[Taz D]

Raul has posted an update on the migration of Farm Town. Thanks for the update Raul.


Post Release Updates - October 31st, 3:45PM

- Migration Update:

About 2 years ago, July 2017, the migration team started the conversion of the game from Flash to HTML5. The project was by all standards fairly big, we had about 150,000 lines of flash code and more than 6,000 graphics that had to be converted to the new platform.

Our first approach was a manual approach and we spent several months on it but later realized that we will never going to catch up on time, especially since the main team had to continue releasing new features.

The second approach, which is what we are currently doing, was to create the tools to automate the migration process as much as possible. We finished those tools a few months ago and the initial tests were really encouraging.

The conversion of all graphic items to the new format went according to plan, just minor issues that were fixed relatively quickly.

However, the conversion of the flash code to the new programming language was not as smooth, there were lot of areas where the automatic translation did not work out of the box, and that was fine, it was expected in a big project like this, what we did not expect was that fixing some of those areas would actually be time consuming and error prone, it required more profound changes to implement on the new programming language what we had done in flash.

At this point, we are expecting to release the HTML5 version of the game by the end of the year, however, it will be a restricted version, it should include at least all farming tools and main facility functionality, hopefully more than that but it's difficult to know at this point exactly which functionality will be included. However, we think we have cleared the major hurdles already and we are moving fast, we should have the bulk of the functionality of the game migrated and tested in 1 or 2 months after the first version.

We are also planning by the end of November to give access to moderators and other long time players to test the restricted version of the game.

The good news is that the game will definitely be a better game, the graphics in the farm will look better and the farm will display and operate faster. Also, moving forward we are planning to enable access to the game from browsers in tablets as well.

We will provide another update in the next release.