This Game has too Many Glitches! a long post telling you why...

Understanding What Goes into a Game

Farmerama is a very complex game with many different aspects involved. To name just a few:

· Events
· Mini Events
· Farming
· Animal Husbandry
· Mills
· Artisan products
· Farmwheel
· Gifts
· Neighborhood
· Upgrades
· And new items to keep the upper level players interested

For each different part of the game, the developers must test the functionality. Testing is a lot like switches. A switch has only two states. On and off. That’s how computers work.

For each little part of the game, there are switches that indicate on or off. For example,

Do you want to breed an animal? Yes and no are the only two options.

Yes? Then what animal - chicken? Yes and no are the only two options.

Yes offers a lot of other switches. Do you want to add a pheromone? Yes or no.

Yes? Then how many – one? Yes or no.

One switch has only two options. On or Off

However two switches has four:
SW1-'on' SW2-'on'
Sw1-'on' Sw2-''off'
Sw1-'off' Sw2-'on'
Sw1-'off' Sw2-'off'

For each added switch, it grows exponentially.

If you are testing 10 items on a part of the game, you have 1024 different combinations of switches.

And that’s just for the testing alone! Each state of each switch has to be tested to see if it works.

Every program in the world has glitches. That’s why you continually get Windows updates. To fix the glitches and add functionality.

Glitches occur when your programming language gets an update and messes with one of the features of the game.

Or maybe a programmer (because s/he’s human) omits a semi-colon in the code. You have no idea how hard it is to go through hundreds of line of code to find that “little” error! But that little error can shut down the whole feature. Make it disappear. Gone.

Or maybe adding a new feature to keep up the interest for the gamers messes with another feature. Then there’s hours spent trying to fix the old feature to mesh with the new one.

The list of mishaps that occurs with ANY program is a mile long.

Farmerama will continue to have glitches. It’s part of the beast. Windows will continue to have glitches. Quicken will, too! Word, Safari, you name it, it will glitch. Updates is the name of the game.

Impressed
What makes the developers of Farmerama so great, in my eyes, is the fact that they find and fix those glitches remarkably fast!

They look at our mile-long list of wishes, and try to incorporate the little desires we have.

They continually develop new areas of interest to keep those, who have been playing for years, interested. There’s always a challenge for someone. That takes a lot of vision, work and testing.

Not only does Farmerama provide so MANY different aspects to the game, they cater to the world and have made it available in different languages. That’s a whole new set of problems there. We may complain because we are not getting the translation fast enough. But add translation to all of the above mentioned problems that may occur, and it’s understandable.

Your Computer
A lot of the problem with Farmerama may not be a Farmerara problem at all. Your computer has very much to do with glitches, too! A few examples follow:

Overheating
If you laptop is overheating, it means the fan is clogged and the connection between the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and the Motherboard is dirty. This will slow down your computer tremendously and you will struggle to keep your browser window up and running. Most laptops have this problem. If you can find someone who can tear it apart and clean it (three hours of time), it will feel like new again! I’ve done it multiple times to my old beast. In fact, I find that I must clean it out once a year.

RAM
RAM (Random Access Memory) is a little piece of hardware that stores temporary information so that your computer is not always going to the hard drive to get stuff to work. If you only have 2 GB of memory, you are running slow and cannot handle the magnitude of the game and the Flash required to run it.

To fix your RAM problem, go to crucial.com, scan your computer and see if you have the ability to upgrade your memory. You can usually upgrade your RAM quite cheaply. And swapping out your RAM is easy. There are many YouTube videos that show you how to do it.

CPU speed
Another problem may be your CPU. If you have an old computer, the CPU (the brain) may not be running at a very high speed. The solution for that is a newer computer. You can find decent computers now for not much money. Refurbished ones, too.

Operating System
Operating systems can be tricky. My folks use an old computer that is still running Windows 98! They complain when their games don’t work. LOL. Of all the operating systems out there, Vista is the worst and really hogs the RAM. A virtual nightmare. Try to get Windows 7 or 8.

Cleaning out the Hard Drive
Every time you play Farmerama, all the graphics are stored on your computer in a temporary file.

Your browser caches (or keeps copies) of the graphics so that you can access the pages quickly.

These little pieces of visual delight are hard drive hogs! They are heavy on space. It’s important that you clean this file continually to keep your computer running smoothly.

The best tool that I have found is Auslogic BoostSpeed. Because I’m a developer, I pay for the full version and it runs automatically in the background. But they also offer a free version. Same with CCleaner.

Best place to download is CNET because of safety from viruses. Or FileHippo. These are my two favorites. There are most likely others out there that other Friendly Farmers know of and would like to share.

Run this at least once a month, if not every week.

Another thing you should realize is that if your Hard Drive is close to full, it will considerably slow down your computer. Upgrade to a Hard Drive with more space to eliminate that problem. I like to keep mine under 75% of the full capacity of the Hard Drive.

And defragment your hard drive (BoostSpeed will do this for you). When your computer stores stuff on your hard drive, it will find little empty spots all over to break up the file and store it. After a while, you have files fragmented all over the place. It takes more work for your computer to find and compile that file again. Defragmentation gets the pieces together again and in close proximity.

Viruses
Yes, our friendly little flu-like nasties can wreak havoc on your computer and make you pull your hair out! Check for these weekly, too. If you need free, we use Microsoft Security Essentials. More important is Malware Anti-Bytes. This will catch everything that any virus software won’t. You can get Malware for free, too.

Programs
Some programs are memory hogs and will slow down your computer tremendously. Windows Update is one of them! We find that Symantec Norton is another. Find someone who knows computers and have them stop some of those programs from running in the background. You would be surprised at how much is running behind the scenes without your knowledge, and is consuming valuable resources you would rather have for your game.

Internet Connection
Your gaming experience is dependent on your Internet Service Provided (ISP). If you are running on DSL, forget it. It will be sloowwww. Do a search on Google for the best provider for your area and their prices.

I think that covers it all except for one thing:

A huge thank you and a hug to our developers who continually keep the game running smoothly to the best of their abilities, for taking care of the glitches in record time, for the chance to be challenged on a weekly basis, and for all the cute freebies you gift us with. Let’s not forget their “I’m sorry for the glitch” gifts we receive sometimes, too!

AND:
This game is free. The magnitude of this game indicates many developers working full time. Developers cost money. This is a business, after all. If they offer things for Real Money (RM), it’s to help with the overhead. Some of us willingly pay to enhance the game play. But you can enjoy the game without using RM, too. It just takes a little longer to get those goals met. And that’s okay. It’s rare to find an amazingly complex game like this that is totally free.

I hope this has helped those who struggle with the glitches from time to time.

 

This is absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. A lot of players would do well to read this and make a few apologies, I think!

 

DarlingDaizy1 - I love to say : YES......YES.......YES...... The same thing I see from my point of view that understand a little about how programming language works.
This is exactly what happened that many people do not realize how this game works. And speaking about the glitches, no one wants these "bugs" to happen, including the programmer itself.
Thank you for taking the time to write it. Hopefully this can be a little open horizons many people who read this thread and do not always blame the developer team neither BP company.
Thumbs up for you, girl!

squigglegiggle - make a few apologies. How do people do it?


Additional :
I myself as a customer or a player, always ask for and expect the best service in the first place. But I also sometimes criticized some of BP's policy is not effective with respect and do not violate the rules.
Perhaps more precisely is issuing an unpleasant feeling, without blaming anyone. It should be done in the steam room, but unfortunately we do not have it anymore.

 

One more comment. If you plan to do serious gaming, ditch the laptop. Earlier in the year I purchased a new laptop, took it home and managed to crash it running a game (not Farmerama) on day one. Brand new, out of the box, very little software on it. It got returned and I now have a desktop. Get a desktop. More bang for your buck than a laptop.

 

You are so right DarlingDaizy. But human nature makes us want to grumble, it makes us feel better (supposedly) and gets it off our chest. I think a lot of us just have a ten minute slot to harvest a few crops and find we can't. Then we grumble.
Of course the developers are doing a great job and we should offer praise too.
SweetCassi - I use a lap top with no problems although it does grumle a little sometimes!

 

I admit I prefer desktops to laptops. Especially for gaming.

Haha! So true! I just wonder how many times the grumble toward the devs should be towards the computers! Haha!

 

Thank you DarlingDaizy for sharing all this information!
It helped me understand some things and in school I am going to write a test in computers about RAM, CPU and some others.

It seems like an interesting job. Was it difficult to learn and understand computers?

 

For me it was not difficult, Arielh - but I'm one of those people who LOVES Math and puzzles. So learning computers, programming and songs is like putting a puzzle together.

Do you like Math? Do you like building things?

 

Ι like Math, I think it is my favorite subject in school!
But I am not sure if I like building things Ι haven't try(in computers do you mean right?).

 

Yeah... that's two roads to computers. Building the computers or making software.

Arielh, I think you would like programming. You love the game and you like Math. Next, you decide what part you would like to do. For instance, web development has three aspects.

1. Making the graphics and the design of the website
   
2. Building the website (the visual part - the front-end). Like a puzzle, you break up the page into blocks and build it using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
   
3. And THEN there's the back-end. Like PHP (one little sample of a programming language) - that is where the functionality of the website, like keeping the year correct at the bottom of the website without having to manually going in to do it every year. That's just a very minor sample of functionality.

There is so much that you can choose from, Arielh! So many different aspects of programming! There's Java, PHP, Drupal, javascript, Flash, Objective C (for iPhones). See? A treasure box full of things to choose from! I love it!!

 

I have read this thread a while ago and went straight for a like.
I am certainly one of these people that complain on occasion about the glitches.
Thank you DarlingDaizy to explain everything so wonderfully and offering solutions on how to possibly fix problems on our side.

It is so good to get a feedback that actually might help to solve the problem.
I am saying feedback, because I am one of the people that mentioned this issue in the first place.
I will not apologize though because without the comments of players addressing this problem, I would have never been so lucky as to being able to read the reply of DarlingDaizy. It was very informative indeed.
It is important to me to hear about the possible difficulties that the tech/dev team might face when introducing new stuff.

I bring up some issues in this forum particularly so that people like DarlingDaizy and squigglegiggle can help me understand better. Thank you again to everybody helping me with that.

I do think that the tech team is indeed fixing everything as quick as humanly possible.
Thank you tech team for the great job that you are doing. I just meant to take off some pressure of you guys, if that would have made any difference at all.
Of course I know that you are doing the best you can and I agree that you are quick at fixing the glitches when they come up.
Unfortunately DarlingDaizy's post seems to imply that nothing can be done about the glitches beforehand.
Most of the time, I just feel sorry for the tech dep to have to deal with so much stress, but I guess that just comes with the job.

Some of us players that aren't techs, do not really understand all the intricacies that go into programming; so please forgive us our occasional grumpiness towards glitches. And I am usually happy about bonus codes...

How about explaining the situation a bit more in the next producers newsletter?
Glitches do seem to happen more often lately...
Maybe explaining some of the difficulties to the broader community?

One of my theories is that it might actually have to do with the implementation of the Corral Reef. It is a big new feature after all.
Me as a player, I am honestly interested in more information from the dev team and how they are doing.
That is why I was so excited about the promised newsletters: They are not only good to increase anticipation (like for the corral reef) but might work really well to appease some upset players by explaining some of the actual difficulties.

 

Thankyou DarlingDaizy1 for your explanation. I feel that the response by devs to errors in the game is excellent and you have helped explain the exponential nature of what I click away happily at doing, without much thought. I want your help with a problem or two that maybe others are having. I have bought it up with the TGC and refreshed till I am blue in the face. But I accept it is my computer that is at fault.
I have two types of freezes, one where the donate page comes up completely blank - only way out is relog
and the other is when I try to leave a page and clicking on the 'farm page' causes a freeze - it even highlights first!
I compound the problem by having three owls on different pages to maximize EP and thought I should slow down - wait till the owl emerges and the 10% floats by ... But the problem still exists. What do you think?
DB

 

Thank you DarlingDaizy....what a fab explanation!!!! I am in awe of those who work in programming...basically, for me, they are equal to brain surgeons, in my book!!! I do love puzzles...and was great at math until algebra! Then it became clear again with Trigonometry. LOL

I know absolutely nothing of these things you speak of! I've taught myself what little I know of how to use a puter. I do have fun organizing my pics and other decorating sites as well as social media. Email is a godsend when needing to work with committees, which I did for a few organizations for years.

But uh oh.....I decided to get a laptop for myself for xmas....I've always had a desktop...and mine is a dinosaur(at least 7 year's old). I don't have any problems with it....except...that I have to stay in my office(way in the back of the house) to use it. So I thought having a laptop(with wi-fi)....I could be more with everyone(plus its very cold in my office) and in the kitchen or family room!....or even in bed LOL

Please tell me I didn't make a big mistake? I didn't get a huge one b/c I want it to be very portable and easy to have...ehem...on my lap!
I'm going to keep the desktop going as a back up.

 

There are puzzles - here -. Can you crack them?

 

Whooeee, David! I am by no means an expert. There are so many variables that could be affecting your computer, and without looking at it, I can only guess at some issues. So, we can start with a few questions. Okay... a lot of questions:

1. Do other people experience the same problem that you do? You mentioned that you feel it may be your computer. I've never experienced what you have described. But then again, I don't have three owls.

So, a question for other farmers is, do you experience the same thing?

2. How old is your computer?
3. Laptop or desktop?
4. PC or Mac?

The next questions apply to a PC:

5. If it's a laptop, do you feel it is heating up?
6. How much memory do you have? (To find out, go to the start button, find Computer at the right menu, right click on it, and choose properties.
7. Under Computer Properties, what is the processor speed? (GHz)
8. What is your Operating System?
9. How old is your Hard Drive?
10. Do you experience any other freezes with other games or programs that you may be running?

If you can let me know the answer to these questions, we might discover something there.

One more thing, next time it freezes, right click the task bar and click Start Task Manager. Go to Performance Tab and see if you have maxed out your CPU Usage.

Hope this leads to some positive conclusions!

Oh, Brookie! I don't think you made a mistake! Laptops are great! But they do get dust between the motherboard and the CPU. It may take a long time for you if you are not on it very much.

For me, I'm on it every day for hours if I'm working on a website. I also have three cats who shed copious amounts of fur twice a year! In addition, there's a lot of dust in our house because we still have a lot of naked backyard that is only dirt. Naturally, I am going to clean mine out much more often than you will!

I don't think you should worry. If you've had a laptop for a couple of years and you notice it is acting up, find a good computer person to clean it out for you, and it will be as good as new. Try to find an independent one as those who work at computer retail stores may try to sell you a new computer when yours can last you for years. My laptop is five years old and still going strong.

Congrats on your new Christmas Pressy! I love getting new computers!

 

Dear DarlingDaizy1 :Thanks for your prompt response. My computer is a Windows 7 Home Premium PC ,three years old which I presume is the age of the hard drive. Processor speed is 2.2 with 8.00 GB RAM and 64 bit operating system. It used to get hot so I bought a stand with a fan in it. At the last freeze, CPU usage was oscillating between 31% to 57% , mostly around 48% . There was 24% physical memory. My hard disk drive had 116GB free out of 177GB

DB

 

Okay, David, this is what I think is happening. I'm assuming it is a laptop. If so, then I strongly suspect that the thermal paste between the heat-sink and the CPU has dried out. To fix that, you would need to find someone to take your laptop apart and use an air compressor to clean out the fan, pull off the CPU, scrape off the old paste, and reapply a thin layer again.

The clues are that you have to use a fan to keep the computer from overheating and it's about three years old. However, don't take my word for it. If you really want to make sure, download a CPU Temperature Monitoring software. Then you can check to see if this really is the problem.

Again, it is so hard to diagnose without having the computer in front of me and my little hands on it. So, I am giving you my best guess-timate.

 

Thankyou DarlingDaizy1. I think you are right on the money - yes it is a laptop, and I had a problem with the powercord staying attached. Now the outer case is not sealed. Thanks for all your help and I will take it to the cleaners in the New Year.
Happy New Year!
DB