Weekly Update – 4/21/2017 Apr 21 - TheFeelTrain

This week at Installation 01, we're getting technical.

Only a little bit. Don't worry. We're just going to answer some questions that no one is asking.

Breaking In

We've had a another break in at the Installation 01 office. Which is really strange, considering we don't have an office. Give a big warm Installation 01 community welcome to Crs! It's prounounced "Curse." You may have seen him hanging out in the Discord server. I would say I've talked to him before, but unfortunately I can't read Crsive.

You also might have seen this UNSC frigate model he made over on /r/Halo on Reddit.

He has become one with our modeling team. Catch him strutting down that runway.

Technically Correct

You may have noticed a few logos have popped up on the bottom of every page. Or probably not, they're kind of small. Either way, there's a single burning question:

The logos, Mason TheFeelTrain. What do they mean?

Not a single person has asked me a technical question about the game or the website, but I thought I'd take the time to explain these technologies and why we use them anyways. This will be some riveting stuff for the 12 people that enjoy this kind of thing. I'll be focusing on a different technology each week in my new section I'm calling "Technically Correct."

Up first is Amazon Web Services. We currently make use of two of their services, DynamoDB and S3.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB is Amazon's document database service. Our reasons behind choosing it were simple.

It's managed by Amazon, so we don't have to worry about most database maintainence.

It has predictable and reliable performance. Trains need to go fast.

It's massively scalable. Whether we have 19,000 spartans or 19 million spartans, DynamoDB can handle whatever gets thrown at it.

The API was relatively easy to pickup and integrate with both the game and the website.

A NoSQL style database has treated us very well thus far.

Amazon S3

For our upcoming Fileshare feature, we anticipate the need for massive cloud storage. The price of storage and bandwidth is relatively inexpensive on S3. Outsourcing the hosting of your larger files to Amazon S3 means we can optimize our own servers for hosting the website, and let Amazon worry about everything else.

I just hope our files don't get too wet up there.

Video Roundup

There are a couple more videos we'd like to showcase this week. One from our good friend LateNightGaming and the other is a little known YouTuber by the name of 50ShadesOfReview.

LateNightGaming

I talked to LateNightGaming for a bit, but did not get the chance to play with him as he said he needed to get to bed. That's okay, we all need some more sleep. Imagine my surprise when I found him posting memes on Twitter at 3am. It's never too late for memes I suppose. We gave him the chance to give the game a little test. Hey, his review is pretty good.

50ShadesOfReview

Unfortunately our game is not as good as the Halo flash game, but at least 50ShadesOfReview gives us 3.5 out of 5 stars. I'm disappointed in the lack of whips and chains in his review, though. I give him 3.5 stars. He also used the wrong logo in his thumbnail, don't know what that's about.

Here is our current logo in all of its high resolution glory in case you'd like to make a proper video thumbnail of your own.

Blame Bean

Bean has left his trash all over our beautiful beaches. Litterbug.

Can we blame him? Yes we can!

I'm off to get some lunch. Maybe next week's update will just be a food review of whatever I end up getting. Or watch me eat it in my livestream. It's actually just a GoPro strapped to the front of a train.

TheFeelTrain