Various Small Devs and Our Office Move

By Rich Stone,

Hey everyone

It's been an exciting couple of months for me and for TrueAchievements/TrueTrophies (now under our TrueGaming Network company name) - I recently employed an additional developer to work on the sites, and we now have a proper office to work from!

The office is based in the South East of England, not too far away from Gatwick Airport, and we've been hard at work making it look a bit less corporate:

TrueGaming Network Office Wall

In order to help train up the new developer (GamerTag Doomful), we've been rattling through some small developments and bugs, so here's a list of the main ones:

Scanners
We've completely re-written the scanners (probably the 10th time I've done so!) - the new code, along with the server upgrades we've recently carried out, have led to an approx 5 times speed improvement. Pro users now have their achievements added within 15 minutes of earning them! Regular users should also notice they get scanned more regularly.

Site Performance
As well as the new hardware, we've re-written or optimized a lot of slow code - the site is humming along very nicely now and you shouldn't notice any pages timeout any more, even the complex leaderboard ones.

Game Ratings
These now appear on Friend Feeds. You can prevent ratings you make from appearing, or indeed block all Game Rating posts from your feed, in your Friend Feed Settings

Best Challenges
We've added a panel to your homepage for showing off your highest Ratio Xbox One Challenges - this can be moved, customized or hidden (along with all your other homepage panels) in Customize Homepage

Walkthrough Notifications
You probably noticed that on game pages that don't yet have a walkthrough there's a button to get notified when a walkthrough has been published. This button didn't previously do anything (my bad!), but from now on when Walkthroughs are published that you wanted notifications for, you will get a PM about them! We're also posting published messages on the author's feed when they hit publication.

Gaming Session Reminder Emails
We've added a new setting in My Gaming Session Settings to allow you to switch off the Gaming Session reminder emails, or have them sent as a PM instead. I know there were a few vocal users that have been after this for a while!

Moving forward, we'll be tackling some larger developments once Doomful is a bit more familiar with the code - TA is a complex beast and it will take him a bit of time to get to grips with the whole site.

Onwards and upwards!

Rich

P.S. We also made a new 404 page as a Friday challenge!

Community News

Written by Rich Stone

Yo! Rich here - I was the one that created TrueAchievements back in 2008 as I felt the Xbox Gamerscore system could be improved. The site has evolved massively since then and it's now the biggest and best Xbox community on the planet! Racing games and open world shooters are my thing, but I'll give most genres a go. Except RPGs - those things are evil.