December 23rd 2020 Migration Update:
We already completed all the features that will be released in the restricted version of the game before the end of the year, these features will include all farming tools for crops, trees, flowers and fishing, the free style designers, the Store and the Storage screens, all other functionality will be hidden and enabled gradually in the coming weeks.
As mentioned before, we are using the Unity Game Engine to migrate to the new version of the game, however the HTML5/WebGL component of this engine, which is what we are using to be able to run the game inside the browser, was not performing to the level we expected out of the box, and therefore we had to spend a significant amount of time exploring options to improve performance.
We feel good about the current status and what we will be able to accomplish on the final week, but due to all this time focusing on performance, we will not be able to release any facility functionality as mentioned in the November 30th update. However, we should be able to release full facility functionality in the coming weeks.
The moderators are currently testing the restricted version of the game already, however, their version still do not have any of the performance improvements we are working on.
We are planning on releasing the new version to a small percentage of players in the next few days and will update the Game Migration Update -- December 23th, 2020 thread accordingly.
UPDATE November 30th 2020
This is going to be the last update of the game in the Flash platform. The migration to HTML5 and releasing a restricted version of the game at the end of the month is going as planned, but it will take a few days more for the mods to try the new version as we are optimizing several settings for the game to run properly in the browser, we will continue posting updates as we make progress.
UPDATE October 31st 2020
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.
UPDATE October 3rd 2020
Helping the Migration Team: For the next 3 months we will be spending maybe half of our time helping the migration team in the conversion of the game from Flash to HTML5, so new features and functionality changes will be less than usual in the coming releases. However, new facilities, new levels, seasonal decorations and farm expansions will be released as usual.
UPDATE July 2020 We are still working on the HTML5 version and will be doing beta testing soon. The effort required by this migration has been much more than anticipated, however, at this point we have high confidence that we will complete the full migration before the end of the year.
July 27 2017 As some of you already know, Adobe recently announced that support for their Flash platform will be discontinued at the end of the year 2020. Rest assured that this will not affect Farmtown. We already started working on migrating the FarmTown game away from Flash and onto a newer and more resilient platform.
What does this mean for you? You won’t notice any significant difference when we upgrade the Farmtown game. In fact, we expect that the game will run faster, and it will let us add more features to the game that we haven’t been able to add due to the performance limitations of the existing Flash technology.
You will be able to continue playing Farmtown in your browser, in addition we’ll also add support for Facebook Gameroom for a better game experience.
In the name of the Farmtown team, we thank you for your continuous support and loyalty.
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Jan 28 2022, 04:28 PM
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