BrainKing History

• March 2003 - Pente, Keryo Pente and Janus Chess were added to the site. I was informed that what other sites call Pro Pente is actually Pente and Pente should be named Small Pente, in order to make it correctly. Confusing? I don't know and I don't care, the only important thing is that the games are supported and playable. About Janus Chess, the funny looking "doggy" picture which was used for the Janus piece had been ripped out of a Janus Chess program, so there is no reason to think that I would create it myself. (actually, I prefer cats) I hope the Janus Chess players weren't too disgusted by it.
  It was also a time of adding the game of Gothic Chess which was removed from the site after two years. The full story with all details will be posted later.


• April 2003 - Oh yes, the BrainKing.info site was created and released. But it was not this current version, we had started with several simple static HTML pages, providing some basic information about BrainKing, its staff, technical background etc. The site was not updated very often, due to its static structure the update process was kind of annoying. I guess this blog system makes the overall experience much more user friendly (and easier to admin, for me).
  The last important event of April 2003 was that I had passed moderating some public discussion boards to other users. The system didn't allow to add more moderators to the same board and there were no other neat features you can currently explore, but it was a good step forward. It would have been virtually impossible for one person (me) to maintain all discussion boards at once. And there are people who like to have a responsibility.

• January 2003 - part 2 - After a quick look at the News Archive and some personal notes, I've realized that more events than I've posted to the previous entry had happened in that month. I guess the most important one was the addition of Backgammon and its variants because, whether we like it or not, it is a popular game and many people were disappointed that BrainKing was not supporting it. Well, the reason was obvious - unlike chess, reversi, five in line and similar games, backgammon is not played on a square board and every possible combination of pieces on a pip must have its extra image, so it took some time to create all necessary pictures and I am not a graphician at all (hint - who wants to make a better looking backgammon image set for BrainKing and get a special prize? ). Anyway, launching this game was not straightforward because it was a new game for me and I was not aware of all rules (not to mention a doubling cube which was added 2-3 years later!). However, it was finetuned to the final version within a week or two.
  (and auto-pass won't be done)
  Dark Chess, Atomic Chess and Halma were added at the end of the month, along with an option of user defined tournaments. It was also a time of significant performance problems but this issue belongs to the February section.


• February 2003 - The process of fixing the performance problems was kind of difficult because I had started to work for a new employer at the same time, so the BrainKing work was left almost entirely on Liquid. Fortunatelly we had found a solution after several complicated days by changing a database driver (one wouldn't believe what simple details can have such global consequences). I was impressed that even during this difficult time there were people who purchased a 2 years membership.
  We have added prize tournaments and private tournaments in fellowships.

• November 2002 - I had been told that something like WebTV exists and is widely used in United States and other countries. Well, it wouldn't be a big problem if this device provided a better screen resolution - due to complaints that some BrainKing pages were "too narrow" to show game boards properly, a row layout was introduced as an alternative to the default column layout. The row layout is an ugly one, it looks awful and I don't recommend to use it unless there is no other option. I hope a new BrainKing design will solve this problem by creating an universal layout for all web browsers at once.


• December 2002 - New games were introduced, although I've lost a record of exact dates of these additions. Maybe the News archive could give some hints. It was also a time of the first site crash, not a big one but BrainKing was down for three days because one of the server's disks had collapsed and there was no other server to replace the damaged one. Due to lack of resources, the whole BrainKing system was very unstable and could easily get jammed anytime. Fortunatelly, it is not a problem now. I wonder when we added the second server, in order to separate the application and database layers ... anyway, we did it.


• January 2003 - I don't think something important or interesting had happened every month but if I can recall a BrainKing event, I would mention it here. The beginning of the year 2003 had been marked with a release of the very first tournament system on BrainKing. I have no idea how it could have been working at all (bugs, bugs, bugs) but it was a good success anyway. Tournaments must be a part of every successful game site, of course. At least the number of paying members had been significantly increasing. People like to compete.
  You might remember that the first tournaments had to be started manually by their creators because BrainKing had no system of regular tasks. It occasionally caused funny situations when a tournament sections contained games with nonexistent opponents or four times more table cells then they should have. The current tournament system is much more sophisticated, although some minor bugs are still waiting for a solution. But minor bugs are never critical.

(to be continued)

If you were with us since the very start of BrainKing, you probably remember all important events which happened during last four years. If not or you are a new member, you can get some key information right now. I have decided to write this entry because of my own fragile memory too - it might be interesting to recall these events after 10 years.

• April 2002 - the very first element of future BrainKing structure was designed. Based on experiences from other game sites, I had an ambiguous notion of the basic set of BrainKing feature list and started to gather all missing information and resources. By the way, besides Liquid and me, there was a third guy who was meant to develop with us, mostly a 3D interface of game pages, but it turned out to be a side cut, so we were finally established as a two-guys team. A curiosity - when we wanted to find a good name for the game site, the third guy came up with the name PlayBrain (probably after reading too much PlayBoy issues ) and it was used as a working title until the final BrainKing name was definitely set by me. I guess it sounds better. Although it might be harder to pronounce for non-English speaking people.


• September 2002 - the domain BrainKing.com was registered which meant that the BrainKing name was definitely set and established. A test environment of the beta version of BrainKing was temporarily launched on Liquid's home computer and connected through his cable modem (256/64 kbps line) - not the fastest connection but good enough for a couple of testers who were trying to play the first games and reporting some initial bugs. The real BrainKing server was built and put to our server housing company. We were lucky that our contract contained a line about an unlimited data traffic - I was formerly thinking that a 50 GB/month limit could be enough since we only transfer HTML pages and a couple of small pictures, there were no big downloads. I couldn't be more wrong, of course - the real current traffic is 25-30 GB a day and growing every month.


• October 2002 - the BrainKing site was officially launched, providing only 5 game types (Chess, Corner Chess, Fortress Chess, Horde Chess and Five in Line), several discussion boards, a message box and BKR charts. No tournaments, no fellowships, no regular tasks. Only English and Czech version. And many bugs. However, it was kind of a success, especially due to the site speed - there were only a few users, there was no big load. From my current programmer's point of view, the source code of that starting version of BrainKing was awful - I still don't understand how it could be working at all. At least, there was a really big place for an improvement. Due to the lack of resources (there were no paying members at the beginning, of course) everything was running on one computer - BrainKing itself, database, backup service, mail server, etc.

(to be continued)