StencylForge - Challenges and Solutions (Updated Dec. 15)

Over the past few days, StencylForge has ground to a halt due to a traffic surge, from both being featured on BBC Click as well as launching iStencyl. Many of you who've come to rely on StencylForge, or those of you who are new to the Stencyl ecosystem have found it difficult to reach it except off-hours.

Joe and I are working on relieving StencylForge. We're optimizing some of the internals and exploring ways to reduce its footprint on our server.

But more importantly, we've been taking several steps, on top of simply tweaking StencylForge, to relieve the points of frustration and improve things in the future for everybody, simply by reducing our reliance on it for the most common tasks.


Preship the Most Common Behaviors

We will begin pre-shipping StencylWorks with the most useful behaviors out of the box. You'll be able to pick them when attaching behaviors regularly.

This is both an improvement over the status quo - you're guaranteed to have the best (and working) behaviors on hand, and you don't have to fetch them each time you make a game.


Local Import/Export of Resources

Within a minor release cycle or two (and this is already part of the nightly builds), you can import and export resources to your computer, rather than going through StencylForge. This will relieve what a huge chunk of users are using StencylForge for today - transferring resources between projects or backing them up.


Take StencylForge out of the Crash Course

We're re-formulating the Crash Course not to use StencylForge, thereby allowing it to be completed without this dependency and allowing us to focus more on the other aspects of StencylWorks. This will arrive in our next pre-packaged build.


We think that our tweaks to StencylForge on top of these changes will ultimately lead to a better experience for everybody and leave StencylForge to do what it does best while not being needlessly saddled down by things it doesn't need to host in the first place.

Made some tweaks to StencylForge, and now things seem to be zipping along quite nicely.

Thanks for bearing with us!

Another move we're making - we going to take down all of the example content that we already ship with StencylWorks. These duplicates only serve to confuse, and although it's nice to get comments on them, we'd prefer to have the discussion happen here where all can see and track.

This affects Games and Kits for now. When we start pre-shipping behaviors with StencylWorks, that will also be affected.

In the place of pre-shipped content will be new, original content that  is too niche or new to ship but we think you'll like.

So what with people who downloaded Stencyl let's say in times of beta and then updated only via built-in updater? Then games/behaviors/kits that are in prepackaged version but not in old prepackaged builds (like those from beta stage) will be unavailable for those people.

I strongly recommend to leave them on Forge, just not in Featured section (as regular SF uploads).

Maybe a separate section would be good, because sometimes one makes changes to the games/behaviors that come with Stencyl and want them to go back to how they were when they first came with the product.

Or just put them with all "regular" uploads and remove from Featured as I said before.