We feel the recent infrastructure changes were poorly communicated, so we decided to try and communicate better. We're going to do more semi-regular updates like this one in the future.
ZKL will be phased out
We're planning to phase out ZKL in the next couple weeks. We decided on Chobby as the default lobby and developer resources are too strained to maintain two official lobbies. We encourage you to switch to Chobby now and report any problems so they can be fixed.
Since ZKL is GPL, anyone can take up the slack, it's just not going to be us.
Chobby is being actively developed and can now open things in a browser (user profile, map list, links in chat, etc). It will also flash to alert the user when minimized if you got a MM notification or mentioned in chat.
Lobby protocol performance
After some load testing we found out that the protocol doesn't scale well with hundreds of users. We made the protocol more lightweight, so it doesn't send all info about everyone to every other user. This means that you may not see the complete list of people in battles or people in #zk if it grows too large. You'll still see everything about your friends, clanmates and people in channels other than #zk.
That's not idle steamdreaming either, the initial surge may be quite large, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Chobby: idle performance
My current focus is on improving the idle performance of Chobby. The engine was modified to allow for FPS throttling, so a slider configuring max FPS in Chobby will be possible.
I also made the engine stop rendering when it's minimized, which has cut resource usage a lot too. It also stops sounds, but wrapper sounds like alerts will still make it through.
