Category Archives: Recipes

Using the trace(…) command from anywhere in your Extension code

The trace(…) method is a useful little tool to log any information in the log files for debugging your Extension code.

It is available in the main Extension class and in every Request or Event handler. However, often times, developers need to log messages from other places in their code such as data classes, or any other object that doesn’t extend the Request/Event base classes.

How can we call trace(…) from somewhere else? Continue reading

How to send an email from an Extension

Emails can be sent directly from your server side code in order to provide registration confirmations, updates or even debugging and stats reports.

In order to enable email sending you will need to setup the Emailer Service from the AdminTool: from theServerConfigurator choose the Emailer tab, turn on the service and set your SMTP parameters. Continue reading

How to schedule timed tasks in an Extension

Often times in the server-side game logic it is necessary to use timers for recurring events that are sent to the clients (e.g. the end of a turn time, npc actions, etc).

A quick solution to this problem is using the ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor class, provided in the JDK, which offers a convenient task executor backed by a pool of threads. SFS2X already runs its own instance of this Executor (wrapped in a class called TaskScheduler). Continue reading

How to debug your Extensions

You can easily attach a Remote Debugger to the server and enable your favorite Debugger for bug hunting in your Extensions.

SmartFoxServer 2X can be started with the sfs2x.bat (Windows) or sfs2x.sh (Linux/Unix/MacOSX) scripts. By adding some JVM switches to the launch script you can enable remote debugging. You can do it by following these steps: Continue reading

How to use the SmartFoxBits 2X

Together with SFS2X we provide the latest version of our SmartFoxBits components, which can save you a ton of time in setting up the application GUI if you are using the Adobe Flash platform to build your client.

The base SmartFoxBits pack contains five components:

  • Connector: manages the connection/disconnection process (supporting the new reconnection system too)
  • Login: handles the login process
  • RoomList: manages the Rooms list, including the Groups feature (allowing to create multiple views of the list based on groups)
  • UserList: manages the user list allowing private chat
  • ChatBox: provides a basic chatting component

You can check all the details and read the documentation on the SmartFoxBits page.