FPSBuddy

FPSBuddy – WebNola Portfolio Case Study
FPSBuddy.com Case Study
Company Information

FPSBuddy is a project which was developed to help competitive gamers win more games in Halo 3 and Gears of War for the Xbox 360. WebNola developed all aspects of the site, from the minimalist (yet highly functional) design to the custom programming of all five custom tools. Currently, gamers can use the site’s Halo 3 Timer, Halo 3 Team Finder, Halo 3 Quick Stats, Halo 3 Callouts system, a Gears of War 2 Timer, and the site’s user discussion forum.

Challenges & Solutions

When the Halo 3 Timer was in it’s developmental stage for FPSBuddy, one of the largest problems WebNola faced was the playback of the flash timer systems between different browsers. This matters a lot for timer systems since they needed to match the actual game timers as closely as possible. Basically, Internet Explorer plays flash at a slightly faster rate than Firefox does which threw the entire system out of balance.

At this point, we were forced to make a decision whether to make a second version of every timer in order to facilitate a problem in an outdated browser which would likely be fixed in the next update or just let the users know to use the better browser. To create a second version of the timer to facilitate an inferior browser was not a realistic decision, so we went with the latter. In order to alert the site’s users of this imbalance, we integrated an alert which only appears on Internet Explorer browsers which politely reminds the user to use Firefox for much more accurate timers. This turned out to be a great decision and FPSBuddy has since received much critical acclaim.

Overview and Conclusion

FPSBuddy is growing in popularity and is very much still an active project. There are new tools planned for launch by Q4 2010.

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