So recently I released an update for Phoenix. It was pretty small on the user facing side of things but pretty big on the back-end.

So what did I do? I’ve ripped out the database so all stats are retrieved directly from Ubisoft. I’d already started doing this a while ago but I was mainly just bypassing the database, now the code is entirely gone. This seems to have made the bot a bit slower at getting data but reduces strain, and simplifies the code, as it doesn’t need to interface with the database. Far more simple.

This change may cause some strain on the bot with large amounts of requests but should be fine for the small amount of users it currently has. With a larger amount of users, I’d definitely need the database to “cache” the stats for quicker retrieval.

Apart from that, the main user facing change was dropping “Player” from the command. It used to be “r6 Player TheSecondSense”, if you were searching for me. It’s now; “r6 TheSecondSense”. It took a bit of meddling as I’m now manually reading each message for the “r6” command rather than using the Command system built into DSharpPlus, the Discord C# library I’m using. The downside to this is that anything after “r6” is taken into account as well, so; “r6 I’m the best Siege Player” attempts to search the Siege PC playerbase for someone called “I’m the best Siege Player”. It’s a bit of an oversight but not major, it’ll just return the standard “player not found” error anyway so it’s no big deal, maybe I’ll fix it for the next update.

Overall; this is a nice update which has made Phoenix faster and easier to use. It’s also allowed me to get rid of my second server, which held the database, keeping costs to a minimum.