In October 2006, Mammoth was asked to provide a feasibility overview for a project centered around the consolidation of three distinct web sites into a single site which encompassed all the functionality on offer.

The three sites were BigPond GameArena, GameNow, and Games Shop. Each site was built using core Mammoth technology on the web site, but each was tightly integrated with other vendor software and services. For example, the GameNow service was built using Exent Technologies' Games on Demand software.

Part of the consolidation would include a complete redesign for the GameArena website, something which was a project in itself as several significant core changes were required to the front end of the site. All these front end changes had to be done in conjunction with the back end changes that were required.

The consolidation project was extremely technically complicated and required a high degree of co-ordination not only between Mammoth staff, but also between our client and their design company. The project was run on an extremely ambitious timeline, and despite receiving designs very late in the project, Mammoth was able to deliver the completed site on time and with all the major business objectives available.

This project saw the introduction of several new features to the GameArena site:

• Introduction of a fully load balanced and redundant structure
• Integrated multiple user databases into a single database
• Consolidation of large amounts of code into a single codebase.
• Extensive user-focused performance optimisations, including:
  • Strong focus on reducing page load times
  • Extensive use of AJAX technologies to improve user experience
  • Dedicated image serving system to facilitate multiple connections to the web servers
  • Improved caching structure to provide faster page loads
  • Reduction of overhead in dealing with third party vendor systems
• Introduction of Flash video streaming
• Reduction in required hardware infrastructure.

Mammoth worked with a variety of software, technologies and services on this project, both open source and proprietary:

• Apache, PHP and MySQL for the core web services.
• C# and .NET for integration with GameCreate.
• Exent Technologies Games on Demand for the Game Rentals services (including integration and management of Oracle and Tomcat software).
• TryMedia Systems ACTIVEMark for the digital game sales services (including encryption and distribution of ACTIVEMark-encrypted titles).
• BillPay as the payment gateway for credit card transactions.