03-10-2016, 09:19 AM
Hey Folks,
I'm going to give an assortment of "What's going on" here, both good and bad.
The Good
Considering 'the bad' right now, updates have been occurring at a good pace again. I think once we handle a few of 'the bad' we can stay very consistent in the frequent updates/changes to the games and really start pushing content plans ahead.
We have an offline gains trial coming up.
We have the new Skill Map system coming up soon with major pet rebalancing.
We have a new monthly event coming up.
The Bad
A lot of players are praising the speed of things and talking about how updates are coming along, but i'm going to side a bit with the negative nancies here for a moment. Things are NOT going even close to as stable as we had hoped by this point in time.
The migration went very bumpy during the development process and it hasn't been going all that great afterwards either on our end. We have a lot of errors/problems that are not the "Just google it" kind. We have pretty much no way to truly debug issues that are not easily reproducable due to the server set up on a backend server that unfortunately does not match our rather unique needs for this game.
Many players are unable to connect due to the new ports used.
Groups of players are experiencing lag, or bizarre issues (such as minor rollbacks) caused by OS-level issues in certain dedicated servers.
The resource usage on the current servers are not what they should be based on our self-hosting tests.
The biggest bad: The next community discussion (and thus the rest of the discussion-results list) is going to be delayed a weak, aiming now at March 19th
The Solution (Nerd time)
We had a rather incredible, and important meeting to discuss the fact that I simply do not want to be tackling tickets and technical issues that are not exactly normal for developers. This has resulted in the simple fact that we have to make some serious changes to improve development and reduce the stress on the community and ourselves.
Time has been spent completely redesigning the server and client while still trying to tackle these recent updates and planning for the future. I'm happy to say a good amount of progress has already been made, and we are actually already well on our way, going through preliminary testing phases on the new design.
The new design entails listener servers that pass on connections from port 80 (hello work & campus internet gaming again), and creates an instance-level of the servers instead of running each instance as its own server application. This will significantly save on CPU & Memory usage to the point that we can ensure far more power than we'll need for the servers and at a fraction of the cost.
In our new design:
-No reliance on backend hosting solutions (other than your typical AWS)
-Much faster production/development with very easy test phasing compared to the current design
-Much faster maintenances (potentially as fast as they used to be...60 seconds)
-Ability to perform global broadcasts (finally - much needed)
-Ability to debug and monitor specific rooms in real-time
-Ability to shut down instances that may be broken & hindering the service (causing the lag some groups are getting)
None of this screams excitement for content-hungry folks, but we should be at a public testable version by this weekend where we can keep moving forward again. Some of our original designs simply didn't work out and it was difficult to prepare perfectly for such a massive migration without seeing the information/problems first hand. We are now rectifying that and the purpose of this post is to let you know that the recent lack of publication has been due to spending a lot of efforts in ensuring that we had a solid (and possible) plan before communicating what we were going to do.
Ray
I'm going to give an assortment of "What's going on" here, both good and bad.
The Good
Considering 'the bad' right now, updates have been occurring at a good pace again. I think once we handle a few of 'the bad' we can stay very consistent in the frequent updates/changes to the games and really start pushing content plans ahead.
We have an offline gains trial coming up.
We have the new Skill Map system coming up soon with major pet rebalancing.
We have a new monthly event coming up.
The Bad
A lot of players are praising the speed of things and talking about how updates are coming along, but i'm going to side a bit with the negative nancies here for a moment. Things are NOT going even close to as stable as we had hoped by this point in time.
The migration went very bumpy during the development process and it hasn't been going all that great afterwards either on our end. We have a lot of errors/problems that are not the "Just google it" kind. We have pretty much no way to truly debug issues that are not easily reproducable due to the server set up on a backend server that unfortunately does not match our rather unique needs for this game.
Many players are unable to connect due to the new ports used.
Groups of players are experiencing lag, or bizarre issues (such as minor rollbacks) caused by OS-level issues in certain dedicated servers.
The resource usage on the current servers are not what they should be based on our self-hosting tests.
The biggest bad: The next community discussion (and thus the rest of the discussion-results list) is going to be delayed a weak, aiming now at March 19th
The Solution (Nerd time)
We had a rather incredible, and important meeting to discuss the fact that I simply do not want to be tackling tickets and technical issues that are not exactly normal for developers. This has resulted in the simple fact that we have to make some serious changes to improve development and reduce the stress on the community and ourselves.
Time has been spent completely redesigning the server and client while still trying to tackle these recent updates and planning for the future. I'm happy to say a good amount of progress has already been made, and we are actually already well on our way, going through preliminary testing phases on the new design.
The new design entails listener servers that pass on connections from port 80 (hello work & campus internet gaming again), and creates an instance-level of the servers instead of running each instance as its own server application. This will significantly save on CPU & Memory usage to the point that we can ensure far more power than we'll need for the servers and at a fraction of the cost.
In our new design:
-No reliance on backend hosting solutions (other than your typical AWS)
-Much faster production/development with very easy test phasing compared to the current design
-Much faster maintenances (potentially as fast as they used to be...60 seconds)
-Ability to perform global broadcasts (finally - much needed)
-Ability to debug and monitor specific rooms in real-time
-Ability to shut down instances that may be broken & hindering the service (causing the lag some groups are getting)
None of this screams excitement for content-hungry folks, but we should be at a public testable version by this weekend where we can keep moving forward again. Some of our original designs simply didn't work out and it was difficult to prepare perfectly for such a massive migration without seeing the information/problems first hand. We are now rectifying that and the purpose of this post is to let you know that the recent lack of publication has been due to spending a lot of efforts in ensuring that we had a solid (and possible) plan before communicating what we were going to do.
Ray