Dev Diary 28 :: 2017 :: March

[Ray]

The upcoming Global Warming event will be released within the week; aiming for Friday depending on how stability tests go, otherwise Monday.

Beyond that there has been an abundance of back-end changes to improve scalability, debug capability, and reduce how error prone some things were. 

Some Technical backend workings for those interested:

• Self-Managed database hosting to stray away from managed service issues we recently had with the authentication & sessions, along with outrageous costs. This will open up the opportunity to log far more interactions with the game and offer better support. Beyond that it should open up far more capability to provide a REST api in the near future to developers for non-restricated player data...providing the capability of great information tools to the community.
• Lambda-based authentication, payment processing, and session creations. We currently host everything through Elastic Beanstalk, which was both costly and error-prone during maintenances or unexpected mass-relogs due to a server failure. 
  This can provide much better logging capability, and should allow us to be able to debug targeted instances of users issues as we on a rare occasion have players who simply cannot authenticate suddenly from what we generally assume is DNS issues, however this will allow us to ensure that is the cause.
• Linux-Hosted game servers. Right now windows-based machines are costly on both resources and financially. We could be running twice the amount of power per machine for the same price if on linux. We won't be tackling this for a few weeks, but it's in hindsight.
• Significantly improved room processing. Plenty of optimizations on timers/queued processing. In recent tests the phase between post-authentication and loading into the game has improved substantially. Beyond that pings are feeling far more consistent. 
• Resolved the way several items were previously stored within the servers, reducing leading issues on memory and cpu cap-outs that were likely causing some of the issues with challenges and response times as servers aged.
  

While these side-tasks have not been overly exciting, I'll be excited to get them out and stable as it will generally be some of the final steps to the back-end that shouldn't need further attention in the long-term. From there we can tackle long-term game-logic issues.