Yeah it's been awhile. Thanks jumbers for letting people know we weren't dead.
We have been as busy as I think we ever have been. Internally, I've begun referring to the project as "2.75" or "2.9" now since we've made far, far more changes than originally thought, and we're actually getting pretty damn close to a full on 3.0.
We've engaged the help of some of the EQEmu folks, who have been amazing at hammering out what we consider to be the last roadblocks. I *think* (don't hold me to this) the AA rewrite, which is nearly complete, is our last hurdle. Raids and groups are re-done. We think we've solved the memory leak from hell. Zones and pathing appear to be fixed. Great stuff.
Along the way, we played around with some things that will just make it easier to maintain the game. Without getting into specifics, we have a caching layer that has been the bane of our existence for a long time. We incrementally improved this by getting to where EQEmu was. I have now taken it a step further by implementing an enterprise-grade cache used by little guys like Facebook and Google. This weekend I committed those changes. While they still need to be tested, zones boot up and the cache looks good. This will give us the ability to update many more things on the fly without requiring a patch as is currently the case.
We're also transitioning to be able to run on Linux, which is far more efficient and easy to maintain. This is already done in fact - we were able to do that when I swapped out our cache layer, and I have become the first player in SoD history to load a character into a Linux server running our code. Very cool stuff.
Once I get the new cache properly tested this week and we get AA changes committed, we will hopefully be open for full beta business again. Assuming no more catastrophic memory leaks or the like, my hope is that we will have solved all the major impediments toward production release.
Now one thing to caution - just because the server is ready doesn't mean we are. We still have a pretty big list of things to set up to bring it into full production, including updating our tools, converting characters, etc. The process, I predict, is going to be bumpy. That said, I feel like we're at least, for real, done after this. At least I hope so. I'd like to actually play again some day.
-t
We have been as busy as I think we ever have been. Internally, I've begun referring to the project as "2.75" or "2.9" now since we've made far, far more changes than originally thought, and we're actually getting pretty damn close to a full on 3.0.
We've engaged the help of some of the EQEmu folks, who have been amazing at hammering out what we consider to be the last roadblocks. I *think* (don't hold me to this) the AA rewrite, which is nearly complete, is our last hurdle. Raids and groups are re-done. We think we've solved the memory leak from hell. Zones and pathing appear to be fixed. Great stuff.
Along the way, we played around with some things that will just make it easier to maintain the game. Without getting into specifics, we have a caching layer that has been the bane of our existence for a long time. We incrementally improved this by getting to where EQEmu was. I have now taken it a step further by implementing an enterprise-grade cache used by little guys like Facebook and Google. This weekend I committed those changes. While they still need to be tested, zones boot up and the cache looks good. This will give us the ability to update many more things on the fly without requiring a patch as is currently the case.
We're also transitioning to be able to run on Linux, which is far more efficient and easy to maintain. This is already done in fact - we were able to do that when I swapped out our cache layer, and I have become the first player in SoD history to load a character into a Linux server running our code. Very cool stuff.
Once I get the new cache properly tested this week and we get AA changes committed, we will hopefully be open for full beta business again. Assuming no more catastrophic memory leaks or the like, my hope is that we will have solved all the major impediments toward production release.
Now one thing to caution - just because the server is ready doesn't mean we are. We still have a pretty big list of things to set up to bring it into full production, including updating our tools, converting characters, etc. The process, I predict, is going to be bumpy. That said, I feel like we're at least, for real, done after this. At least I hope so. I'd like to actually play again some day.
-t