Category Talk to Simutronics (34)
Topic GM Announcements (5)
Message Game Status Update (10)
By SIMU-SOLOMON@PLAY.NET
On Feb 21, 2000 at 14:20

Update on the current tech situation:

After a week/weekend of prowling, searching, scanning, and prodding, we've got some additions/patches/tweaks
lined up for the system to be rolled in during the shutdown on Wednesday afternoon that we're hoping will stop
these crashes.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that we won't really know if it works until we don't crash...or at
least don't crash with the same frequency and for the same reasons, since it's going to be hard to get to a
point where we never crash. It's always going to happen SOMETIME....the key is to make sure it's rare and not
always caused by the same thing. :)

Now...something else I'm having to ponder about that I wanted to share...

The game DOES seem to be running relatively stable for two to three days before it decides to die, SO, I've been
asked to consider an alternative plan that will allow us to eliminate these unwelcome crashes:

If there are still problems after the software updates on Wednesday, we're looking into announced, scheduled
shutdowns of the games every other day, sometime around 11 am or 12 noon Central. This way, no one gets
surprised, no critters go nuts, nothing is damaged, nothing is lost, no caravans go wonky, no timewarps, etc.
The game comes down for 2-5 minutes and then right back up, with PLENTY of advanced warning. It's not the BEST
solution, but it's definitely the safest in terms of making sure the games are as stable as possible for the
longest amount of time possible. This will also allow us to continue working on fixing the problem, instead of
having to recover from the continual crashing. Back in the AOL days, we used to have weekly announced shutdowns
for maintenance, so while this is a little more frequent, most of the older players will remember that it wasn't
a big deal.

Additionally, we are going to plan to roll in some other software on Wednesday that will allow us to track and
hopefully identify whatever it is that's giving us (you all) the intermittent lag.

Hope this helps,

GM Solomon