We have the new Lisa replacement working pretty well under testing. Previously, using Lisa, we were unable to get 100 trade convoys (each convoy between 4 and 20 ships) to run on our test server (a dual Pentium3 600). It would start to work and then quickly fall behind on rule processing, spiralling downhill into crushing defeat from there.

During testing this evening we had no trouble running 100 trade convoys on the test server, using Andy's lisa-replacement. This was even while a bug was still present (now fixed) which reduced his new program's efficiency by around 100x. Thus, we are very optimistic about the performance of his new simplified rule-based construct.

Our production servers are much faster than our test box, so hopefully we'll have plenty of overhead for crazy bot activity and wacky gameplay excitement. Let's hope so <fingers crossed>.

So, performance is looking up, but there still is some debugging going on, mostly at a higher level. Some traders and bots are getting confused and lost under certain cases, and we want to straighten that out prior to release. Andy and Michael are still shooting for the "this week" thing, I'm just posting this so everyone has an idea of what's going on.

-john