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Oct
17
Outage and Related Development
We had an unplanned game downtime on Weds morning of this past week, and this post is intended to fill people in a little on what's been going on.
The basic problem was the "Kourier" AI subsystem, which controls the Hives, going a little bonkers and trying to create over 32,000 hive-NPCs at once, in a single sector. This then caused cascading failures elsewhere. The root issue, however, turned out to be quite complex, and not even a "new" issue, but rather something we've been lucky to avoid in the past.
Because of this, we've spent some effort over the last few days, to clean up and re-work the "Kourier" system, to make it more robust. This should also eliminate some of the other related problems that have plagued us for some time, like not-enough or too-many missions appearing for certain types of dynamic gameplay.
We did not plan for this development to be happening now; but now that we're aware of the problem, it has become the top priority and we've allocated our resources there. This has further pushed back other development that has been in the works. Such is the life of building a live, online game.
A lot of our planned gameplay improvements will also hinge on this same codebase (dynamic territory ownership with conquerable stations, a better Deneb War, etc), so there are other benefits to our doing this work, but it's still inconvenient timing.
We don't expect this issue to delay other development for more than a few days to a week, but, obviously server stability is critical. So we appreciate your patience in the meantime.
The basic problem was the "Kourier" AI subsystem, which controls the Hives, going a little bonkers and trying to create over 32,000 hive-NPCs at once, in a single sector. This then caused cascading failures elsewhere. The root issue, however, turned out to be quite complex, and not even a "new" issue, but rather something we've been lucky to avoid in the past.
Because of this, we've spent some effort over the last few days, to clean up and re-work the "Kourier" system, to make it more robust. This should also eliminate some of the other related problems that have plagued us for some time, like not-enough or too-many missions appearing for certain types of dynamic gameplay.
We did not plan for this development to be happening now; but now that we're aware of the problem, it has become the top priority and we've allocated our resources there. This has further pushed back other development that has been in the works. Such is the life of building a live, online game.
A lot of our planned gameplay improvements will also hinge on this same codebase (dynamic territory ownership with conquerable stations, a better Deneb War, etc), so there are other benefits to our doing this work, but it's still inconvenient timing.
We don't expect this issue to delay other development for more than a few days to a week, but, obviously server stability is critical. So we appreciate your patience in the meantime.