So here's what's been going on over the last few months:
The housing crisis is resolved, thanks to opening of a new housing facet Maral and bringing back IDOC Events (announced house falls). Although these solutions are quite simple, they would cause an avalanche of requests to move/merge houses. And although it's simple to merge 2 houses together, moving hundreds of houses, and reconfiguring those mini cities comprised of 10 or more houses can be very time consuming, so this all wouldn't be possible without our new House Positioning system, which allows players to move, merge, and even resize houses. And with an interface that neatly displays which tiles are obstructing the placement.
Although we got this feature about 3 months ago, I still often see how happy players are when they first try to place a house and notice this system.
- house placement.png (521.53 KiB) Viewed 7352 times
We fixed a ton of various bugs, everything from small wrinkles in the code and typos, to more serious hidden bugs - those that can't be recreated on the test server, or pop up only occasionally, but still cause a lot of problems. The major victory here was a handful of issues in our database caching layer - the multi-threaded component that makes it possible to work with large datasets in the background (such as all the chat history in the helpsystem), without the game lagging for 100's of milliseconds or even longer, every time anyone uses anything that relies on this functionality (yeah, it wouldn't be playable).
https://baseballtrainingguy.com/swing-i ... ug-squash/
- bugsquashcover.png (64.46 KiB) Viewed 7347 times
And technical upgrades from behind the scenes. Our old secondary server was acting up, and since it's time for a new one, we now have a HP ML110 - a "true" server, with a Xeon E5-1660v3 processor, 128GB ECC RAM, hardware raid, and SSDs. Basically, our server is not just "RunUO.exe + scripts", it's a bunch of other databases and services. All of this is copied in realtime to this server, so in case the main one goes down, we should have minimal downtime, without any long-time revert. I've experienced a 3-week revert as a player, and heard of much longer reverts on some servers, and that shouldn't happen here.
This server also runs secondary/auxiliary services, and it's where I load up backups when debugging or searching for some item.
- hp server.jpg (35.36 KiB) Viewed 7376 times
Worth noting - most tickets are answered and resolved within 24 hours. There is still a good chunk of back-end internal things to take care of before we start crunching the content again.
I'm currently working on getting auctions back up. The main thing is it will simplify organizing/setup of auctions, and with most of the deeds that are sold to be functional, so that they can be applied right away without sending a ticket and waiting for staff. So there will likely be an auction in the end of November, as well as early-to-mid december, to make up for all the gold we didn't sink during the year
Thank you all for your support of Excelsior! Whether by playing, donating, inviting friends to play, or something else.
After monthly auctions are reinstated, the wishlist/todolist is approximately the following (and maybe not in this particular order):
- Setting up official discord server. Well, it takes all about 15 minutes to open a discord server and post a link somewhere, though we've had issues with voice chat in the past, so this means setting up voice recordings, and user identification (linking discord username with the shard username). That's the only way we can have an official discord server, where shard rules can be enforced.
- Mentor Society hiring and finishing a few things that are still on the todo list. You can actually apply right now, in north Britain there's the Mentor Building (formerly Youth Center), there's an application stone at the entrance.
- A particular un-named component on the server that will make collaboration in game development possible, i'll post more when i have a more clear view on this.
- Getting portal v2 back online. Besides being a chat interface for public/guild chat and private messages, it's also a tool for general interaction with the shard, like game development.
- Events, also perhaps reopening one of the seasonal quests, updating the wiki, wrapping up old unfinished stuff, etc, the list is endless.
