We're watching to see how it goes.

Sweet! I arrive from Perth about noon on Feb 11 and head out just after 4pm.

I first read that as "They toot and bring...uh..you know".

The performance issues last weekend were related to a misconfiguration that didn't get detected until we had a bunch of servers under decent load.

Once that was fixed, everything has been silky smooth for everyone that doesn't have transit and last mile networking issues of some kind. The server machines themselves are barely breathing, and running on average less than 10% of capacity. They are designed to be able to take FAR more load than we expect to take even on busy servers to prevent serverside lag as much as possible. Think multiples of our target population per server.

When servers are locked, it means we're doing something to them and we don't want people logging into it. A common reason for locking a server is prior to a restart during a rolling restart outage, where we will lock the server, notify everyone who is online that it's restarting in 5 minutes, then restart the server. In this case we lock the server so people don't login after a notice, miss it, and then end up having the cluster reboot without them knowing it's coming.

Another major reason for a server being locked is that it's coming up after a reboot. When that happens, we lock a server while we test it's functionality. We want to make sure it's 100% functional before we open it up.

A locked server is a temporary condition, and just means that only accounts with GM privs can log in. We don't do it as any kind of population control or anything like that.

Hope this helps clarify a bit!

I arrive in Sydney right before noon from Perth. I'll have to hightail it over to the international terminal and then I leave out of Sydney at 4:15PM

Short answer: this is not something we're going to add in the foreseeable future.

Long answer:

We looked very hard at adding avatar space collision to the game, but it was not something we had, or are likely to have, the resources to accomplish. To begin with we would have to entirely rewrite our avatar motion system from the ground up, and then we would have to completely redo avatar combat. So there's no question that it would be a massive investment of resources.

On top of that, avatar to avatar collision is not a well solved problem in a massively multi-player space. That's not to say it's unsolvable, or that it hasn't been done well by someone else, but it's not something we can just add without thinking long and hard about the consequences. What does adding avatar to avatar collision open up in terms of griefing possibilities? Can the AI accidentally trap you in a corner? Can someone with a compromised (hacked) client get around our collision detection? If so how do we prevent that, or detect and ban players who are cheating. And that's just off the top of my head.

Finally there would be infrastructure concerns to worry about. There is no question that adding avatar to avatar collision would significantly increase our bandwidth requirements in avatar space. But exactly how much is 'significantly'? Would it push us beyond what dial-up can handle? What other systems would we have to change to make space for all the collision data on the network? How would that impact our bandwidth costs?

Again none of these issues are unsolvable, but we don't even know what the cost of solving some of them would be. Ultimately, at this time, we don't think that adding avatar to avatar collision is the best use of the resources we know it would cost. When you add the fact that we know it is going to have additional development costs we don't have good estimates for, it moves from a very expensive project, to a very expensive and risky project. And that's not a risk we want to take at this time.

I saw what you did there.

Here you go! These are mine!

Update: They gave us a status report today, and were thinking it would be done tonight, but I haven't seen mail from them. HOWEVER, they did tell me what they were doing. It's a a driver update that they're pushing which will hopefully be available for download soon. I originally wrote "tomorrow" instead of "soon", but I've never been through this process with them before, so I don't want to overpromise.

I'll be doing rolling restarts of servers, starting with EU servers, to implement the changes discussed in http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/...ticle_id=10594.

I'll log onto each server to give you a five minute warning when it's your turn, so no need to sit around during the whole maintenance window.

No patch will be required and per server downtime will be fairly brief.