Development Update - Server Maintenance & What Comes Next
As you may well know, the Project Existence servers were shut down for maintenance yesterday. We're working hard on getting them back up so I wanted to explain a bit what is happening behind the scenes. To begin with, I wanted to go over how we've been doing things since going into early access. There's a limit to how much you can prepare, so our philosophy has always been:
This was working great when we went into early access! A bunch of people jumped into the game while we were like hawks jumping on issues and fixing them as they came up. Things then evolved to a point where we were actually stressing some of our cooler systems and technology that we're actively working on.
Some of the issues that have been popping up made us realize we needed to upgrade how our world database works. This means we had to update our tools and development environment in order to run stress tests easily and get more detailed information when players encounter errors, which gives us the opportunity to debug these more efficiently.
This has been more time consuming than we expected, so as soon as we see that we have this running smoothly, the servers will be back up! As for what this massive update entails, we are be introducing some new crafting and automation mechanics - but a large chunk of it are things in the backend that you as a player won't see or notice for now. This doesn't mean we have cool stuff coming, but this update is going to be essential for what comes next!
Before, everyone was playing in "instances" of the world (basically duplicates of the same region) and players were able to move between them through portals. What we're working on now is a new and improved version that still supports these instances, but adds the ability for us to segment a larger world into smaller pieces.
Our next goal is to expand the world and give players a massive, continuous environment to explore and exist in. The technology behind this is very clever (I think so, anyway), so I want to do a full dev blog on exactly how this works and why it's cool when the time comes. For now, thanks to everyone that has been patient with us and continue to show interest and support!
If you want to stay updated on our progress, follow us on twitter and join the Discord where we post frequent announcements and can easily answer any questions or concerns you might have.
- Arctic Theory development team
- Release the feature
- Measure the impact
- Fix what is broken
This was working great when we went into early access! A bunch of people jumped into the game while we were like hawks jumping on issues and fixing them as they came up. Things then evolved to a point where we were actually stressing some of our cooler systems and technology that we're actively working on.
Some of the issues that have been popping up made us realize we needed to upgrade how our world database works. This means we had to update our tools and development environment in order to run stress tests easily and get more detailed information when players encounter errors, which gives us the opportunity to debug these more efficiently.
This has been more time consuming than we expected, so as soon as we see that we have this running smoothly, the servers will be back up! As for what this massive update entails, we are be introducing some new crafting and automation mechanics - but a large chunk of it are things in the backend that you as a player won't see or notice for now. This doesn't mean we have cool stuff coming, but this update is going to be essential for what comes next!
Before, everyone was playing in "instances" of the world (basically duplicates of the same region) and players were able to move between them through portals. What we're working on now is a new and improved version that still supports these instances, but adds the ability for us to segment a larger world into smaller pieces.
Our next goal is to expand the world and give players a massive, continuous environment to explore and exist in. The technology behind this is very clever (I think so, anyway), so I want to do a full dev blog on exactly how this works and why it's cool when the time comes. For now, thanks to everyone that has been patient with us and continue to show interest and support!
If you want to stay updated on our progress, follow us on twitter and join the Discord where we post frequent announcements and can easily answer any questions or concerns you might have.
- Arctic Theory development team