Friday with Means - July 1st, 2011 - Happy Canada Day!

burmese

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=591448



Friday with Means - July 1st, 2011 - Happy Canada Day!





I'm sorry the Q&A video isn't out yet. Someone is working on it now. Slapping out the raw footage would have been easy but there were problems with the sound that needed to be fixed. Not being able to hear the questions asked takes a lot of the fun out of a Q&A session. AO does not have a full time sound guy on the project so we had to borrow time from one of the TSW team who graciously did the work on his own time.



The most important time this week was spent making sure the universe wouldn't explode again. I discussed it briefly with some people at the QA session but I will explain it again here. Two weeks ago Atlantean went down and would not come back up again. Turns out the id manager was out of IDs for missions for that dimension. To put things in perpective it means you guys had run through or at least taken 4.4 Billion mission IDs since launch. We discovered other IDs were also not recyclable in the AO codebase and were also running low. These IDs are associated with your characters in a table and also in your character information BLOB and as such would be a nightmare to remove. (ie: weeks of possible downtime) We managed to do something temporary during the 6 hours when the dimension was down to reclaim some IDs for use for the next month or so while we worked on a real solution...the temporary solution was a one-off that could not be done again. Macrosun and others have been working through their weekends and evenings to find a good solution to this problem for the last two weeks. We have deployed two versions to the test dimension this week in an attempt to fix this problem...the second one shows the results we were hoping for.



Next week we will be deploying a new version to live that we hope will fix this issue. It has a high risk factor as it touches a lot of old/awful systems that have not been looked at in years.



It is Canada Day and I am supposed to be on vacation so I am going out in my Canoe now.



Have a great weekend and I hope our American's have a great 4th of July on Monday!



(Edited by Famine: Videos of Q&A Panel found here.)

__________________

Colin Cragg

This "Means" Cake

Game Director/Producer



Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"