Laggy spaceships, doing sudden and unexpected maneuvers? Or something different?
Delighted to have you with us, Ptolemy! Am pretty sure you’re from the awesome Illy crowd?
Yes, us too.
Pretty sure you were connecting when the server had thrown a fit; apologies.
Generally means that the texture hadn’t loaded, but the model itself rendered anyway. Most likely an artifact of the server hiccup, but we’ll certainly take a closer look.
Yeah, we do think there was a more generalised I/O choke problem behind the server fall-over.
Notwithstanding that we had a few server fall-overs, perhaps the most impressive thing (from our perspective) was that the third server crap-out was broadly unnoticed. ie, The time between the server failing and the complete server recovery of the core game application, including picking up from where it left off… was a little under 5 seconds.
This bodes extremely well indeed for the entire scale-on-demand architecture whereby we can simply pull additional servers in on a whim, as needed, for massive scale fleet combats - even if they’re not necessarily “running hot” in advance. So whilst a server crap-out absolutely isn’t what we want happening (and will fix; we know where the problem lies), there was a very encouraging upside to it!
Lots of wonderful server dump logs to plough through 
Yeah, we’re very pleased with them. They feel, and sound, quite “meaty”. Some polish needed on the fx, still - sparks, a hint of smoke/exhaust from the cycle mechanism, a touch of muzzle flash etc. But yeah, getting there.
I’d really love some decision-making commentary (especially if accompanied by video) from any players who wish to - and are able to - share. It’s going to be astonishingly useful for us in building the combat AI. So yes, please, either here or in the Lounge would be really, really appreciated.
Best,
SC
