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[LadyTiggs]

Comms from CapnJosh

 

This last week we got some new server hosting systems online.  The launch of the PS4 and XB1 platforms required a TON of extra capacity; we used a lot of AWS machines, which, while they work, we don�t consider them to be the best long-term solution.  Cost, performance, and management systems leave something to be desired.  Our solution now consists of all physical hosts on some beefy networking infrastructure, along with some pretty great deployment and server management systems that allow us to tune the capacity better than our previous systems.  All machines are modern Xeon CPUs, and they�re in datacenters built with game servers in mind.  We have high hopes for these things ?

 

Our previous deployment systems consisted of Ansible playbooks, some jinja2 templating, good ol� Boto to query and interact with AWS.  And a TON of string parsing code.  Yeah, it had become complex.  There�s another system that we had been using to support private server rentals, but that system unfortunately suffers from a ton of CPU overhead, which essentially makes gameserver performance and capacity take a hit.

 

We will be migrating the remaining server hosts to the bare metal beastly servers over the next 1-3 weeks, and we�re hoping you can feel an improvement in server performance.  All platforms will benefit from this move, including the venerable PC build � we just started up the first of the gameserver instances yesterday for PC, so after a little more time monitoring for performance we will most likely start retiring the older hosts soon.

 

What does this mean for the private server support (yes, you can rent a server and set up things like game modes, map rotation, player slots, and server name)?  We will be retiring it.  However, the new hosting solution has private server rental support, so we are aiming to bring that online over the next few months.  I can�t quite commit to a timeline just yet, but believe me when I say we really want to make this happen.  The whole situation would become much better supported ?

 

We are hard at work on Content Update 1 (console), which we are aiming to release in August.  This update will include performance improvements for the server, so we anticipate even better server performance once that�s launched.

 

-capnjosh