Mycal
Staff member
It's that time again. This weekend I'll be preforming some maintenance on the server. During this time, expect outages across all of our domains.
For this maintenance, my agenda is as follows:
This is actually quite a large list and I don't expect it to be done in a single night. Fortunately, most of these changes only affect our internal source repository and the odyonline site. Starting Friday, April [st]18[/st] 25, 2014 at 08:00 PM CDT, the odyonline.com site will go offline and remain offline for the duration of this project. The forums should be back up relatively quickly after the 3rd point is done.
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While I'm here, this is in a dev blog for a reason. I haven't had much time for development but everytime I do, I make a good amount of progress. As such, I have decided to start scheduling test nights starting in May. Test nights will be live testing sessions where I post a build with limited functionality targeted towards each test. Each night I will have an agenda set and estimated duration. If we finish early, I may have something else ready to test or we can end early. The first night will be a very basic test. I'll post the complete agenda and a final date as we get closer to it. Since I have built a lot of custom functionality for this game, the purpose of the first test night is simply to make sure these things work on other systems. Most features of the game client will either be removed or turned off to get slimmed down builds ready for each night. Test nights will likely fall on weekends since I have a pretty busy schedule during the week and I'm sure many of you do too.
No signup is required to participate and I expect the turnout to be real low early on (possibly only 1 or 2 people for the first few). All you need is a windows computer, windows vista or newer. If you have a microphone, great because we will be making use of mumble. If not, no worries, mumble does have built in chat as well. I'll give more details about the process closer to the first night and again during the introduction on the actual night. Our mumble server is private, but will be open each test night. The main channel will be unlocked and as the night progresses, I will move people individually to separate channels to talk privately if someone needs some help. Once you are dismissed, you are free to hang around and chat if you wish. I will be actively working on issues the entire night and may put up new builds as I fix things depending on the amount of people still around.
Also, to help encourage participation in these test nights, I will be raffling off games each night. I will have a choice between a few games each night that the winner can choose from. These games range from indie titles to AAA games on Steam. If you happen to own all the games I'm raffling off, we'll work something out at the time of the raffle. To be entered into the raffle, all you need to do is show up and participate in the test. Once I have notified you that you are entered, you are free to leave and I will notify you via PM on these forums. To encourage participation, I will only enter you once I have verified that the everything works on your end. For the most part, this will simply mean there were no obvious errors. I will announce the games being raffled at the beginning of each test night so it's always a surprise.
Please note that I will be purchasing these games on my own dime, so if anyone has any spare games on steam they would like to donate, please contact me. I will not be accepting money donations to purchase games. If you want to donate money, buy a game as a gift and contact me with it instead.
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tl;dr - Maintenance [st]this[/st] next Friday. Test nights starting in May. Raffling games off to participants!
For this maintenance, my agenda is as follows:
- [st]Full image backup[/st]
- [st]Update all packages currently installed to their latest stable versions[/st]
- [st]Switch our webserver from Apache to ngnix, both for performance reasons and to match my dev environment.[/st]
- Setup some git hooks for auto-publishing
- Backup the current odyonline.com site
- Publish the new (temporary) version of the odyonline.com site
- Migrate the database
- Test, test, test!
This is actually quite a large list and I don't expect it to be done in a single night. Fortunately, most of these changes only affect our internal source repository and the odyonline site. Starting Friday, April [st]18[/st] 25, 2014 at 08:00 PM CDT, the odyonline.com site will go offline and remain offline for the duration of this project. The forums should be back up relatively quickly after the 3rd point is done.
[hr=#000000]1[/hr]
While I'm here, this is in a dev blog for a reason. I haven't had much time for development but everytime I do, I make a good amount of progress. As such, I have decided to start scheduling test nights starting in May. Test nights will be live testing sessions where I post a build with limited functionality targeted towards each test. Each night I will have an agenda set and estimated duration. If we finish early, I may have something else ready to test or we can end early. The first night will be a very basic test. I'll post the complete agenda and a final date as we get closer to it. Since I have built a lot of custom functionality for this game, the purpose of the first test night is simply to make sure these things work on other systems. Most features of the game client will either be removed or turned off to get slimmed down builds ready for each night. Test nights will likely fall on weekends since I have a pretty busy schedule during the week and I'm sure many of you do too.
No signup is required to participate and I expect the turnout to be real low early on (possibly only 1 or 2 people for the first few). All you need is a windows computer, windows vista or newer. If you have a microphone, great because we will be making use of mumble. If not, no worries, mumble does have built in chat as well. I'll give more details about the process closer to the first night and again during the introduction on the actual night. Our mumble server is private, but will be open each test night. The main channel will be unlocked and as the night progresses, I will move people individually to separate channels to talk privately if someone needs some help. Once you are dismissed, you are free to hang around and chat if you wish. I will be actively working on issues the entire night and may put up new builds as I fix things depending on the amount of people still around.
Also, to help encourage participation in these test nights, I will be raffling off games each night. I will have a choice between a few games each night that the winner can choose from. These games range from indie titles to AAA games on Steam. If you happen to own all the games I'm raffling off, we'll work something out at the time of the raffle. To be entered into the raffle, all you need to do is show up and participate in the test. Once I have notified you that you are entered, you are free to leave and I will notify you via PM on these forums. To encourage participation, I will only enter you once I have verified that the everything works on your end. For the most part, this will simply mean there were no obvious errors. I will announce the games being raffled at the beginning of each test night so it's always a surprise.
Please note that I will be purchasing these games on my own dime, so if anyone has any spare games on steam they would like to donate, please contact me. I will not be accepting money donations to purchase games. If you want to donate money, buy a game as a gift and contact me with it instead.
[hr=#000000]1[/hr]
tl;dr - Maintenance [st]this[/st] next Friday. Test nights starting in May. Raffling games off to participants!