C Del

You made the HD planet images? I came across your demo video on YouTube a while back and was rather impressed. Is there a way to replace those planet textures easily on the client side? I know that assets have been added in the past, but I don't know about textures.

I hear that you're frustrated with the extended downtime, which is entirely understandable given the circumstances, but I encourage you (and others) not to lose faith in the project. I think it is difficult to grasp from an external perspective just how much work and difficulty is involved in managing and recovering from what is an IT catastrophe like this. To switch hosting providers, as they are doing, is a massive headache in the best of times - to do so without warning and under substantial stress is the kind of thing that gives CTO/CIOs of small tech companies everywhere PTSD. The fact that, from what I can see, there has has been zero practical loss of data from this breach is a cause for celebration, and it means that the people in charge were paying attention, keeping important best practices, and acted diligently in managing the server(s) and the web of services residing on those servers. Many volunteer projects could easily have been permanently crippled by this event, and the fact that I can log in here and can see my characters on net-7.org shows me that the project is alive and kicking. Now I appeal for patience and grace: Waaaaay back in 2008-2013ish (it's difficult to remember now), I was a minor contributor to this project. At that time, the active volunteer staff was several times what it is today, and even with that extra help, the project had its plenty of struggles and setbacks. Unfortunately, this decade and more later, there are fewer shoulders to bear the burden of server maintenance, development, financial management, logistics, and community management. This diminishment may seem an ominous portent, but, conversely, I believe it highlights the extraordinary commitment of those core members who have kept the watch here while I went about my business, coming back about every year to listen to the December shopping music, fly around Sol, and revisit a part of my childhood to which I'd be 20 years more distant if not for their effort. Forgive me for babbling on, but I mean to say that the good people here have shown us by their actions that they care about preserving this game and keeping it available for others to enjoy, and though that may be difficult for them, I see no indication that they intend to stop now. Finally, a huge Thank You to all of the active staff for keeping the home fires lit for all of us - as long as this community exists, EnB shall not perish from the Earth.

Yeesh. Just decided to swing by - sorry to see you guys going through this. Let me know if there's anything I can do. Is the donation funnel functional? EDIT: Yes. It is. If you have the means, this is a great reminder to help out your friendly neighborhood emulator project!

It's fixed.

Oh man. Remember when you could import things from places? Now, the DRM stores just tell you when and where you can play things. Mad respect paying nearly the price of the game again just to get it when you deserved it. Even with its complications, I'm glad the globalization of gaming seems to have really cut down on that region-dependent BS.

Hey. Tryna gib money, but don't see a button. Should there be a button? Am I being an idiot? Thanks.

And so the cryptowar begins. I'm no financial adviser, but personally, I'm going long on pancakes and shorting staples like there's no tomorrow.

Alurra is quite correct.  It could be done with a slash command, but that's not exactly convenient.   It's funny that Destiny actually had this same age-old problem and only addressed it well into their first year, maybe 9 months after release.  When will they learn? :P

Incredibly correct, sir. Part of the problem is that we'd have to dump the call stack and memory image to figure out what happened, and that's a huge amount of data for an application this large.

Server go away. A developer is on it.

Missions aren't hard-coded in. They're in the content database (which is separate from the character database). A server code rollback will not affect missions unless server code had to be fixed to make a mission work which, to my knowledge, has not happened recently, so you are clear to proceed.

The server ams dies again. For a second there, Zackman was keeping it alive with pure willpower. Stand by.

Well, I didn't crash the server...   The server is being worked on.  The recent crashes are due to some restructuring that needs to be done in the server.  Like I said earlier, they're growing pains.

Edited (hopefully) for clarity. (I only changed formatting)   Also: Sticky!

Tienbau, Zackman, Kyp, et al. are the awesome ones. I just pop in every now and then and break things. :P You are correct that crashes have been happening more often than in the past, but this is not completely a bad thing. The reason it's happening is that we continue to have more and more players online at once. As we've pushed toward 400 simultaneous users, and then on to 500, the increased load on the server has caused less-than-perfect or older sections of the code to break under the new found stress. Each time the server crashes, Zackman, and recently Tienbau again, are doing their best to fix the problem so it doesn't happen again, which is why the server doesn't always come back immediately. Zackman has been doing a terrific job of keeping the server going and minimizing downtime. These are growing pains and, while they hurt a bit now, they'll make us bigger and stronger in the end.