For those of you in software development what I'm going to write is known to you so you can skip the next paragraph.
So as some of you have heard, we have a lot of developers now on Demigod at Stardock. Since it became clear shortly after launch that there were tremendous scaling issues with the network connectivity for setting up games (i.e. when thousansd of people are online, messages between the NAT server and the clients got backed up) Stardock has taken it upon itself to write its own system in order to try to solve things faster.
You saw the initial results of those efforts late last week.
Tonight, we're launching the update that tells Demigod to have Stardock servers host the game if players have trouble connecting. There's a lot of different modules involved for this and so different modules pass QA and are approved for integration.
Normally, these modules would get put together into a "big" update but with Memorial weekend coming up which is a prime time for people playing games like this, we're taking those updates as they come out of QA, putting them in and taking advantage of Impulse's rapid deployment capabilities to put out these updates. They're tiny (less than a megabyte) each.
So tonight it looks like we're going to have 3 in one day. Each one progressively better.
Now, will this make everyone happy? Probably not because there's some logic behind deciding when it should give up trying to connect someone and just use the proxy server.
If you're someone who has serious problems connecting to other people, you can force it to just have our servers host you by adding the command line parameter /serverproxyonly to the Demigod short-cut. Though, note, this will add some latency but probably not much (we had test games all week between USA and Europe with total ping times >100ms).
So it's going to be a long night for us but we're extremely excited to see how this series of updates works out. If anyone has any problems AFTER the third update (please don't post until 1.00.088 is being run -- that's the official version off of Impulse - mouse over the version number in Impulse to in the bottom left to see what sub-revision you have).
Stay tuned!
