As it seems, there were a few semi-blocking issues with the unstable client so we’ll hold off the server update and client change at least a week. My wife’s giving birth to our third child next week so I’ll be away until the week after.

There’s a new feature being debugged on the test server as well – a duelling ring. These will be created by the GMs close to the start cities on wild and within 20 tiles they should provide a full same-side no penalty pvp area just like normal duelling does.

The most important feature though is that they provide a way to get rid of any unwanted ruler.

Once per week the people of the kingdom may challenge their ruler to appear at the ring.

In order to make it hard to abuse either by the ruler so that he challenges himself with an alt, as well as make it hard for enemy kingdoms to challenge him by switching sides, or forcing the ruler to appear at a time he has no possibility to attend it’s a pretty complex procedure.

10 people from the kingdom are required to challenge the ruler between two server restarts.

The ruler may decline this challenge, and once more. If he declines a third time he has failed the challenge and people are allowed to go to the ring and vote. If 10 people vote for removal during the next week he is removed.

If the ruler accepts the challenge, he decides upon the date. It’s at least two days away and no more than a week. If he answers the first challenge he is protected for three weeks, and two weeks if he accepts the second challenge.

He must appear at the ring at the time he decided upon and stay half an hour. If he doesn’t appear, or dies, or leaves the area within half an hour he has failed the challenge and a vote begins. Needless to say he should bring as many bodyguards as possible.

I don’t know if a vote always should begin if the ruler dies in the duelling area but I’ll ask around now that I’ve explained the basics.

The ring can not be deeded or built upon. Terraforming should be prevented as well.

I’ve spent a few days sorting out ancient bugs with embarking and riding in the client code and was on the virge of giving up today as I finally managed to make a break through and sort out the situation.

Things changed on the server as well and unfortunately it broke communication in certain places with the current stable and unstable client when embarking. This means that I can’t update the server unless we also move the current unstable/test client to the stable version. From what I understand there aren’t a lot of blocking issues but some clients will see new problems since it’s a move from jogl to pure lwjgl.

It has been over half a year since we updated the stable client and this is starting to impede on game progress so we may have to make this transition anyways and hope that those who run into problems upgrade their hardware or find other solutions. No decision is made yet but it may happen in the next few days so please try the unstable client here and report bugs in the client bugs and problems forum.

We’ve been running on the new hardware since Thursday. All systems are green! ^*

Even though we’ve moved hosting from the North Americas even some players from the US claim they don’t notice any difference since the servers themselves are faster which counters the increase network latency.

Now I can focus on Epic again. You’ve heard it before. Anyways the code I’m making has to do with calculating and composing mission triggers and determining the scope of missions depending on active population.

For reasons you probably understand now (since it’s been delayed a lot already) I won’t give any ETA. As usual I am very optimistic.

^*: except I don’t know if AOL users still don’t get their registration emails. A minor problem considering previous issues.

Allright, earlier today I noticed that if I replaced the firewall with my laptop there was no packet loss. When I plugged the firewall back in it seemed to work ok.

Now, I decided to try and run the servers using the test client so I brought them up and the huge packet loss was back which is an indicator that we run into the same problems as earlier. There was virtually no traffic. Time to replace the hardware with something I have been recommended. Next switch attempt scheduled to next wednesday. Can code until then:)

Yesterday the technician from the firewall company didn’t find anything wrong with the setup and we moved forward today and tried a new move attempt.

Apparently the servers are very smooth but there were still lag spikes and packet loss so we had to revert again. I am going to talk to the hosting company because there seemed to be packet loss on the machine in front of our firewall so we need to hear what they say.

We’ll test the new setup using a special client next time in order to verify that the network problems are gone. It was good to hear people from the US say that the new servers seemed faster except when the network lag hit.

Yeah, not fun at all. At 11 PM I decided that we had to revert the update.

The firewall CPU went to 100% even though it’s supposed to manage 27000 connections with inspection. We had 200 connections and all inspection turned off so it’s now a matter for technical support.

So right now the servers on the old machines are starting up. We try again next week.

*Grumble*

Update – 28/02/2011 – The server move is currently scheduled for Tuesday, 1st March at 10am CEST. However this is dependant on a support call from Netgear. Please check for further updates. (GB)

After quenching the wall of fire that had turned against me I finally managed to ride my black and white horse named SSH onto the new servers and fight that scary cat by the name of Tom. I returned victorious,  but humbled and wiser.

It turned out the cat wasn’t really the enemy – it was myself. Not too surprising I guess. The main error I made in dealing with him was to assume that the normally so easy-going variable {$catalina.home} was set to the same place on the new server.

Anyways, after cleaning a few policy errors I am now ready to declare that the sun is again shining bright and you can expect extended downtime on Wednesday, European daytime, as we move the game server code to new hardware. Let’s celebrate afterwards this time:)

I don’t want Wurm to be Wizards online. There are a lot of Korean MMO type of games for that. There are a lot of our current players who don’t want that either and from what I understand they are equally tired of the inflation in spell casting.

I still want you to meet mystics (we call them priests) now and then and wonder about their weird and powerful capabilities.

Or be one of those of course. Which a lot of people usually will want.

Yesterday Wurm was Wizards online with all those champions running around casting fire spells or enchanting every single spork they could find. Yes that was an exaggeration. Anyways I decided to take some time to remove most of them which a majority of people has been nagging me to do for many many months.

Now, today people write me long letters about how they started to like Wurm because it had terraforming and spellcasters were rare. But could I please give them their channeling powers back and make priests playable?

So the same person writes: I started to love Wurm because you didn’t have a lot of spellcasters. I hate priests because you can’t play them – who in their right senses would play a priest? Why can’t you please make priests playable? I want to be a priest!

I hope I get the message through here. What I am aiming at is that we have a rare interesting “class*” that people really want to play. But we want it to stay rare so right now it is very limited in what it can do. This upsets people because it’s boring to play a priest. Or at least they think so.

Some people think that everyone should be able to be a priest. Others like me think that would be a bad idea. One reason is flavor and lore, another is inflation on various levels.

What I think I’m trying to say is that the mere existance of a rare interesting class is upsetting and possibly very poor game design. If it is fun to play for too many people it will no longer be rare.

We have a luxury in Wurm. We can focus on rewards. Real rewards – not cosmetic ones. Everything has more purpose than in most** other games so playing a boring class like priest will be rewarding for enough players to warrant the existance.

I will keep thinking and be open to input for ways to make priests a bit less boring. Hopefully I can make them more like mystics on Epic with some kind of insight in what’s going on behind the scenes.

* we don’t have classes in Wurm. Or at least we don’t think so.

** all!

PS: We upgraded the firmware in the firewall yesterday and now I can’t reach the new servers so I’ll have to tinker with the firewall configuration. When that is done I can start looking at tomcat again. Then we can move pretty quickly. Then I can finish the code on Epic which should take a bit more than a week depending on disturbance levels. Then we need to test and polish some other things.