MattScott

Hi all, I missed these stats from yesterday, and its a short holiday week for us, so customer support was mostly shutdown Thurs and Fri. As of this morning we have: 434 unanswered tickets 683 total tickets We are answering tickets from 11/11. If your ticket is older than November 11th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

If you're playing on Jericho, I think you're playing on LA servers for now. If you're playing on Citadel, then you're playing on NY servers for now. As soon as our EU servers clear customs, then we'll do some moving around.

Hi all, EDIT: We originally activated 7 Days of Premium for all players and all platforms. We have extended this till 12/22 for a total of 25 days while we continue making adjustments and get the EU servers online. Thanks, Matt

We are working on new server locations. Currently only LA and NY are online.

Hi everyone, All services are back online. We are fine tuning district server assignments to get us through the next couple days. Please note that we are missing all EU-based servers, so Citadel is temporarily running off the new East Coast servers. I'm going to lock this thread for now. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, This is taking agonizingly too long. We are waiting on one more fix to get PC back online. Sorry, Matt

Hi all, XB1 NA/EU and PS4 NA/EU are back online. We're working on bringing up PC. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, The team is troubleshooting an issue with connecting new district servers to the existing worlds. We're close, but I don't think the PC, XB1, or PS4 environments for North America will be ready for another couple hours. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We are getting closer. The databases are all restored. The network team has been working for 72 hours straight now. The main issue now is some bad hardware that had to be replaced. I hate to throw out dates, but I feel like you have all been in limbo too long. So if I had to start making some guesses, here is how I think the various platforms will come online: PS4 and PC NA = midnight tonight Pacific time XB1, PS4, and PC EU = early morning (7am-ish) tomorrow Pacific time A couple caveats: We are missing some network equipment and a bunch of district boxes that got stuck in customs for the new EU datacenter. This means all of EU will be temporarily running on districts in New York for a couple days till we get the new EU location online properly. And all platforms will be running Financial and Waterfront with no threat segregation for a couple days. Sorry, Matt

Hi all, We’re fixing one internal issue that is still preventing the EU world from being available. I don’t have an eta, but the team is working very hard. The other database restores all started at the same time. Each platform will come online as they finish. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I have posted an update here: Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I have updated Lixil's original post with more details. These are large databases, so they are taking quite a bit of time to backup, copy, and then restore. We have XB1 North America up. Logging in is very slow for some reason, and we're troubleshooting that. There are also only 5 districts with no threat limitations in Financial and Waterfront because the XB1 population is so small. I think PS4 North America will be next up. We are waiting on the database to finish restoring. All EU environments had to be recreated from scratch, so those are taking a bit longer than expected. PC databases are being restored right now. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I know this is garbage timing. The team is working as fast as they can to get things cut over. We will do our best to communicate timing. As of right now I don't have any extra information. Sorry, Matt

I should have qualified my statements a little better. Each event requires dev work to integrate achievements and rewards. There is a minor tweak this year to an existing mini-game that required some additional work, but a couple devs spending a week to prep out an event is actually quite short for us.

This is exactly correct. This is a fair criticism. Unfortunately we have to coordinate these larger moves around rigid contract end dates. Pushing this off would require us to wait another year. These will all be brand new servers, but many of the stability/performance issues are related to the 32-bit single threaded server code. While the existing hardware is quite old, in the year and a half since we took over, I have not seen any major issues with the power of the servers. Yes. The “loan” model is the end goal now. Citadel’s database is already pushing max capacity for performance. Our initial tests showed that consolidating worlds further would seriously bottleneck things. The loan model opens up some very cool functionality downstream, while keeping each world small and easier to run. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I missed yesterday’s update, and I’m currently out of town, but here is a quick rundown: - Part of the team had to take a break from the Engine Upgrade to help finish off our new Christmas mini-game. They should wrap up those tasks this week and jump back in soon. - The biggest focus continues to be the building features and removing duplicate items. I added an update to last week’s post once we identified more than 12K duped items. It took 3 days longer than expected to hammer out the commandlet that could properly identify dupes (lights, brushes, static meshes, etc). That process is a bit crazy. Each object type has unique code that compares it with each other object of the same type. On Friday we had cleaned up all the smaller maps and Financial. We’re working on Waterfront over the weekend. Hopefully we’ll have a new build to test soon. - We made some progress with Ambient Occlusion, but that engineer got pulled into other tasks related to the network move happening this weekend. - We shifted some focus to PS4 and XB1 bugs. We tend to pause console development while larger efforts are underway in the code, so that we don’t end up having to work through the same code twice. Currently neither build runs well due to the dupe issue, but we made some good progress anyway. TL;DR - Christmas tasks and the network move ate up some bandwidth. But everyone should be back on APB 2.1 after Thanksgiving. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Great week. Lots of hard work from CS to dig in and keep the momentum going. We're also hiring potentially 2 more CS agents. We haven't been this low since July. 400 unanswered tickets 620 total tickets We are answering tickets from 11/7-8. So we are now answering tickets in 2 weeks. If your ticket is older than November 7th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt

Thanks for the reminder. I'll ask the team to see what we can do. Thank you very much. I'll definitely pass it along.

Hi everyone, Over the last year and half, the Little Orbit team has produced quite a bit of original art which has been incorporated into skins, clothing, and events. These pieces have all been original works created by our talented in-house artists, and a couple months ago, I had a player reach out for permission to use the high rez art I posted from the Kabuki Weapon Skin Collection for a t-shirt. With that in mind, my art team have created a Redbubble store and put most of our original art up there. For those who aren't familiar with Redbubble, they make print-on-demand items showcasing original art. I was pretty skeptical at first, but their capabilities are impressive including custom made prints, mugs, clothing and even phone cases. Having spent some time looking at all the items, I admit there's a part of me that loves the idea of taking virtual customizations back into real life content. To be clear, none of these designs are APB specific art, characters, or logos. So if this isn't your thing, no worries. If you're interested in seeing more, you can see the new Little Orbit channel here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/littleorbit/shop?asc=u As a small Easter Egg, we've also included a couple new designs that haven't been released for APB clothing that you can see first on Redbubble. And we'll be updating the store over the coming months as we release new art. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, This week we began staging networking infrastructure with an entirely new provider. This includes new district server hardware based on the west coast, east coast, and Europe. Please bear with us. We are trying to keep the downtime at a minimum while this is being staged, but we have an aggressive timeline to get entirely cutover by Nov 25th. I'd rather plow through this and get it over with, versus having some rambling effort that takes months to complete. For the next week, we will have periodic windows where systems will be unavailable. @Lixil will do her best to make announcements on the forums. EDIT: We are still working on the world consolidation. We hit some extremely frustrating blockers once we built our proof of concept. The strategy has shifted to worlds that can seamlessly loan their players/characters to other worlds, giving us the same end result of NA - EU cross play. EDIT: District servers for the West and East coast will be consolidated under the Jericho world. For now, players will be able to choose them off the advanced list. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We had to do a unscheduled reboot. The Login Server should be back online now. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I'm checking with the network team to see if the fix was applied to all servers yet. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I’m going to keep this week’s update a bit shorter. Fixing lighting, shadows, and building features continues to be a bit of a rabbit hole. There is very good progress, and with respect to lighting and shadows, I am calling it ‘good enough’. There are some straggling items that we can revisit post launch. Features on buildings (cProps) is the last area plaguing development. We discovered a horrible issue where props with embedded lights were recreating those lights over and over. We also have a lot of duplicate props in the district (again). This is an issue that popped up a month and a half ago that we solved. But it seems to be back. EDIT: I got the actual stats today. There are currently 12,700+ duplicate objects in Financial alone. There's also a secondary issue that popped up related to props that use the physics engine. Apparently we were at the limit of how many objects can use physics in a single district. It is very possible that we are occasionally seeing crashes in Live due to this issue. So we also spent some time fixing this in APB 2.1. We finished AA (anti-aliasing) and have started work on AO (ambient occlusion). It works for the most part except when the game animated the field of view which causes a flicker. The hope is to get a build to SPCT by Tuesday/Wednesday that has these items all addressed. EDIT: It’s taking a fair bit longer to clean up the dupes. So we wont have a new build tomorrow. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I want to take some time to walk through this, because we have been chasing it for a couple weeks trying to diagnose and fix the issue. I also want to thank all the players who sent us latency reports and helped report the issue. Based on initial reports, it seemed like this was an obvious issue with our provider. So that's where we started, but after many days of extensive research, we couldn't find anything affecting our service. It turns out the problem was in our orchestration layer that controls spinning up and spinning down districts on our many district servers. This system is also responsible for detected hung/non-responsive districts by looking at ping times and CCU counts. If the district has been sitting empty for a specific time period, then we throw it away and spin up a new one. At some point in the last month, we had an issue where the orchestration layer was killing districts with players in them. This issue was difficult to diagnose, because it only happens on Citadel, so it's not a system wide issue. While we were investigating, my network team disabled the ability for orchestration to kill districts, so that we wouldn't accidently keep kicking players. Then we got caught up in Halloween and a number of other pressing tasks, and this issue was left on the back burner. During the last two weeks, it appears that orchestration was still detecting non-responsive districts, attempting to kill them (which was disabled), and then spinning up a new district on the same server. Currently due to memory and CPU constraints, we can only run 3 districts per physical server. Over time, orchestration had fired up 7-8 districts, which caused massive amounts of processing lag and eventually started crashing districts. As of today, we believe we have figured out why orchestration was killing populated districts. It involved a small configuration error from when Nekrova physical servers were merged with Citadel servers (which also explains why only Citadel servers were affected). We have started putting a fix in place, and the lag issue should get better. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Lots of movement this week. 537 unanswered tickets 740 total tickets Both of these are considerably below last week. We are answering tickets from 10/31 with a couple earlier stragglers. So we are now running at a ~16 day response time. If your ticket is older than October 31st, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status. Thanks, Matt