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MattScott

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Posts posted by MattScott

  3. Posted

    Hi everyone,

     

    Only three working days this week, and lots of interruptions with the terrible network move.

     

    I don't have a comprehensive update today, but I was told that we are finally "done" with all the major blockers.

    However we need to make a build and get our test environments put back together, and then we'll see how all the fixes hold together.

    I'll likely update later this week once I have more information.

     

    Thanks,

    Matt

    • Like 31
    • Thanks 8

  5. Posted

    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

    • Like 8

  6. Posted

    3 minutes ago, Acornie said:

    Thanks Matty. So uh, when are we going to get LA servers? My ms to NY is disappointingly bad.. I really hope it gets better maybe in the future >.>

    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.

    • Like 5

  9. Posted

    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

    • Like 8
    • Thanks 4

  13. Posted

    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

     

     

    • Like 6
    • Thanks 12

  16. Posted

    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

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 10

  18. Posted

    13 minutes ago, LAPDAlonso said:

    "Part of the team had to take a break from the Engine Upgrade to help finish off our new Christmas mini-game."  LMFAO all you can do is laugh, i tell you. I have been sick for the past 4 days and i needed a good laugh this morning, thank you L.O.

    TAKE A BREAK FROM THE ENGINE UPGRADE TO FINISH UP A CHRISTMAS MINI-GAME???????

    long_facepalm.gif

     

    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.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 3

  19. Posted

    On 11/21/2019 at 6:07 AM, Saxtus said:

    From what I understand, they just move to another datacenter provider that will host the new district servers.

    No new functionality will come out of this by the 25th, except the new districts running from the new locations.

    New exciting things will come, this change is the necessary pavement for them but not the actual thing yet.

    This is exactly correct.

     

    On 11/20/2019 at 12:57 AM, Saxtus said:

    This schedule is extremely tight and doesn't leave space for any mistakes / omissions.

    Last time you worked with tight schedules, when the old datacenter was booting you out, it backfired badly.

    I hope this to pan out nicely but I truly believe that you shouldn't leave it for the last possible moment again.

    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.
     

    On 11/21/2019 at 8:51 PM, Darkzero3802 said:

    Are these servers going to perform better and be more stable then these relics that are currently struggling to handle APB?

    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.
     

    On 11/22/2019 at 12:53 PM, Revoluzzer said:

    Are you now working on a world consolidation based on the "loan"-model, or is that an interim solution?

    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

    • Like 5
    • Thanks 3

  20. Posted

    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

    • Like 24
    • Thanks 7

  21. Posted

    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

    • Like 10
    • Thanks 2

  22. Posted

    11 minutes ago, Snubnose said:

    might as well use the opportunity to ask if this section will be update with more wallpapers / art?

    https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/media

    Thanks for the reminder. I'll ask the team to see what we can do.

     

    5 minutes ago, IROCkiller said:

    Man, give props to your artists for me. I really like everything I see there.

    Thank you very much. I'll definitely pass it along.

    • Thanks 1

  23. Posted

    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.

     

    Waves of Luck Phone WalletTriTops PJsSuccubombshell PillowTarot Tower Coasters


    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

    • Like 15
    • Thanks 1

  24. Posted

    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

    • Like 19
    • Thanks 14
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