We got a really good new build from GPG this evening that has a cure for those people who have experienced in-game disconnects along with some in-game exploits and a few other things (favor points, achievements, etc.).  So we spent a lot of time this evening working on that.

Meanwhile, I turned over the Proxy server setup to the enterprise team at Stardock to speed that up (for those of you not familiar with Stardock, we’re 70% an application company, 30% games with very distinct development teams).  Basically I turned over the Proxy server work to the Impulse development team since they already have built the infrastructure around Impulse.

The connection servers, which is one of the areas some people (and we have reproduced this) are having a lot of pain with is something we’re still working on (2:30am as I write this) but we’re nearing the end of productive work on this.  Basically, it’s a problem of scaling. The classic what works for 500 people falls apart when used by 5000 people at once.  But a lot of progress has been made there as well.

Anyway, we’re going to call it a night and come back tomorrow to continue on the integration.

Now, as some people have heard, we are going to release this update as a “beta”.  Impulse has an option for users to be able to try out pre-release software on it.  Warning though, if Demigod MP is already fine for you, don’t mess with this.

Here’s how you make use of this feature:

We expect to have this up tomorrow.  But I’m not making any promises as we don’t want to take a chance of putting something up that leaves people stranded (or having to re-download the whole release game again).

Update: Friday afternoon

We've finished integrating GPG's changed with the Raknet changes with the CVP changes.  But we have still not resolved the issue of why it takes so long for 2 people, after being connected, to get into the lobby when there's a heavy load as the database seems to now be able to handle it (we set up a bunch of new servers) but there is still a random several second delay between when it says someone is connected and when it actually even attempts to insert them into the game lobby.