1. Changes to AAO development cycle
It's no secret that AAO development has been stagnant. Time for that to change! Unas has recently made some behind-the-scenes changes that mean development can move forward! The highlights are as follows:
- Enthalpy can now accept changes to the website, and when they are ready, send them to Unas to put them on to the site
- Enthalpy can now make changes to music, sprites, ect.
- Enthalpy is joined by kwando1313 and ThePasch, working on changes and reviewing others' changes
- It's now possible to "test" changes to AAO before they go live
2. Changes to AAO server
It's no secret either that, since AAO was forced to move to a new server a year ago, the ride hasn't been extremely smooth, with regular unrecoverable crashes that left the site down until Unas was able to issue a manual restart action.
After a year spent trying to investigate the issue and tweak settings with little to no effect, Unas has decided this June to take measures against that.
Since even the latest attempt to fend off the issue, by setting up an additional server mid-June to absorb part of the load, has failed to prevent crashes from occurring, Unas suspects some kind of hardware fault and a full move to a different server is required to try to get away from it.
The new server was chosen and installed last night. It will in theory offer more performance (with twice the amount of RAM and thrice the CPU cores), even though part of this power is shared - as it is also a virtualised environment (instead of the current server which is a fully dedicated machine).
The move of AAO data should take place tonight or tomorrow (ie some time between June 29th 8 PM CEST and June 30th 6PM CEST).
During the actual move, which should last for around two hours (more or less), AAO will be unavailable. But with that we hope to get a more stable environment for the Game Jam in July !