The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 11, 2012

Official News page 1


PROGRESS REPORT ON FED2 CODE UPDATE

by Hazed

In last week’s Star I told you that Alan planned to put some new code into the game on Monday which would prepare for the game’s move to the cloud. Well, things did not go as smoothly as expected, and here’s why.

The main problem was that Alan wrote the new code over six weeks ago, and then had to stop work on it while he moved to his new abode in leafy Chiswick. This meant that when he came back to the code last week, he’d forgotten the details of exactly how the code worked, and what was needed to made it do its stuff.

On Monday he realised he couldn’t just put the code into the game as it was. The reason was that there were three stages to the new code, and he’d written it so two of them happened simultaneously. This caused a chicken-and-egg situation because the piece of code that updated the billing database expected the Fed2 persona file to be in the new format, and the piece of code that updated the Fed2 persona file expected the billing database to be in the new format: a logical impossibility.

So he had to revert to the old code, which fortunately was easy using a revision control system called GIT with its handy “cherry-pick” command which allowed him to decide exactly which bits of the code to load back onto his production machine.

It then took a few more days to make all the necessary changes to the Fed2 code and the billing code, and yesterday he put the code in and ran a few tests to make sure it works. Which it did.

So now we are back where we were last week: tomorrow (Monday) Alan will back up all the game data, put in the code to use the new format, and put the data back. So to repeat what I said last Sunday: After tomorrow’s reset, the game will come back up as normal but after 5 or 10 minutes it will close again. During that time, Alan will instruct the game to write out all the account information. Then it will stay down for a while - it could be up to two hours - while he converts that account info into the new format it needs, and puts in the new code.

Company owners need to be aware that this may affect company cycles so you might find they don’t advance a day at Tuesday’s reset.


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