Auth Server Down

[snickel]

Hi Vahrokh,

i wrote exactly what i meant to write: The best game that NEVER was -- this is just another way to express that HZ could have been one of the best games ever but failed.

And as for the rest of your post -- i share your opinion, since you also express the strong points of this game, this time in another field: technology.

So why should there not be some company who recognizes this game as promising -- even economy-wise?

[Vahrokh]

Because the only way to make Horizons profitable is to refactor it keeping the good ideas and concepts and software solutions (which are not tied to a specific platform nor programming tool) and:

1) Trash once and for all the newbie Microsoft stuff and stop wasting time with that sorry crap. I had better experiences even with ugly old dogs like Informix in that department. It's the source of the "lag" when you do most database related things. In a game where even a single building sub-piece is stored on a database and must be located on it to be shown to players, having a sub-par database system kills EVERYTHING. Notice how I am saying this since April 2004. And notice that others are using such products with more success but they work only because their games have static maps (on the clients!), static buildings, static trees, static everything, that is they are "light weight" compared to Horizons. Which needs true horse power with huge multi-access performance to keep behind the players in real time (a thing even a decades old Informix does better than MS SQL).
This and other badlibraries like those that cannot let them use more than 2G of memory on the servers. That rubbish is the cause of the "new" stupid spawn system (ever noticed how other games don't have any problem with the current computers?)

It's not a single piece of all the used software, libraries, tools fault. It's a general "suckiness" that in the end kills frame rate, kills database look up times and all the other defects we see.

Some pieces they are changing are for the good (like using an alternate open source STL template library), but it's the foundations that are rotten.

2) There's the need of a bigger management vision. I won't delve into details else this will become a fast rant but know that under any success or any failure there's people, not just technology. So far Horizons went on in "survival mode". Hiccuping content, slow coming updates... it's once again a sum of factors but they could be avoided since the beginning.

I am still unsure if releasing Horizons 2+ years before its time was a good thing. It was not ready, not finished, it failed as business even if it deserved a lot of success.
But then, if AE chose not to release it and to abort it and try selling the "knowledge" to other game makers with broader shoulders maybe in more 3 years we'd have a "Horizons technology empowered" other game that would compete with WoW and EQ2. Instead now it's an aging product that will be scoffed at by any possible buyer of the technology. Because buyers, the good ones, don't dirty their hands with failures, whatever the reason.

3) There's the need of money, wagonloads of it. This game is much harder to do, and maintain than other more traditional solutions. Even the content has to be duplicated since dragons are a sort of other game in the game.
No money = no contents = no updated = players quit = the game enters a long but steady agony.

4) There's the need of a true software house, one with the balls. Horizons is all about good will and selfless endless dedication of few developer marthyrs but this won't cut it. They have not what is required nowadays to produce large scale reliable software, not the workflow management that lets pieces be produced safely and truly tested and pipelined in a serious way from analysis of new requirements to QA and bug reports and the many other "hidden from the general public things" that are a must if you want to deliver in time and reliably (still with minor or even major glitches but not glaring gamestoppers lasting for months).

5) There's the need of a true chain of hosting companies, more strictly tied to the mother software company. As of now, GN do what they can in the night etc. etc. but there's no real "alliance" with Tulga, no real full time exchange of information. One is here and the other is there. Passing files along. GN are required to blindly apply the updates and hope... and sometimes like yesterday it will go crap, and having no true shared knowledge GN will have to wait for Tulga to solve it for them.

6) There's the need of a real publisher. A company that unlike Atari did not have to pull the plug (of investments) and to push the game to market because that year they HAD to show positive balance to their investors (the story is long, but to make a long story short, Atari greatly contributedkilling Horizons to just show a petty, minimal positive income for 2003. Moreover said publisher made so that the game box was generally unavailable in many countries (I had to sweat a LOT to find it and I am in the same country of GN. My friends had to let me buy it in the only 2 or 3 places in entire regions where you could find a pair of dusty boxes) and the advertisement, compared to what I saw of EQ and WoW was skeletal at best.

See all these pre-conditions?
It's almost impossible to get them all, but failing them is failing the business.
MMOs are a big beast to manage, only few have the infrastructures, technology, manpower, streamlined production etc. etc. required.
And those that can, already developed their solutions. I don't see Sony or Blizzard acquiring the important solutions developed for Horizons. They'll prefer extending on their current products, tools and technologies like companies usually do.

The best you could hope of them is the buying (but why then...I am pretty sure none at AE "saved" their work by trademarking it) of Tulga to nab the ideas and trademarks if any then close it.

Another solution would be that a wannabe new MMO company could try and reuse the good of the game in a new release. But having success as a newcoming MMO company is beyond most of them, look at the many aborted titles.

[Shades]

hi all, i know this may sound outragous but could it be that the unexplained reason for the programme stopping workingcould be the result of a virus or corrupt file? i know from when my computer and some of its programs went down for an unexplained reason, it took me a long time to sort out.
Lets just let them get on and work on it now and hope that we can all play this great game again at some point.

[Hawk]

Hi shades :)

[Shades]

hi hawk
still no game up lost track of how long its been down now.

[Neptune]

Vahrokh i agree with most that you posted earlier but have anyone considered
maybe that tulga would like to "cut" of from GN for money reasons and that the lack of info towards GN is not so "innocent"...[^o)]

[Tzael]

Vahrokh i agree with most that you posted earlier but have anyone considered
maybe that tulga would like to "cut" of from GN for money reasons and that the lack of info towards GN is not so "innocent"...[img]/Web//emoticons/emotion-40.gif[/img]

Maybe the lack of info towards GN isn't innocent... then again maybe "we're waiting on Tulga" is a convenient excuse that GN keep falling back on time and again.

Point is that we can speculate all we like, but it gets us nowhere. We're in the hands of Game Network, and let's just say that I don't think those hands are all that steady.

BTW, shard is back up, or at least I'm able to get past the auth server now.

[Amerelium]

uhm, game's up now boys...

[Shades]

YYYAAAHHHOOO!!! *jumps up and down with joy*

[Xante]

server up but no confirmation of it yet in the login ?? ...

does this mean the game works again or would it be down again in the nexthour/minutes to finalise the repairs ?

[Xante]

login page :
The temporary fix finally worked fine and now Unity is back online.

We will monitor its status throughout the day and if everything will stay fine we will credit back 3 days of game time to all the accounts during the morning of tomorrow, Monday 4th April.

If you should experience some issues with your gifts or death points timer, please try logging out and if of the

[Galilee]

A little extra explanation on top of your post Xante (for the computer-illiterate or almost-illiterate, like myself ;) ) (and as I have understood what is going on...):
There are some 20 or more servers upholding the game. Most of these servers now have been fixed, but not all could be fixed; a few remain with bugs on timers etc (don't know if these will get fixed later or not untill thursday-maintenance; they might be okay in a bit too, or not, afaik).

When you log in, you log into 'one of the servers'; and if you are unlucky, that is a server that still has bugs. Easiest solution: relog, it will get you into a new round of 'picking a server'; quite probably this time you get onto a server without the bugs.

So if on server with bugs: just relog, or maybe relog more then once, until you find yourself a server without the bugs. As work-around until things can definitively be fixed. Well to-live-with as alternative for keeping all servers down, I would say [:D]

[Tzael]

That's strange Galilee, yesterday we were being told that it was just the authentication server that was having problems and that there was nothing wrong with the servers that support the shard itself.

I'll follow your advice if I encounter any problems,I just find it odd that yesterday we were being told that it was nothing to do with the servers for the shard,only the authentication server was having problems then apparently [:^)]

[Galilee]

As I have understood it Tzael: first they thought it was the auth-server malfunctioning, but after analyzing things together with Tulga they found it were some files (that were applyed a few days ago, but stopped working all of a sudden yesterday) that were the cause of the trouble.

While waiting for new files, they have made a 'temporary fix'. And this (eventually) worked well on most servers, but still not on all. So it has really nothing to do with any hardware that got broken, all that is okay... and once the new files come in and are applied, all servers will be running fine again too... it's just the temporary (software) fix that works on most but not on all (at this moment anyway).

(all said in amateur-words and as I have understood it; sorry, not very computer-literate at all; but this I did catch as explanations along the way, and I thought others that don't know very much about computers but that still wóuld like to try and understand something about what is going on, might like to hear these tid-bits too...)

More or less understanding what is going on, what is frustrating your gameplay, really helps a lót to keep tempers down and patience up.... at least that's how it works with me; and I don't think I'm the only one built that way [:)]

[Tzael]

Thanks for the clarification Galilee [:)]

[Claws]

got the error again - but got in on second try - still seems unhealthy :(