Server Problems and Status Update

Over the past week there have been a couple of completely unrelated server problems but they should be resolved now. First, the subversion server has been down off and on for a couple of weeks due to a combination of hard drive failure and internet connection problems. It should be working at the moment because I've setup a virtual server to handle that stuff until my new replacement arrives (hopefully next week sometime). As long as my internet doesn't fail again that will work for now.

In addition, this site was down for a few hours last night due to a failed upgrade to Debian Lenny. It seems that the Xen setup my hosting company uses for this server doesn't like Lenny all that much. I've reinstalled from scratch and restored from backups so very little was lost (a blog post from that day and a vote in the poll). I guess for the moment I'm going to have to content myself with Etch and hope that by the time support for that ends I'll have some way of doing the upgrade successfully.

On a lighter note, I'm very close to ready to start playtesting (which is part of why I wanted to do the Lenny upgrade now before that starts). I think all of the basic functionality is there now and I've updated some of the placeholder artwork (although not all, a few minor things aren't done but they're...well...minor). I'm still not entirely happy with the models, but at least they're a start. I would probably call the next build that I post an alpha since I'm pretty sure there are some things that will need to be changed, but I don't want to change them until I've actually played the game so I know what to change them to.

So overall it's good news; the servers are back up and running and the game is making good progress. Check back here next week when I hope to be running some scheduled playtests (assuming I can find any testers:-).