Solar-Sim has been taken offline for routine server maintenance. When the server comes back up, I will be making some changes that require Solar-Sim to be taken offline again from time to time.
The biggest change I’m making this weekend is to Solar-Sim’s frame of reference. Solar-Sim currently uses an “Earth Mean Equator” frame of reference. I originally chose this because that was the only frame of reference available for the star catalog I used to build Solar-Sim’s starfield background. While this made the planets line up nicely with the constellations, flying around was a bit odd because the Solar System was essentially tilted 23 degrees.
The frame of reference is changing to use the plane of the ecliptic. This means I’ll have to reconstruct the starfield background, but your ship won’t have to be tilted as much anymore when you travel from planet to planet.
Another change happening this weekend is the appearance of some moons and planets will change. I’m conducting a review of all texture maps used by Solar-Sim, and any that are found to be copyrighted will be removed.
Solar-Sim has just been taken offline for routine server maintenance. It should be back up in about 30 minutes.
Solar-Sim and the webserver will both be offline briefly this morning for routine server security patching.
Solar-Sim and the webserver will both be offline briefly this morning for routine server security patching.
Solar-Sim will be offline tomorrow night (April 30) from 7:00PM to 7:30PM US Central time. The server needs to be powered down so I can swap out the UPS battery backup system. Solar-Sim’s current UPS isn’t recharging anymore, so it is time to replace it before the next big thunderstorm hits.
I bought a new machine and did some “surgery” on it to install additional RAM over the weekend. The website, patcher and asset repository will remain on the older server, but the simulation engine itself that Multiverse connects to now runs on a brand new machine. The new machine runs dual core 2.0 Ghz CPUs and has 3-GB of RAM. We’ll run on this machine until we’re ready to start Beta testing and switch to a hosted environment.
Also, I’m not sure how they found us already (as I haven’t advertised or linked us to Google yet), but I’ve deleted our first Spam comment today.
Tonight’s post will be brief:
Solar-Sim’s database, simulation engine and scripts have been migrated to the server. The server platform will be tested this weekend to ensure the migration went OK.
The server Solar-Sim migrated to definitely isn’t powerful enough to support Beta or go-live; there will be another server migration prior to starting Beta testing. Even so, this week’s server migration was still an important step (as all testing and development was performed on the same machine prior to this week).
The next milestone to reach is to setup an “asset repository” on this website. Alpha testing can’t proceed until this step has completed, as this is what lets the Multiverse Client download everything needed to work with Solar-Sim: icons, textures, 3-D models, scripts, and so on.
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