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State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2022 9:24 am
by diafero
As some of you noticed, I have been on a longer-than-usual break from working on Deep Island; this is the first time this year that I am checking the GoW forum and going through my Uru inbox. This is because I had a super busy start of the year with job applications and more travel than you would expect during Covid. The good news is that the job application part is over, and I will become a professor later this year. :)

The bad news, however, is that my time available for Uru is only going to decrease as my professional responsibilities increase. I hope I can still spend 1h once a month on updating some ages when updates arrive in my inbox, but even that I cannot promise unfortunately -- it might be even longer between updates, like it has been for the last few months.

At the same time, I can see in the statistics that Shard usage has increased notably around March 2020 (no idea why :roll: ). I don't plan to shut the server down as that would be a great loss IMO, and it currently mostly "just runs" without me having to do much maintenance. It's only updating ages that consumes significant time. I would say updating an existing age is usually around 10-15min, adding a new age around 15-30min of work. (That is assuming the age is in "perfect shape" and passes all the checks. Unfortunately failing updates do happen regularly; this is totally okay since some failure conditions are hard for age writers to predict, but it does take time and it usually means another update to fix the failure.) Age writers are not as active as they used to be, but gladly some are still quite active, so this adds up. ;)

So, what does that mean? Well for now it means age updates are going to be rolled out less frequently than in 2020/2021. But it also means I could really use some help to do these age updates! Unfortunately the way it currently works, I am not sure what is the best strategy for sharing that work between multiple people. But still, it is worth asking -- would someone here be willing and able to help with these updates? That would probably require a certain amount of "computer-saviness"; updating an age involves putting files into a strict folder hierarchy, running a Python script, handling errors the script might show, and then uploading the output files with rsync. To update UAM, and XML file has to be edited (some bash scripts to parts of the work, but a bit of manual editing is still required). If those are words in a foreign language for you, then you probably won't be able to help here -- which is totally okay of course, this kind of tech stuff is not for everyone. :) But if you do recognize all these things and have experience with that kind of work, and have some spare time to help run Deep Island, then please reach out and we can try to figure out a way to spread this work over multiple shoulders. I'd love to see Deep Island continue to thrive, as it has been for more than 12 years now. :)

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2022 4:26 am
by Sirius
diafero wrote:The good news is that the job application part is over, and I will become a professor later this year. :)

Congrats ! Hopefully this is (slightly) less stressful than job hunting !
I think I remember Hoikas is a professor as well ? Seems to be common around here :)

diafero wrote:would someone here be willing and able to help with these updates? That would probably require a certain amount of "computer-saviness"

Sounds doable. I can find some time for Uru every now and then, I'll help.
I also have basic knowledge of how Alcugs work since I have my own LAN server for testing Drizzle-related stuff, so this should go smoothly.

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2022 8:50 am
by Korovev
March 2020? Sounds familiar... :)

Hopefully I’ll be able to help too. I’ve never played with Alcugs, but I’ve used the other tools.

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2022 2:20 pm
by diafero
Thanks a lot for your offers. :) I'll reach out via email for further coordination.

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:41 pm
by diafero
March 2020? Sounds familiar... :)


Yeah, almost as if someone started a weekly event on the server around that time. ;)

And you can really see it in the long-term server stats:
activity-longterm.png
activity-longterm.png (90.04 KiB) Viewed 6093 times

Red is unique logins per 24h, green is per 7d, blue is per 14d.

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2022 3:26 pm
by Doobes
Sadly, I'm not very tech-savvy when it comes to maintaining shards, but I have put the word out on my Facebook page with a URL to here (thanks to Korov'ev's FB post for getting my attention!). Hopefully there will be a few takers!

Congrats on the new job too, diafero! We're a patient bunch, so take care of you and yours first and foremost at all times, yeah? We can certainly wait for new updates. ;)

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2022 8:39 pm
by diafero
Thanks! 3 people have already reached out to me so for now I think we're good on that front, and next need to figure out on the technical level how this could be done best.

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Sat Jul 22, 2023 9:53 am
by Sapphire
I have a request for help. I've been trying to contact someone on here who can help but have had no response :roll: I got Windows 11 on my new Mac finding the MOUL did not work on a Mac with M chip in it. So I'm trying to load Deep Island but my login credentials aren't recognised when loading the game installer though they seem fine logging into these forums. Can anyone help? I've waited over 2 weeks for a reply from Diafero who I thought managed the site. So now I just need someone somewhere who can help as I thought my guild of writers login would work for the installer too. I really want this to work as I've been unable to load the Deep island onto my computer since getting it & am really missing playing. I'm not technical enough it seems. Thanks for someone's help. Sapphire

Re: State of the Deep Island, and a reqest for help

PostPosted: Mon Jul 31, 2023 9:31 am
by Korovev
It’s a bit of a stretch, but is your password longer than 15 characters? Uru’s network protocol has an issue with long passwords, while the forum will accept them fine.

But since you’re using an M chip Apple, have you tried my wrapper? It should still work, but I don’t have the machine to make sure. The procedure is a bit convoluted, I made a video here.