Shattered Kingdoms

Sometimes the tick lag is still there.

The pause isn't as long, though.

I've noticed it to be about the same time as between rounds of combat. Very acceptable imo.

What are the specs on the box?

Its not really a box of its own, its a virtual cloud server. Its the equivalent of 1 AMD 2Ghz core and 1GB of RAM. A mud is not very demanding of hardware - we were running them on VAX mainframes back in the day that were not even as fast as a 1st generation Pentium. The big gain over the last server is we have the dedicated core instead of having to share it with half a dozen small time websites. When we want to number crunch the tick, we dont really want to be sharing that core.

Why didn't you host it with Amazon? They have some of the fattest pipes on the net. And they are cheap, possibly cheaper than 1-1. Might have been better service because the management interface is standardized, well-known, and popular... and the latency would be about as low as possible (making for a better gaming experience for your users).

I actually spent a lot of time getting SK to run on AWS about a year back, just out of professional curiosity. So I speak from experience when I say that it wasn't the right choice. $0.085 cents an hour sounds incredibly cheap, but when you start adding it up that comes out to $61/month. Even if you go to reserved instances, when you add in the other miscellaneous costs they charge, such as bandwidth, the best you are going to do is end up about the same price. The real financial incentive to using a service like AWS is the ability to scale up to dozens or hundreds of servers quickly, an ability which we sadly do not require.

As for latency, that's all relative. Our current service already has a world class infrastructure in place, but no matter who hosts us, some people are going to have more latency than others. SK isn't an MMO with different servers catering to players in each particular country. There is only one SK server, so if you play from Europe or Australia, you are going to have more latency than someone in Kansas. It's unavoidable and yet almost irrelevant. There is not much data transfer playing a MUD and the game pulses are slow enough that all but the worst connections should be on an even playing field.

At any rate, the slow speed was never due to bandwidth, it was due to lack of processor time. All of the comments that I've heard so far is that the new server is operating much faster than the old one. When I talked about upgrading to a new server, I asked for pledges and some people came through right away. Other people implied that they would wait and see the results. I'm still paying more out of pocket now than I was prior to the new server, so...

If you are happy with the faster speeds and still have not ever donated, I'd ask you to once again consider doing so. You can find donation links on the main SK webpage. Any amount is appreciated. Thanks!