SharePlay Newsletter
No. 6, August 7, 1998, Friday
In this issue you can read about:
1. Space Merchant is in open beta
2. Space Merchant server upgrades
3. Panumbra instabilities
4. Our first advertising income arrives!
5. SharePlay staff changes (again)
6. New Webboard is up
1. Space Merchant is in open beta
Space Merchant was opened up for beta testing on July 31st, Friday. Everyone can now join and create a login. The website has been updated at http://www.shareplay.com/spacemerchant with a link to the Space Merchant login page.
The game is very well received and the number of players is growing explosively. We have over 1600 active users in less than six weeks of beta testing. Players really like the game and the webboard is booming with discussions and suggestions.
2. Space Merchant server upgrades
The explosive growth of Space Merchant caught us somewhat unprepared for handling the load. In peak times, the server gets slow sometimes. Right now the main bottleneck is our database server. We are moving the Space Merchant database on its own machine tonight, which should help performance considerably. We upgraded the main server memory as well, and will soon be adding another processor to it.
The other big performance problem is the Internet connection. With two games online, we would need a T1 line, but that needs a lot of money (which we don't have) and also has a long lead time. We are considering our alternatives now.
3. Panumbra instabilities
Since we released 2.1, the Panumbra server was very unstable. An elusive bug where world areas were crashing with no trace of ever being there caused the server being down most of the time. Finally we found and fixed the bug, so the server is expected to be up more than before. Right now we have another problem where characters get locked up the game. After a number of lock-ups, the machine stops responding and people cannot log in any more. This goes away when we restart the server, and it is less frequent than the world area crash bug.
There are numerous other bugs mainly dealing with items, which are in the works.
4. Our first advertising income arrives!
One of greatest events in company history happened two weeks ago: After two years of developing games, we finally received our first check of $27.40 from advertising. We were so happy that we immediately… …framed it!
This is hopefully the beginning of a new era, where the company will slowly become self-financing. Space Merchant went explosive with advertising impressions, and we expect to get more checks for more money than the first one.
Thank you for all who made that possible. If you would like to support our site, please look at the ads and click on the ones you are interested in. Your support is appreciated.
5. SharePlay staff changes (again)
Unfortunately, parallel to starting to stand on our own feet, a lot of people are leaving the company. In addition to Dave and Matt, we also lost Eric, one of our first employees. Eric developed the technical architecture for Panumbra, the whole Panumbra client, and was our all around technical expert. He was like part of a family for us, he has been part of the original group who started this company. We are very sorry to see him leave, and wish him good luck in his new carreer.
The staff reduction also means that development and bug fixes are slowed down for both Panumbra and Space Merchant.
6. New Webboard is up
The webboard has been upgraded, and currently includes six separate boards. The role-players now have their own home, so does Panumbra. Space Merchant is the busiest of the webboards now. You can check out the new webboards at http://webboard.shareplay.com.
Thank you for reading our newsletter.
Regards,
Marta Gabnai and the SharePlay development team
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