Maintenance Warning

(For anyone who read the Discord announcement, this is almost the same post)

Update: Maintenance has started
Update 2: Maintenance has been completed

As we expect some maintenance from our provider to attempt to fix issues with the machine crashing and rebooting, we have opened up a temporary server that we will use to ensure there’s no downtime when the maintenance happens.

Right now we are routing anyone not in North America and South America to this temporary server (it’s located in Europe). So if your ping is different, that’s why. If you are already connecting to this location, then you won’t be affected by the maintenance. We will route people in America there too once the maintenance starts and then everyone will be routed back once it is complete.

Unfortunately because of restrictions in our budget, this temporary server isn’t up to the same specifications, so there are limitations on Gamemode Lobbies to ensure that the server doesn’t become really slow.

The DTP is also not available on the temporary server so make sure you use https://dtp.dark-gaming.com/ as that points only to the normal server but will be down when the maintenance starts. Phase will be connected to whatever server location (EU/SA) you connect to in-game.

Bonus Section

Please note that the information below isn’t news

I already posted on discord, so I thought I’d add a bonus section to this post for anyone that reads the forum.

An interesting part of splitting up the Americas and other continents between two servers is that it also gives us a rudimentary way to quickly see where people in our player base are. Looking right now we have 38 on the Europe server and 63 on the American server. That’s 63 in either NA or SA, and then 38 in all other continents. Though I should probably note that it is almost 3pm in Dallas on Sunday and yet in most of Asia it’s in the middle of night, with Europe just coming to the end of the day (unless you like to stay up late).

Another cool test is how people connecting to t.dark-gaming.com go to different servers depending on whether you are in America or not. It’s certainly possible and viable to have regional servers with cross-region play where necessary, but unfortunately at this time it’s too expensive to do for us. The cost would mean a fairly good setup in at least Europe and SEA (South East Asia) and then you also need to pay for some kind of geo-DNS so that people in each region connect to their regional server. It’s not impossible. If we ever got more funding I imagine it would definitely be something we could pull off well, but until then I feel sorry for people in the SEA region who must have terrible ping right now. If enough people from that region do actually play and are able to support the costs, that would be a done deal right there. Anyway, at some point in the future (hopefully sooner rather than later) I’ll try and improve the situation regarding supporters of our server to be more than just credits, I have a personal roadmap for how it could go but it still looks like a long road ahead.

And to close the bonus section, some people may have noticed something I did to the Zombies Abilities Guide, that indeed ties into what I said just now. The astral projection ability isn’t actually usable even by me yet, it’s actually one of the more complex abilities because it does some things that we don’t have any existing functionality for. Once I finish that (and try to make both of them as fun as possible), they’ll become one of the features that I’ve got planned out for supporters.

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