While on the surface it may appear that there’s not been much development, there has been ongoing and continuous development in the background.
The reason that there’s no new features or changes to present is because most of this development is about maintenance.
The server itself as a few risks that we want to mitigate as much as possible. This means properly maintain the services and software we use and ensuring we don’t rely on a single piece of infrastructure that could take everything offline.
Maintenance
The two major maintenance pieces that are being tracked are:
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Moving all our deployments to be pre-configured, commit-based and revertable.
On the surface the server looks pretty straightforward, but underneath there’s a lot of services that we run, maintain and configure. What we don’t want is one of these services to break and then spend a ton of time trying to fix it, or have to move something to a different machine and not know how to properly set it back up.
Moving our deployments over to this new workflow means that for the most part, everything is predefined and we can quickly revert bad changes or move these services when needed. -
Migrating services from the US to the EU region
This doesn’t mean making them unavailable to users in the US region. Instead it means using our EU resources to run them. Rift and Items for example runs in the EU region already. This is important to ensure that we do not depend upon the US server for any critical services, as it is lended to us and we cannot expect to rely on it permanently.
After these maintenance pieces are done, we then move on to our next few milestones:
Feature Updates
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Updating gamemodes to support more than one machine
This update is important to allow us to run in both the US and EU regions, as well as scale our resources for running lobbies. It also will change how joining lobbies works and add a few new features like parties. More info in a future post.
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Trading System UX update
This will update the look and feel of the trading system to be in line with the rest of our services and remove existing pain points that are left over from the original design
We also know that at some point the next Terraria update will hit and so this will likely put everything else on pause while we update our servers.