We are working on two necessary infrastructure upgrades this week that might cause a few temporary downtimes. Please keep an eye on our Twitter account where we’ll post about our progress and any unexpected problems or delays. Find all details below.

Switch to different messaging backend

Last week we had some troubles involving all game worlds that would halt their background updates. Two game worlds where struggling with this even several days later due to unexpected ripple effects. The reason was an old piece of messaging software that we use in the background to let our game worlds communicate with the central account management systems. Since this was not the first time this software has caused problems like this, I decided that this single point of failure needs to go. All our central systems and the game itself have been rewritten to use an alternative, distributed system. This way I hope to avoid anything like what happened last week in the future. For the upgrade to happen, all game worlds and the central account management systems (login, payment etc.) will be offline for a few minutes. This will probably happen today.

New hardware for portal, forums and wikis

Our portal pages, web forums and wikis still run on hardware that has been installed all the way back when we started AirlineSim as a commercial project. So this box is anywhere between 6 and 8 years old and well overdue for replacement. Therefore all portal services will move to new hardware over the course of the week. We’ll try to keep disturbances to a minimum but expect short downtimes every now and then.