Now that I'm sitting down again I realize I was rather unclear about the situation in my last message. As we all know, when it rains it pours... meaning when things do go wrong you tend to get a lot of things going wrong at the same time. That's how my day has been since I woke up, haha!
The internet randomly going out has continued during the day (my wife is going crazy over that), but I've already moved on to the next problem that popped up. My server host (Yahoo) decided to update their system to something that doesn't work quite the same as their old one. That's the system update I was referring to above, though I didn't think to explain what I meant.
The new system changes are no longer compatible with how I coded a few things, which is why my website has not let anyone log in lately. Once I found out that it was software changes on their end, it wasn't all that difficult to sit down and pound out new code to get the website running again. Not fun, but also nothing that couldn't be done with some code changes.
I felt pretty good once I had the site running again, but that's when it dawned on me... one of the major things that Yahoo server does for me is handle account security, including logins for Castaways 2 and Swamp. A few minutes later I had confirmed what I was afraid of, their new system sent its responses in a slightly different format. I changed 4 lines of code and had "my" copy of Castaways 2 up and running just fine. It's a quick and simple fix, but it is a needed fix. The problem I now have is that Swamp's current backup of source code was lost and the best I have had is a copy from a few versions ago. It's the reason I officially stopped Swamp development after all.
The Swamp client everyone is using, expects information returned from the login server (Yahoo's) to be in a specific format, but now that is different. Technically everything works behind the scenes, players log in, the server tells the game everything worked, but the unexpected format causes an error in the client and everything stops. I do have a plan!
Many people know that I work on code as often as I can, and that 90% of those efforts never amount to anything that the community sees. For some time I had tinkered with a complete rewrite of Swamp, and other time delved into a potential Swamp 2. Neither of those went anywhere, but each did represent time spent and code written. What I believe will save us here is that a portion of the time I spent working on a Swamp rewrite, I was working out the missing changes between the 3.5 testing 7 client (the best intact one I had), and the current 3.6b client.
The gap between my best surviving backup and the current version used to be so large that it seemed too daunting a task, but when I take a good honest look at where it is Now, it's not too bad!
What this means is that unless some magic spell causes the game to start working again, players everywhere are going to have to wait for me to post a client update that understands the new response format from the login server. I will do everything I can do make this happen soon, but it's not something I can do in a day. I may even race to get this functional albeit missing a few of the most recent version's features, just so people can get back to playing.
I'm brainstorming ways to make this up to everyone who will be terribly inconvenienced during this down-time. One possibility is to manually add 1 month to everyone's accounts, but it's probably more important for me to focus on the repair before I worry about how to make all the angry players happy again, ROFL! When this mess is finally sorted out, one huge benefit is that I'll once again have up to date source code for Swamp's client, meaning I can (if I need/choose to) post updates again. I don't want people thinking Swamp is back under official development again, but for the immediate future it sort of us.
So that's my frustrated rant for the day, haha.
- Aprone
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