Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on getting The Sims 1 working within our engine, to ready it for a mobile version. This has led to the development and improvement of a feature that was not explored in TSO before: terrain tools.
This enables a whole new level of creative freedom for designing interesting lots which can use the terrain to spice up a lot with multiple buildings, or even enable lots based entirely around a terrain feature such as a mountain, mesa or digsite. I for one would like to see a jam lot in a digsite, so sims can bury their dreams while they make jams just to save some time.
Continue reading “Introducing Terrain Tools (plus TS1 engine support)” →
It’s been a long time since our last update, but I’ve finally got some time on my hands to get back into things. We also have a new developer working on object plugins for the game too, which have been gradually been appearing in the game since my last post.
Advanced Lighting
The main improvement in this patch is something I didn’t expect to be completed this early into the process, and I didn’t think it would ever be this beautiful and effective. This patch introduces a completely custom lighting engine, built from the ground up for TSO/TS1.
Even though it is not a necessary feature, it’s something I’ve had on my mind for an incredibly long time. Sims games past 1 typically build a light map to construct smooth falloffs and shadows for light sources, with 3 and 4 actually featuring advanced lighting which models per-light shadows in each room. The goal was to bring these later developments back to TSO, now that we have the graphics hardware to pull it off. Wall shadows are projected from each wall “line” in the light’s room, while object shadows are estimated from the object’s collision bounds (both with smooth falloffs).
Continue reading “May 15th Update: Brighten your Monday!” →
Around a month ago, the owners of the longstanding legacy server freeso.ml and I decided to collaboratively set up a test server for people to play in, which would inevitably be wiped as game breaking economy and skilling bugs were worked out. This was purely so people could play the game in its current, mostly working state, rather than waiting for me to deal with my RL business before they could play at all. Our hosts and moderators have proven an absolute blessing in that I’ve been able to put the right amount of time into everything, with them handling support and keeping the server alive.
The server was advertised on the discord and partially the forums, so that the most dedicated users could have a chance at playing first. These aren’t our only users though – we’ve received a lot of attention from various streamers over the past few weeks, which has set off a few communities, top 100 lot competition. At max, we’ve sustained 350 concurrent players in around 60 lots, on one server box. There are just over 2000 lots on the map, and 11,521 avatars in existence. Cumulatively, sims have §75,528,319 in the bank, and have bought §92,393,467 worth of objects (191,956 objects)!
Continue reading “The Sunrise Crater Test Server” →
Hello folks!
Though early testing, it’s clear the transition to ASP.NET will work. While Nancy would crash with a pitifully low number of requests, ASP.NET does not drop any requests at all with several thousand. However, as I mentioned before, we did not expect to see several thousand users attempt to register on day one. Admittedly, we got a bit ahead of ourselves; planning to implement many moderation features after the game had been established, due to a rather small expected userbase.
Continue reading “Plans for the future – Additional Preparation and Invite Beta” →
Ouch! When we tried to launch the game tonight, the servers literally couldn’t take the insane load that we underwent. Here’s everything that happened:
- One day before launch, DOS attacks began hitting the wordpress and forum servers. These were mitigated as they were pretty small scale, and against normal web servers which can deal with a reduced load much better.
- When setting up the API server on our large scale servers, DOS attacks began coming through to the API server recently added to the DNS. These were rate limited, but somehow were still enough to take down the server. It became clear something was wrong with the Nancy driven API server from this.
- By rate limiting to 10 requests a minute (yikes!) we were able to reduce the load on the registration enough to keep it alive, before it was even announced to anyone. During this period, I was able to log in with what seemed like no issues. In this period, 100 users registered.
- I released the registration link on the discord channel. The whole thing blew up, immediately 500 concurrent requests were made to the api server, taking it down immediatly. Hours later, these have still not simmered down – there are a few hundred requests being made and simultaneously active. The large delay each of these requests is incurring is causing the majority of them to fail to get through.
Throughout this process, it became clear that there was a serious issue with the amount of load the API server was able to take. I would say that it should have been able to take at least 25x as much load, and it certainly should not have repeatedly crashed. After some quick experimentation tonight, it seems that the HTTP serving library used to create the API server, Nancy, was serving even plain non-sql requests way slower than other libraries.
We also did not expect this many registrations. Of all of the requests, 885 users from unique IPs signed up. This makes things really difficult. I’m only one developer, and the flash interest in a game that basically died of inactivity years ago is very surprising. It’s also pretty satisfying; it is fantastic to see this much interest in FreeSO, it’s just also very hard to manage.
Could this have been mitigated by opening registrations earlier? Could users whose registrations got through get to play the game?
No, the API server does not only drive registration. If we were to somehow mitigate impact on registration, then the impact caused by users logging into the game would bring it down instead. This would be a lot more certain, as authentication makes 4 times the requests as registration. Registration was also not ready until close to the deadline. This is mainly due to the DOS attack to the wordpress mentioned before.
So what is the plan?
We will perform further load and api testing, look into the root causes of load issues and the server stability. The current plan is to rewrite the API server using ASP.NET instead of Nancy, as it is a lot more “battle-tested”. This could take some amount of time.
We cannot announce a retry date. We might even need a new launch plan altogther, to avoid the load of a few thousand users wanting to play the game on day one. Whatever the plan is, it will be posted on here eventually.
