
JKGalaxies now publicly available
Those who have been following the mod will know that JKGalaxies suffered some issues, but it has now been released. The mod, whose authors we interviewed a while ago makes a huge amount of changes, and fundamentally changes JKA gameplay. I had a short look at it myself, and have to say I quite liked it.
That said, a number of things went wrong with the release. Personally, I attribute most of them to a rushed release and a lack of proper planning, but I'm liable to be stabbed for that.
Issue #1: Having a server
The first issue that nearly delayed JKGalaxies' launch was the lack of a server. It turns out, on the day JKGalaxies was supposed to launch, they still did not have a server. After discussing it extensively with them, I offered JKG my personal server temporarily, which was previously used for Hydroball and breaking stuff. This is a temporary solution until JKG manages to get their own server up and running, and MUG might slightly hate me for it, but hey, it means JKG gets to release on schedule.
Issue #2: TerranGaming
With that sorted, JKG was released, and their launcher was momentarily available on our site. Then JKG's webserver fell over. The issue? Well, apparently, JKGalaxies is hosted as a part of TerranGaming's website here, and their shoddy webhosting allows a maximum of 5 simultaneous users online. Any more than 5 users online, and the webserver falls over. Nobody did any stress testing, so it was only found out about when people were en masse trying to download the JKG files from TerranGaming's site using the launcher.
Issue #3: PHP scripts
I offered to mirror JKGalaxies' files on JKHub, as we are a lot better equipped to handle large amounts of traffic. Unfortunately, none of the JKG team knows PHP, and were unable to modify JKG's scripts to work under our web infrastructure. As an alternative, in order to be able to release today, JKGalaxies was released as a zip file here.
Conclusion
I do think that, with proper testing and preparations, this could've been avoided. I offered to host JKGalaxies several times, and even if they didn't want that, some simple stress testing would've determined this could happen. Despite these perhaps harsh words, I do think the mod they made seems quite awesome. The quality of JKGalaxies is not affected by a badly organised launch, and if you want, you should totally check the mod out.
By Caelum, in Community News,
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