End of Liberator Milestone
March 15th, 2012
The SWGEmu Staff
- End of Liberator Milestone means SWGEmu is ready for Alpha Testing
When work on the Object Restructure first started back in spring of 2009, it looked like that there was nothing else standing in our way and that 1.0 was closer than ever. But after only a few months of development, the SWGEmu Team realized that the OR was not a simple rewrite of the old code. The OR was going to take much longer than they originally anticipated. Years of grueling work followed, team members came and went, one temporary play server was replaced with another. After millions of lines of code and thousands of man-hours our dedicated Development and QA Teams has SWGEmu finally ready for the next step, Alpha Testing.
- When will the End of Liberator (EoL) Milestone be reached?
We expect it to be in April but the exact date is not set. This announcement is to notify everybody that we are about one month away from the Liberator wipe.
The Development Team needs YOUR help on TC: Nova to test the current OR code. Please logon to TC: Nova, pick a part of the game you are familiar with and start testing and submitting bug reports. Everything and anything implemented needs to be tested and retested. If you are not sure what you should do or you want to participate in a more coordinated and focused testing effort then please join our QA and Dev team in our IRC #openqa channel. If you are unsure where or how to submit a bug report, please check our "How to report bugs on Bug Tracker (Mantis)" guide.
- What happens when EoL Milestone is finally reached?
When the EoL Milestone is reached it is time for some seriously massive stress testing. Liberator will be wiped and replaced with the latest OR code from TC: Nova, stress testing period will last a minimum of one month and then another wipe of Liberator will occur. During that time we hope that all major stability issues, bugs and exploits will be found and fixed so our goal of "no more Liberator wipes" can be achieved. This will be a crucial period for the OR code and for this project as a whole, everything done so far will need to be tested during that time. To reduce the likelihood of future Liberator wipes, it is imperative that everyone does their best to help the Developers find and fix as many bugs, exploits and stability issues as possible. If major items are not discovered until after the stress test then more wipes of the new Liberator server might be necessary.
- Month of stress testing is over, what then?
Liberator will be wiped after the stress test. New play-test server will be launched, for now we will call it Alpha, actual name will be determined at some later date. This will mark the beginning of SWGEmu Alpha Testing stage.
Please be aware that even after the new Alpha server is launched some major fixes and additions to the code may require database wipes. We will do our best to keep database wipes to a minimum, whenever possible we will try to save your character data. We will give advance notice of an upcoming DB wipe. Always keep in mind that this project is still in Alpha Testing and that even though we can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel, we still have a long way to go before we are ready to release 1.0 to the public so permanent play servers can be created.
We know that everyone is getting excited about the new Alpha play server that we are targeting for launch some time in May or June. We do not know the exact date it will be ready, but we will be pushing the OR code to Alpha on a permanent basis once all key systems are working as intended and we feel very few future wipes will be necessary.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the term, the OR is a comprehensive standardization of all of the code for SWGEmu. Over the years, many different developers have all worked together to submit code to the project. While this has allowed the Developer team to make great progress in recreating the Pre-CU experience as a whole, it has made submitting and integrating new code difficult. You can think of the old code base as a huge, overstuffed filing cabinet. All of the information is in there somewhere, but everyone who put things into the cabinet used a different filing system. The OR has taken everything out of the filing cabinet, pruned files, reorganized the folders, and attached new legible labels to everything. Code standards have also been set, which significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to commit code changes to the official, public test center (TC: Nova).
During the OR, in addition to standardizing the code base, a decision was made to switch from MySQL to BerkeleyDB in order to both reduce CPU usage and help us achieve our goal of eliminating crash-based rollbacks.
~SWGEmu Staff
Originally Posted by corb
