UltraCorps News

September 2, 2005: Goodbye, Prox

Prox was - that's right, was - the UltraCorps server we got from VR-1. A few days ago, we decided to take it out of service. Prox had eaten four hard drives, and it was never clear exactly why.

Unfortunately, the latest fried drive brought the current game, Golf, to a premature end. We could, of course, keep sacrificing hard drives to the malign spirit that lives in the server, but we think we won't do that. And we cannot, at any reasonable cost, replicate the antique server and environment required to run the existing code.

So: Golf is dead; bye Golf. And this will be the last test we run with the VR-1 code.

Although Golf did not finish, it was a very instructive playtest, and we thank everyone who participated. It got within a few turns of ending . . . enough that we could see how the game went. There wasn't much left but the mopping-up. The static economy made data on what people are purchasing (in other words, which units people think are most valuable) a lot easier to interpret, and we may make static-economy games a continuing feature.

Playtesting now takes a breather while we bring our reimplementation of the code to a fully testable state.
-- Steve Jackson

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	September 2, 2005: Goodbye, Prox Prox was - that's right, was - the *UltraCorps* server we got from VR-1. A few days ago, we decided to take it out of service. Prox had eaten four hard drives, and it was never clear exactly why. Unfortunately, the latest fried drive brought the current game, Golf, to a premature end. We could, of course, keep sacrificing hard drives to the malign spirit that lives in the server, but we think we won't do that. And we cannot, at any reasonable cost, replicate the antique server and environment required to run the existing code. So: Golf is dead; bye Golf. And this will be the last test we run with the VR-1 code. Although Golf did not finish, it was a very instructive playtest, and we thank everyone who participated. It got within a few turns of ending . . . enough that we could see how the game went. There wasn't much left but the mopping-up. The static economy made data on what people are purchasing (in other words, which units people think are most valuable) a lot easier to interpret, and we may make static-economy games a continuing feature. Playtesting now takes a breather while we bring our reimplementation of the code to a fully testable state. -- Steve Jackson Top • Latest News • All News