DEVORD #11

[RET J.Drake]

Development Update - 26APR2022

Hello soldiers, it's been a while since we've done one of these so a lot of things have changed. Since our last post, we've started to use release notes. Now you can track new features, updates and fixes to all of our different projects here: https://3rdinf.us/forums/forum/210-releases/. Since we've started using these release notes, we don't need to do DEVORDS as frequently since most changes are already documented on there.

 

Website

On the surface, not much has changed on our website so far, but behind the scenes there have been some massive changes. First and foremost, a new webhost! The last couple of weeks we've been riding the red-line of our previous GoDaddy host. We decided to migrate our website to the same place as our game servers, namely AWS. Using their LightSail service things went relatively smoothly despite the unfortunate timing.

The COE team was already planning a host migration at some point in the future. GoDaddy was simply unreliable, dropped support for some of the features we needed, had ridicules restrictions which forced us to write code that should never exist,... . I would like to dive a little deeper in what actually happened, and why we decided to treat this migration as a hotfix rather than a planned event.

On Monday APR 25, early in the morning EU times, we decided to install a routine update to our framework. At the same time, when heavy tasks were running on the background, the website would often become completely unresponsive and show a cloudflare error. This happened to coincide and the update failed to complete, leaving our website in a mangled state between 2 different versions. We could not access the Admin Control Panel anymore to continue the update or rollback any changes, and any actions on our hosting panel were so delayed and unusable we were stuck.

So, instantly we started to set up the required infrastructure on AWS Lightsail and we started database and filesystem backups. To give you some insight, our website's database was roughly 200MB. Might not sound like a lot, but that's just text! No images, no videos,.. just plain text. Our filesystem was a little bigger. This contains every single image uploaded to our website since 2018. In total, it was about 50GB uncompressed, 30GB compressed. Considering we had to download it, unpack it, modify/delete some files, and upload it to a new host, this alone took about 8 hours to complete.

In total we've managed to complete the entire migration within 1 day. It took roughly 14 hours to complete, of which only 4 hours we had to display a maintenance message. This message was solely displayed to avoid future confusion, since all process would be rolled back. So all-in-all, a tedious but very successful migration.

 

And then there's one other major feature we would like to touch on. It has not been officially confirmed or announced but we did do a soft release of a Discord integration plugin. This is still in its infancy stages but theoretically this plugin will sync our forum user groups and nicknames to Discord. This will take a lot of manual labor away from Discord administration. This does mean that we've had to redo a lot of roles on Discord. So some of you might have lost some functionality that we had before, and most likely we're not looking to change that. Our unit policy has always been that apart from DMOS communication, Discord is not an official method of communication for our unit. Therefor it should look like an additional support tool for unit fraternization and recruitment, not a complex jungle of roles and channels that requires more manual interventions than our website and TeamSpeak combined.

 

Mods

Corps of Engineers is happy to offer you this recap of the last month modpack updates. Once again, @SSG A.Pendergast cooked you some good looking units to bring you and incredible experience. You already met them, here are the Russian Separatists !

 

As you probably noticed last ceremony, we have added a Soldier of the Quarter Memorial that is already displayed on few maps. We wanted thank those soldiers, some of the best this unit ever had, with an in-game memorial that every member will see. We hope it will be a source of inspiration for a new recruit that will look forward to get, maybe one day, their own name displayed on this wall.

 

The backpacks. You love them, we love them, everyone does. Since the removal of MGP mod, we needed bigger backpacks and we all started using the vanilla one. Problem was, the MTP camo was not matching our uniforms. We made an OCP texture and felt that it was a good occasion to get some custom one. Squad medic, Doc and donators received brand new backpacks and our platoon staff received a new RT1523 OCP.

 

Corps of Engineers is always working on a lot of projects, those are just are just a sample of what we added last month. Among the bug fixes, cosmetic tweaks and new map markers. We have added a new feature that a very few military simulation unit have: CUSTOM MAIN MENU.

3rd Infantry Division Realism Unit is always looking for excellence, and wants to be on the top. Our engineers work really hard to provide you the best milsim and gaming experience. We hope you appreciate the work and there is more to come!

 

Servers

Game servers have been running extremely smoothly. In their current state COE rarely needs to intervene, I think since our last DEVORD in January, we've only had to check on them once or twice, and each time a simple press of the "reboot" button did the trick. We will be doing some testing with upscaling the CPU resources for Sunday events. Speaking of performance, I would like to point out that on our old server (almost 2 years ago now, sheeeesh) we never monitored performance to the extend that we do now. There has been a massive improvement overall. I can personally remember often running single digit server FPS during drills and ops. This is now a rare occurrence. Naturally a Zeus needs to keep everything in check and periodically do cleanup to keep it that way, but these are things we did on our old servers too. So even if we hear "The server ran like shit", well, it actually didn't run like shit for our scale and type of operations.

 

Thanks for reading!
1LT J.Drake, OIC
SGT C.Winters, NCOIC
SPC P.Liwa,
SPC J.Bitar