I reached a major milestone today! The game server software suite is working again (now it’s all native 64-bit code) and successfully installed on the new server hardware. Today, I was finally able to login to the game world again for the first time in years! It felt good to see everything work, and to visit a ‘virtual’ place that I haven’t been to in a while.
I made some significant changes to the Gatekeeper code, to make it more robust and CPU friendly. There is more feedback to the system administrator as well. You might ask, “what is the Gatekeeper?” When the servers are down, the Gatekeeper is used to relay a message back to the client. Otherwise, the current authentication server connection details are returned to the client (i.e. the Been There Launcher application).
The only big problem I ran into was getting the packet data alignment and structure padding correct between the Linux and Windows applications. If you don’t already know, let me tell you, it’s a pain to troubleshoot custom network code! Everything else went pretty smooth, it was just a bunch of repetitive work and testing.
