Hello again everyone. Sorry it’s been a while, I’ve been chatting with many of you in-game and in the Discord, so I’ve felt a bit like I’ve been keeping everyone up to date, when actually I’ve only been keeping very few of you up to date! But I’ll get back to posting more updates again now.

So multiplayer has been out on the unstable branch for a couple of weeks, and it’s been going very well. We have a few issues as expected, but I’ve already made a number of improvements, and it will just keep getting better in the coming weeks.

Over the weekend I rewrote all of my bug reporting to use an FTP server instead of Amazon’s S3. It’s the last thing I wanted to be doing, but Amazon forced my hand with a scary email. They don’t like you uploading data from thousands of locations all over the world without using their full authentication stack… or something, they couldn’t actually tell me what even triggered my usage to be flagged. Implementing my own authentication server would be crazy just for bug reports, so I decided to rip it out and build libcurl for 3 platforms, as well as create an ftp server and make everything secure. Big job, but it went well.

I could rant on for some time about S3, but anyway, it was the wrong solution, I wasted a weekend, learned a lesson (and how to use libcurl), and now it’s back to making progress again.

This week I’m starting off by making it so you can choose new tribes in multiplayer. It’s been a bit of a right of passage in multiplayer to choose a tribe a year’s walk away from everyone, and then have to starve everyone off in order to start again closer. So I’m fixing that today hopefully.

Then for the rest of the week I’ll be fixing lots more issues, focusing on the bigger ones like that, which can have a really negative impact on the gameplay experience. I’ll also be working on optimizations, particularly memory usage and database size, and there’s plenty to be done there too.