Difference between revisions of "Hyperspace"

Latest revision as of 23:55, 24 March 2005

SSCX-A Hyperspace was one of the first zones to adopt ASSS.

Gameplay

Staff

History

Event Horizon

Hyperspace started life as a LAN zone played by a small group of friends, Dr Brain among them. They eventually decided to put it online to try and get more players in it. Having something of a scientific bent, they decided to name it Event Horizon after the point of no return surrounding black holes. The zone, once online never took off. It was briefly hosted on Can-Link before the hosting service imploded. After considering that the zone had only reached a maximum population of 4 players, the zone was abandoned and the group perused more rewarding games such as Infantry and Starcraft.

Dog Fight

Months later, Dr Brain revived the zone under the name Dog Fight with a new map. Again, nothing happened with the zone and it was closed.

Jeff's Zone

In order to experiment with Subgame2 Dr Brain again hosted Dog Fight under the new name Jeff's Stupid Zone. After some days of fiddling, Dr Brain finally figured out how to make Hypertunnels work. He remade the map and added some Hypertunnels around the very edge of the map. The zone's population doubled to a whole 6 players at peak times. Encouraged by this incredible population boost, more Hypertunnels were added and the zone was renamed to Jeff's Zone.

Hosting, at last

Ever since the collapse of Can-Link, the zone had been hosted by Dr Brain on his cable connection. This lead to occasional downtime because of computer crashes and also to more lag than was preferable. SSDZ offered its services and the zone was moved.

Hyperspace

Dr Brain felt, now that the zone was picking up, that the name Jeff's Zone was no longer good enough. So, he started asking the player population about new name ideas. Someone suggested the name Hyperspeed and everyone agreed that it was a great name. Somehow, Dr Brain forgot the exact details of the name and changed the name to Hyperspace. Only later did he realize that everyone had agreed to Hyperspeed, but by then, it was too late to change.

Project 0

This zone was created mainly for graphics testing but later on became "known" for a small heavily bot maintained arena called Warp2 (warpto joke). Many colorful graphics and anime girls (specifically catgirls) were featured here.

Average population was around eight and at max 14, not counting 6 bots (only 1 full time).

SSXH

The intermittent failures of SSDZ lead Dr Brain and picano2.0 to search for new hosting. SSXH under Delta_5 agreed to host the zone and a long period of prosperity for Hyperspace started.

SSND/SSDX

Eventually, SSXH decided to close down. A new host was needed and the SSDX network accepted Hyperspace. After a merger between SSDX and SSN, and several moves between servers on the SSN network, Hyperspace eventually settled down. Unfortunatly, the peace was not to last. Within weeks of quieting down, SSN closed down for no obvious reason.

SSI

Due to the collapse of SSN, Hyperspace was again hostless and had to be hosted by Dr Brain's less-than-perfect connection. Eventually, hosting was secured from SSI (run by 1stStrike and Argyle). Again, the zone flourished.

Getting SSC

Slowly, over time, the zone's regular population grew large enough to warrant inclusion on the SSC billing network. However, once the zone received SSC billing, the population went down to virtually zero. Something new had to be introduced or the zone would vanish into nothingness.

TWCore & AreaBot

As part of the SSI hosting package, Hyperspace developers were given access to the TWCore bot system (at the time, it was not public access). With this system, Nikon F5 and Dr Brain built a warping bot named AreaBot in the angelmass arena to help stimulate population. Eventually, this warping bot was extended to include a system to buy powerups. The system was again extended to include tracking of money and powerups across sessions using a MySQL database. The bot grew in complexity until eventually it housed a fully featured buy system and three discrete methods of warping. Once introduced into the public arena, the zone's population took off.

All was not well with the AreaBot, though. Because of the huge packet processing demands made on the TWCore system, a modified version of the TWCore was needed. The modified version was not as stable as the standard version, though, and reliability problems plagued the bot. The warping and buying parts of AreaBot were separated out into two bots to help alleviate some of the strain on the system. Mods were needed online 24/7 to restart the bots when they crashed. Obviously, this couldn't continue. The decision was made to move the zone to ASSS and hopefully solve the reliability problems of AreaBot.

ASSS

The port from Java based TWCore to C based ASSS was not easy, especially because there were only a few people with any experience in ASSS. Dr Brain was the programmer in charge of the porting. After a few weeks of stop and go, both a direct port of the buy system and a scaled back version of the warper were both ready to go.

The old subgame was shutdown and the new ASSS was started. Everything worked at first, but then disaster struck. The lag coma bug that would plague the zone for the next year had started its reign of terror. A lag coma is what happens when a player stops receiving reliable packets from the server. This means that a player can still fly around and shoot, but cannot change ship or see anyone else's messages. The only remedy for a lag comaed player was for them to exit and re-enter the zone. The bug seemed to only happen when there were ten or more players on the server, so the zone's former evening peak of 45 players quickly became an evening peak of 15, and slowly kept decreasing.

It was about this time that SSI's servers were upgraded from Microsoft Windows 2000 to Microsoft Windows 2003 Server. When this happened, the carefully compiled Windows version of ASSS would no longer run, and the zone was forced to close once more.

SSCX-A

Hearing of the trouble Hyperspace was in, hosting was offered from the people at SSCX who were in the process of setting up a new server running Linux, ASSS's native platform.

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