Beta 0.872-0.873 now out! (Colonization and Exploration)

[x4000]

SugeBearX: That is awesome to hear on everything except your back pain!  I hope that gets a lot better soon, that's definitely no good -- I've had multiple family members with back surgery and I imagine that's in my future 20-30 years from now also.  Have you ever tried a spoonk mat?  My wife and dad and I use those to great effect with more muscle-related pain in the lower back and legs area.  I don't think we could have made the plane flights to Europe last fall had it not been for those mats.

Thanks a ton for the kind words -- and the mantis notes!  Very glad to hear that heartening news.

[crazyroosterman]

while were talking about back pain id like to ask bear what exactly it is that's causing his back pain? only reason I ask is because a few years ago my mother ended up with  sciatica (I'm probably butchering the name but o well) and had to have it operated on?.

[jerith]

I thoroughly approve of the recent changes, especially in the tech tree. I'm having to make actual choices about what to research, and screwing it up as often as not -- I really get the feeling of "Get me drills! Get me mines!" "Forget about drills and mines, we anti-air missiles and personal combat training. Stat!" much more than I have in previous builds. Also music. The music is great. (There are also twice as many atmospheric tracks as the changelog mentions. Did Pablo slip in a few extra while nobody was looking?)

The last version I really played properly was pre-0.870 (work-related mental anguish is my excuse rather than SugeBearX's back-related physical anguish), and the districts with less constrained building placement feels a lot more natural than what we had before. I've played pretty much constantly (albeit slowly) for a few hours now (except for a longish break to take my girlfriend out for a much-deserved dinner to make up for the past week's craziness) and loving every minute of it.

[x4000]

That's awesome!  And I love that you're having that feeling with the tech tree.

All four of the atmospheric tracks are now done -- they were in the changelog, but minor notes in there.  There's a vocal track with Hunter for the end of the game coming, and the last actual in-game suite, and that's the rest of the music that's coming.  The racial music has to actually be used, too, but that requires the new diplomacy interface first.

Really sorry to hear about your work there as well.  You were having a big server move or something along those lines, right?  I hope that's turned out well in the end.

[SugeBearX]

     I have a badly herniated disk between L4 and L5 causing a nerve root impingement, severe sciatica and muscle cramping. ( I also suffer from Occipital Neuralgia, but that's another story) I suffered a subluxation (Partial dislocation) of the right hip in 1994 and like a dumbass didn't seek treatment until I couldn't bend my left leg past a 90 degree angle. The only feeling in the leg was numbness and nerve pain...after castigating me roundly, my chiropractor took my off work for 6 months to do rehab and physical therapy and told me I had likely suffered permanent nerve damage and that my back and hips would probably never be the same. Damn it if he wasn't right...I have suffered constant pain and minor subluxations since, and that was before reinjuring the disk lifting concrete in 2000. It has been hell to treat, as the disk herniated under a spinal ligament and is actually herniated in two sections held in place by the ligament.

     I haven't been able to lay flat on my back in 21 years and my baseline daily pain is about a 5 or 6. Unfortunately, I have more bad days than good of late...lots of 8s and 9s. When it gets really bad it is totally debilitating...like this week. But enough of my sob stories, game forums are about fun...something I intend to have as long as I can sit up straight! 

[jerith]

That's awesome!  And I love that you're having that feeling with the tech tree.

I can tell it's great because of the amount of time I spend staring at it going "I need that thing, but it's expensive. I can get these other two useful things in the same amount of time, but then I have to hope bad stuff doesn't happen." It's awful. I love it.

All four of the atmospheric tracks are now done -- they were in the changelog, but minor notes in there.  There's a vocal track with Hunter for the end of the game coming, and the last actual in-game suite, and that's the rest of the music that's coming.  The racial music has to actually be used, too, but that requires the new diplomacy interface first.

Ah, I see. I must have forgotten to refresh the wiki page, because I hadn't read about 0.874 yet despite playing it.

Really sorry to hear about your work there as well.  You were having a big server move or something along those lines, right?  I hope that's turned out well in the end.

Our data storage cluster suddenly outgrew its hardware (we hit a mode change of some kind where performance dropped dramatically), so we have to migrate it to better hardware one node at a time. This is a two week process, because we need to wait for each new machine to catch up with the others before we can move on to the next. Of course, the increased load that triggered the problem hasn't gone away -- so lots of firefighting during the day and then maintenance work at night.

Last time that pulled me away from SBR, we didn't really know what the underlying problem was and our troubleshooting involved hitting various parts of the system with a large (metaphorical) spanner until something changed. At least we now know enough to do something a little more directed. (The real problem is that we need a smarter persistence layer that doesn't hammer the backend storage quite so hard, but that's a month or two of dev work that we can't get to while things are on fire...)

Fun times. (I mean that. I don't particularly like the long hours, and I much prefer to solve these kinds of problems pre-emptively, but if this stuff were easy it would be boring.)