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NEWS FROM BELLA'S BATH

by Hazed

In a effort to find out what Bella is currently doing, we visited her to ask for an explanation. When we arrived, she was, of course, in the bath! So, taking our life in our hands (or equivalent) we interviewed her in the bath, keeping a careful eye on the monitor which was teetering, precariously balanced, on the soap dish, while being watched by the malevolent stare of her rubber duck. This is what she told us...

<splish>

Well... as you know, we are planning to move to the cloud soon. At the moment Federation 2 runs on two separate processes - one is the accounts database, which handles all the logging in and out and setting up your ibgames account. The other is Fed itself which has its own set of databases for holding things like personas, objects and such like. As you can imagine it's very important to keep the two databases in sync. It's also a grade A pain in the neck when we move to new computers.

<splash>

So, at the moment I'm in the process of merging the accounts database with the persona database. That is more complex than it sounds. Because the accounts database was in a different process, Fed would ask for information, but it couldn't afford to wait around while it waited for the reply, because that would cause the game to pause. So after asking, it goes off to do other things - like moving mobiles, updating exchanges, and processing other player input, until the reply comes back.

<sploosh>

When the game runs as a single process it can get the answer immediately from the in-game cache so the code for logging on etc has to be rewritten to take account of this. I wrote this code years ago, so I'm having to figure out how it works from scratch, which means it takes a bit longer. There is an additional problem in that, unless I want to rewrite FedTerm all the input and output has to be identical so that FedTerm works with the new code, which adds a layer of complexity.

<splat>

At this stage the circuits of the recording droid shorted out from the amount of water in the atmosphere, and the interview was at an end...

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