Hate to resurrect an old thread, but thought I'd share a few things. The ex owner of RedShift is a real life friend of mine, and I used to play on the server from time to time, and knew quite a bit about what all went on behind the scenes. I just came back to see how the game was progressing, if it was, and to see if it was worth getting back into, and Koderz who was the server owner still keeps an eye on the game as well.
First let me clear this up. The server shut down due to a combination of reasons. First, there wasn't enough donations to offset the nearly 200$ a month in hardware cost. Then, there was the immense burden of running the server. It took Koderz and the other admins multiple hours a day to maintain the server, and Koderz spent months of his free time developing tools to assist the server, and the rest of the game and community. He wasn't trying to make a profit off the server, as if he was it wouldn't have lasted over 2 years resulting in a net loss of probably over $1,000 excluding time he could have spent on other things.
Ignoring the cost, the biggest reasons he finally gave up were simply due to lack of support from the dev. At this time Schema was basically solo even after repeated offers from multiple people we know to help him for free. He joined the test team for a while but after months and in some cases a year or more of some of the most critical issues never being addressed as well as simple additions that would make server management a more manageable task being completely ignored he gave up.
The simplified version of the multitude of problems of running a server at that time were.
- It took an absurd amount of bandwidth spiking in excess of 500mb/s for the roughly 50-60 people online.
- It took an absurd amount of disk space. The server would grow by as much as 5GB per day, if left unattended.
- The server was in a constant state of very low performance even when run on top of the line hardware.
- The server would implode if no admin was on to watch it 24/7 due to people doing seemingly simple mistakes like getting too many ships near each other, or having too much stuff near a planet.
- The catalog getting corrupted was nearly a daily occurrence.
- Sectors would randomly corrupt themselves.
- Things like planets, asteroids would constantly disappear or randomly move to different sectors which added to the lag
- Unrecoverable crashes at least 1 time a month resulting in rollbacks
- Admin commands were basically useless since they either didn't work, or reported invalid information, or sometimes crashed the server.
- The sheer volume of log output could cripple the server if not running on SSDs.
What brought me back to check in was I recently talked to Koderz about StarMade after he mentioned talking to Schema recently. We both would be interested in coming back if it looked like things were getting addressed which would make server hosting easier. We're both game developers so we understand more than most what it takes to build a game like StarMade. The harsh reality of the situation now is that to both of us it appears as though StarMade has lost a majority of its player base and due to that it wouldn't really be worth it to come back. I sincerely hope I'm wrong but it's not looking like it.
