Red Shift (#1 On the official list!) - NO LONGER ACTIVE!!

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    Server ran on donations those donations stopped and the owner did not wish to continue funding the server himself like he had been.

    Redshift shut down due to lack of funding not any other issue as far as im aware.
     
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    Note: Sorry for the necro.

    Server ran on donations those donations stopped and the owner did not wish to continue funding the server himself like he had been.

    Redshift shut down due to lack of funding not any other issue as far as im aware.
    It wasn't due to funding (Thought it wouldn't have helped). It was because multiplayer issues were being ignored by the devs at the time in favour of things like improving docking. There was two main issues.

    The first was that multiple cores were not used by Starmade, all that mattered was the clock speed. So you couldn't improve the performance of the server by going for more cores.

    The second was at the time the game sent everything to all players. So if a player on the other side of the universe did something everyone would be updated by it. Also all ships/etc of every player were sent to all players when they logged in. So if you had alot of people on the server you could literally get timeout errors as so much data would have to be sent to the player (We are talking about MB's worth). So unless you had a very good connection to the server (And were close to it, meaning you had to be in America for RS) you couldn't login when there was more than a few people on the server.

    While its true they did have a 16 Core server at one time they switch to a 4 Core server after finding that more cores didn't work.
     

    Fellow Starmadian

    Oh cool so thats what this is
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    ah, that explains why I remember the admins of redshift talking about what the data requirements were for such a game, and being amazed at how high they were. Hopefully starmade uses cores more efficiently now than it did back then?
     
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    Hope springs eternal.

    Until the devs optimize the game, ALL servers are and will face this exact same issue. It's killing our online MP experience in the community because we can't have more than 10 people or so online at a time. After a big battle, often a server cannot recover on it's own and has massive lag until restarted.
     
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    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.
    1. It took an absurd amount of bandwidth spiking in excess of 500mb/s for the roughly 50-60 people online.
    2. It took an absurd amount of disk space. The server would grow by as much as 5GB per day, if left unattended.
    3. The server was in a constant state of very low performance even when run on top of the line hardware.
    4. 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.
    5. The catalog getting corrupted was nearly a daily occurrence.
    6. Sectors would randomly corrupt themselves.
    7. Things like planets, asteroids would constantly disappear or randomly move to different sectors which added to the lag
    8. Unrecoverable crashes at least 1 time a month resulting in rollbacks
    9. Admin commands were basically useless since they either didn't work, or reported invalid information, or sometimes crashed the server.
    10. 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.
     
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    StormWing0

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    Ouch, talk about going for overkill and it not being enough. >.<
     

    DrTarDIS

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    Don't forget admins who didn't understand what actually caused lag, faction-favoritism among admins, and other general badform actions that killed the RS community even as it was chugging forward. It was sad, it COULD have been a good server without asshats tripping on power.

    I will gladly lay claim to one nuke-to-total-reset after one punk used admin powers to unreasonably screw with me. I know there were others who felt the same but I'm unsure of how vindictive they were. :)
     
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    Don't forget admins who didn't understand what actually caused lag, faction-favoritism among admins, and other general badform actions that killed the RS community even as it was chugging forward. It was sad, it COULD have been a good server without asshats tripping on power.

    I will gladly lay claim to one nuke-to-total-reset after one punk used admin powers to unreasonably screw with me. I know there were others who felt the same but I'm unsure of how vindictive they were. :)
    Who are you referring to? If you had this problem you should have brought it to me or Pepper. I was one of about 3 zero tollerance owners I knew of at that time... We understood far more than almost every other server/player what caused the lag. I spent literal weeks of time profiling the server as it ran. We were the best server for a very long time as stated by the hundreds of people that played there and even some that couldn't due to the lag. The only 2 admins I remember ever doing that type crap got quickly banned completely from the server, not just powers removed.

    What Dev said above is totally correct in what happened, and actually there was far more wrong with running a server than he listed there...
     
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    ...[revelations]...
    Care to elaborate? It could only help the few of us left that are still trying to run servers (I know I'm interested), and the Schine devs that are hopefully more open now to optimizing.
     
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    Care to elaborate? It could only help the few of us left that are still trying to run servers (I know I'm interested), and the Schine devs that are hopefully more open now to optimizing.
    Honestly, no offense to Schine/Schema, but they've heard my complaints numerous times. If they were/are going to do anything about them I would think they already have what they need from me. If not Schema still has me on Skype and I have no problem whatsoever in answering questions he has.

    I'm really not up for going down the path of what all was wrong with the server for a billionth time. Dev hit the high points above, I'm sure you can find other posts by me or GravyPod about what all problems we faced running RedShift and ElwynEternity. therimmer96 knows many of the things of which I speak.

    If you have direct questions, feel free to find me on Discord ( Koderz#0406 )
     
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    JumpSuit

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    Honestly, no offense to Schine/Schema, but they've heard my complaints numerous times. If they were/are going to do anything about them I would think they already have what they need from me. If not Schema still has me on Skype and I have no problem whatsoever in answering questions he has.

    I'm really not up for going down the path of what all was wrong with the server for a billionth time. Dev hit the high points above, I'm sure you can find other posts by me or GravyPod about what all problems we faced running RedShift and ElwynEternity. therimmer96 knows many of the things of which I speak.

    If you have direct questions, feel free to find me on Discord ( Koderz#0406 )
    Your server will be missed Koderz...
     
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    If Koderz is still around, this is Roninx, we worked on a little coding together. You are welcome to run my server. That goes for any of your crew as well.
     

    JumpSuit

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    If Koderz is still around, this is Roninx, we worked on a little coding together. You are welcome to run my server. That goes for any of your crew as well.
    No way, Roninx? Remember the old days with me, you, and Colorofdeath and few others i can't remember? :)
     
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    Your server will be missed Koderz...
    Thanks! We might come back eventually if the game picks up steam again. Most of the admin team is still around my discord server.

    If Koderz is still around, this is Roninx, we worked on a little coding together. You are welcome to run my server. That goes for any of your crew as well.
    So yeah, didn't notice this message until now. I pm'd you a link to my discord server if you want to join.
     

    JumpSuit

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    Thanks! We might come back eventually if the game picks up steam again. Most of the admin team is still around my discord server.



    So yeah, didn't notice this message until now. I pm'd you a link to my discord server if you want to join.
    I would love to assist in serving this server if it ever pops back up or establish my Trade Corporation on it to help attract more attention. but if i do come, i hope jump distance is more farther and sector size bigger. reason for sector size being bigger is default is 2.0 (citation needed), and that is rather small for a every scaled fights.
     
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    The Judge

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    Wasn't Redshift notorious for being the worst server around?
     
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    Wasn't Redshift notorious for being the worst server around?
    Well, the fact that we remained #1 for basically our entire lifespan, and by far had the most players for 90% of it's life says otherwise. We also had arguably the most knowledgeable admin team and some rather sophisticated tools to keep it up. There's not enough of a community now to warrant me coming back right now but I would put money on the fact that we'd be back on top pretty quick if we did. I personally put more work into running RS than basically any other server owner/admin I saw in my 2.5 years of running it. I'm not saying there weren't other good servers, and other owners/admins that put some work in (I know several of them) but they frequently came to me for help. I also directly assisted Schema with feedback and data from the RS server, and assisted the test team for a while as well.

    I'm very happy with what we, the admins and myself, achieved with RS and was sad to see it go but in reality I was spending 8+ hours a day maintaining the server or improving it, and I was sometimes paying most of it's $200 a month hardware cost, so it just wasn't worth the time/money to keep going. That's the only reason we ever lost #1 is we gave up. I haven't seen you run a server, and until you can run one on the level we did I'd be careful disparaging other people as it shows quite a bit about yourself.


    What a necro of a bad thread :u
    Coming from you... that's hilarious. You're the reason we ended up changing the servers name because everyone thought we where affiliated with you and I was endlessly getting complaints about you and people disparaging my server because of you. Also if you paid attention, this thread has been slowly continuing for months, it's never really died.
     
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    not an argument, but being # 1 on starmade servers or on the population list doesnt mean youre good, it just means you offer vote rewards to pay off #1, and new people who dont know better join based on playercount and establish an emotional investment in a particular server.

    its really not a good metric to judge how "good" a server is.