Rage Against The Machine. (Patreon)

Sorry for the delay - the reason for this will become clear, below.

While I have never been a religious person, there are a few phrases from the texts of various faiths that are peerless in summing up the human condition.  Among these is the passage from the biblical book of Job:

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away”

I believe the next person to come close to relating the same crystalized sentiment on the vagaries of life was David Byrne in his work, “Once In a Lifetime,” when he opined, fatalistically:

“Same As It Ever Was.”

Don’t worry - I can hear you asking: “What does this have to do with Peace Island?”

Well, in the wake of last Wednesday’s 200 FPS achievement, we felt that our refactoring process was complete.  We had reached “Triple-A” performance standards - and in my view, the system architecture was Beta-ready.  it was time to clear the old, rusty stuff from the server and put the new, polished version in.  

We have done this operation twice before in recent years, and the process has always been clean and straightforward.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t so, this time.

Honestly, this past week has been the second-most stressful time in Peace Island's development, since the “Purge Of The Scammers” two years ago.  What should have been a three-hour process turned into a four-day ordeal.  I have watched the project literally fall to pieces first on the server, and then on my own development PC.

Everyone had to disconnect from the server while Laura & I struggled to figure out WTF happened.  I had to go so far as to delete all installs of Unity on my machine, down to the last traces in the registry.  The server’s version control system steadfastly refused to acknowledge the files on its own hard drive, much less any external client, until Laura was able to figure out a solution, Monday morning.  That’s the simple reason why we could not update yesterday - we were still busy pushing the project back up on the server.

Thankfully, before this entire operation, we had heeded the words of Byrne & Job:  We took it for granted that things were “Same As They Ever Were,” and we should anticipate that the Guy Upstairs (or Murphy’s Law) might feel like taking a chunk out of our hide. Therefore, we created a pristine copy of the project to hold in reserve, should this happen.

Now - while we saved the project in its entirety, there is no denying that this server issue stole four days from us when we needed that time the most.

Even in the face of a delay we experienced last month, we thought we would be able to release the closed Beta by the end of August - but this server issue has unfortunately forced us to push that back to September 10th.  We will hopefully be able to release the Playtest version for Mac/PC before the end of August.

No one is more frustrated by these last-minute delays, than we are.  However, you can rest assured that we’re going to use that time to best effect - after all, we’re still scheduled to demo Peace Island at Portland’s Meow Cat Cafe on the 25th!

(Also - our printer was down for four days, but I used the time while the server was recovering to fix it - premium shipments resume tomorrow!)

We promise to have better news and gorgeous screenshots, when we meet again, next week!