DevOps staff describe preparing builds and servers for a show, the nine-person team, patch size reduction, and the PTU-to-live patch release process. A ship artist covers the Drake Herald, Constellation, Mustang Delta and Caterpillar asset sharing, plus ship production phases.
It starts with the IT group, a lot of setting up and testing. From Devops there's a couple months of prep before the actual show to allow for a lot of builds to be put together and test those publishes. The other thing is the systems no matter what, ride the edge of their capabilities and push the boundaries further on improving the infrastructure and upgrade with no downtime. Tyler talks about how QA pulls some ridiculous hours, but when it comes to Devops, they wonder how they manage to get any sleep.
It's dedication at the end of the day. Ahmed for example is passionate and when he gets told to go home and rest, he'll just open up his laptop at home and continue working.
9 people including Mike Jones. Tyler talks about how patch size externally, affects the internals just as much and they're pushing so much data and the patch project is a huge deal internally. There was a time where Tyler complained about slow internet speed at one point, but it was because he happened to be on the same network that was publishing and it was sending so much data. Instances like that is what they want to reduce.
You could say everything is a challenge, but they welcome challenges and it's fun to overcome them. The patch size reduction has been a big challenge, but it's less fun and more of a pride thing to be able to make it happen and it'll pay off in the end.
In general terms, because specific would take too long. Typically the process starts when QA gives the green light. Then the checklist happens to make sure everything is ready on the backend. With PTU they're moving a copy of the build to all the servers simultaneously. It's quite tricky, but they upload to a server that players can't see while other servers are running and then when that server has been green lit, then they'll begin the uploading process for the patch to the launcher. Then after some final tests and making sure everything is golden, they'll flick the switch and it goes live.
It varies from company to company. Any type of publishing, IT, webwork experience is good. For CIG it's Engineering, Network engineering, Linux is important because the servers run in Linux.
Mike doesn't know why it got started, but it was well established after Mike won the mustache contest and people started growing beards, Mike decided to win that contest too and he decided to not shave because it was tedious and it caught on.
The last ship Chris and him did together was the Alien scout, it was probably the fastest ship ever made in his opinion. The Constellation of course. Mustang Delta is one of his favourites that he worked on.
The Herald because it was his first ship to do, he got to set the pace. The difference being milestones or gates such as white box, grey box, Flight, etc. There's a lot of iteration in the earlier phases.
Look at what the spirit of the project is and in the Herald case was looking at Drake. Defining the traits of each company was important when Josh joined CIG and having something to look at and reference. Looked at construction equipment, barebone engines…
They're everywhere, especially near the end when everything is coming together and that's when the issues tend to crop up. The smallest problems can end up being a big problem if it's not taken care of in white box and grey box which is what those phases are for.
Josh is a big WW2 nerd so anything that's militarized. When he got to work on the Delta he was very excited. He doesn't have a true favourite because ships are like children to him, you love them all for their unique characteristics.
Yes, and the sizes have advantages and disadvantages. On the Constellation and working with Chris Smith was a lot of fun because you could get constant feedback and work off the other person, but it takes longer to see the final result. For smaller ships it's just you and it gets out faster, but not as much collaboration.