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John, can you talk a little bit more about the role of the Live Operations group and the development and QA that you work with?

TL;DRThe Live Operations/DevOps team turns checked-in code into builds, publishes them to many channels and the public test universe, and builds server infrastructure meant to present one cohesive game worldwide, which is still early.

John ErskineStudio Director, Cloud Imperium Games Austin

Absolutely. So, in addition to Tony's team in Austin that's building the Persistent Universe and a lot of other things, we have the live operations and DevOps team in Austin. And this is the team that really takes the code that's been checked into the source control repository, turns it into a build, publishes it out to the server, and makes sure that that is all efficient. As we did this morning, right? I left Austin right as we published everything to the public and drove here to be with you this afternoon. That process happens continuously. We have about nine different development channels for various purposes: art channels, the latest, greatest code in the main channel that's usually broken and needs fixing, and then we have the different QA channels and the live channels. And so the DevOps team is continuously managing that, making builds, putting those builds into different environments so that QA can test them. As you know, in December, we launched the first iteration of our public test universe system. What that basically means is that we can take a build that is a candidate for live and we can spin up a copy of the live universe in our server-hosted environment, and then let you copy your account over to that server set. And then you can play the game before we actually publish it to the live servers. Some of that functionality will also feed some of the stuff Tony was talking about in the Persistent Universe in its early phase, the idea of being able to copy your inventory from place to place and overwrite your character data. So that's an example of a building block that that team has been working on that will be used as we continue the development process. There's a lot of real geeky technology that goes into building all of these servers and making sure that all of that... Or magic, as we were talking about earlier. It's part alchemy, yeah. But even today with Arena Commander, which is just one slice of the experience, we're running hundreds of servers on the back end to keep up with your login, passing you off to the different mission type servers and game modes, and load balancers and web nodes and account databases, and it's all really fascinating to me, but it's not necessarily great conversation starter material. That's what our LiveOps team is working on in Austin. And as we cross from a period where most of the gameplay has been played on your computer to a world where the most important game rules are managed on the server and your computer is graphically displaying that to you, the role of the LiveOps team is quickly becoming more and more complicated, because managing all of the interactions in a live persistent server environment is a pretty big job. So in addition to the team that we have in Austin, we have other people in other studios that work on different pieces of that. And we also have some very close partners, some technology vendors that we're working with, because an important piece of our plan is to present the game to the world as one cohesive game around the world. We don't really plan to have 35 different server instances that are all running their own economy server and all that stuff. So part of what the LiveOps team is working on is building out the type of very modern, leading-edge technology infrastructure to support that kind of concept. So there's some pretty cool stuff in the works. It's very early.

Persistent Universe Panel›3 - Getting Social·
Published on this date.30 Jan 2015