Hey there Portal People!
I’ve only got a couple of items this week, but one of them is pretty big news, so make sure you are informed! Not knowing and then getting caught by surprise could cause some headaches, so read on to find out how you can avoid some frustration…
Upcoming Downtime Window
Word has descended from on high (ie, from AWS) that the underlying virtual machine configuration that Obsidian Portal relies on has been scheduled for maintenance this coming week. What this means is that at some point during the dates of February 11 – 18, we will experience an outage of between 30 and 90 minutes.
I am currently attempting to see if they can provide us with a more precise window, or if there’s an accommodation that can be had to avoid this downtime. If I can work something out, or find out more specific information, I’ll be sure to let everyone know. Otherwise, users should be aware that we don’t have exact details regarding this downtime because it’s not up to us or under our control.
We encourage everyone to take appropriate measures during this window to try and minimize the potential impact of being caught unprepared. Some examples include:
- Avoid lengthy sessions of editing without saving. You don’t want to try and save only to find out that the outage began while you were typing on the edit page.
- Consider preparing edits offline. Copy/pasting to (and then later from) a Word or Notepad document is quicker (and thus safer) than making edits online.
- Ensure that everyone who may be making additions or alterations to the campaign is aware of this downtime window.
Map Marker Stuff
If you’ve been following our various posts and updates on the subject of map markers, then you know by this point that our goal is to release a new set on a roughly monthly basis, and that the popular opinion for the next set people would like to see is along the lines of space or sci-fi. Given that we’re at about 5 weeks since the release of the “General” set, you may be starting to wonder what the status of work on the next set is.
There are a couple things to mention here. First, while we are indeed working on the space or sci-fi set that users are wanting, we’re going to be pushing it back at least 1 release. The basic idea here is that we really want to do it right, and so we’re taking our time so we can get a better result. That said we’ll be slotting in a Numbers or Numerals set next. Our anticipated date to release this is February 13th. If that changes, we’ll let you know.
Secondly, we received a bit of feedback that we felt was valid and warranted action. It went something like this: “If you’re going to start cranking out new map markers, shouldn’t you make ones that were specifically mentioned during the ReForge kickstarter?” Our response to this is “Absolutely!”, and so we are (turns out we had also started without even realizing it). As you may recall from our January 10th update post, I’m all about fulfilling those commitments whenever the opportunity presents itself in a way that I can and have access to do so – so Jynx and I have made sure we put those as a priority as well.
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That’s going to do it for this week. I’ll post updates if and as I get them.
