Time for the yearly update in which I tell you about embarrassing things!

So, in short:

• The statistics website is down and has been down for ages. It will be coming back up, but I cannot give you an exact timeframe.
• A lobby server bug has been fixed that caused the game to go back to the main menu after earning an achievement.
• A lobby server bug has been fixed that caused certain matches not to be accepted if the player used a certain colour. (I’m pretty ashamed of this one.)

And thus, we return to your regularly scheduled blog posts, about three years after the last one. Yep, still alive!

The Seal Hunter Stats site has been moved to a new host – it should be much snappier, and it has received a few facelifts in the process. You should totally check it out.

At the same time, the master server has also been moved to a new host. This should speed things up and improve reliability in general for those in the Europe/Asia region.

I hope to have more news to share with you shortly. Until then, keep hunting those seals!

There have been connectivity issues for some of our services, so we’ve been given a new IP, and I did not know this beforehand (there are other admins for this specific dedicated server, too).

Give it an hour to let your DNS changes replicate, or you can also try to manually flush your dns (http://www.tech-faq.com/how-to-flush-dns.html).

The short version is: wait an hour or two and you should be able to play again.

Sorry about the plethora of problems that has sprung up lately. :\

• The downtime the last 24 hours has been caused due to the fact that the Seal Hunter database is growing way bigger than I ever imagined it to (it is currently hovering around the 0.7 GB mark, and rising) and this has caused slowdowns in various systems. I will be tracking them down over the next few days to minimize server downtime and lag.
• Work on the new master server is progressing slowly, mainly because…
• …I’ve moved (and am currently more stressed out than I had ever fathomed one could be), and I’ll be starting my internship with an actual game developer company tomorrow, leaving me even less free time to work on my game.

Those are the haps, pretty much – I dearly wish I had the time to work on adding new weapons and a friends list and such, but Real Life is a mean mistress. I hope you understand – I definitely do not intend on abandoning the game, but I have had to prioritize development away for more urgent matters lately. Sorry! :(

Keep them matches coming – almost 220,000 of them already – you guys are crazy!

Edit: Our dedicated server host messed up a motherboard exchange. Please bear with us until it is fixed. Fixed.

The Seal Hunter master server has now moved to its new server (for the more technically inclined, IP 217.23.15.182), and while there are a few initial roadbumps (stats.sealhunter.se will be down for a little while), things should now perform quite a bit better.

The old master server is still running, though, but keep in mind that no statistics will be stored permanently when you play there. Read the new MOTD for more information.

The DNS change might take a day or two at worst to propagate for all of you, so if you’re still being sent to the old master server, just be patient!

If you experience any prolonged issues, don’t hesitate to ask for help in the forums.

EDIT: After migrating, the dedicated server is suffering from a failing harddrive. This is forcing the SH master server to be down. The matter is being looked into, and I hope to bring the master up again as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding. The server should now be back up, and hopefully this harddrive won’t fail on us. ;)