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. ;)

The SH master will move over to a new and much more powerful host in the next few days, and as such the DNS will be updated to point to a new IP. This might cause some downtime for all of you as the master server needs to be temporarily taken down in order to replicate all the databases, and some additional downtime as DNS changes might take a while to propagate all around. The actual switch could take approximately a day, in an absolutely worst case scenario.

I apologize yet again for the lack of updates, too – over in ye olde real life, I’m about to enter crunch mode for a school project we’re doing, and after that I am moving to a new apartment. There simply hasn’t been a lot of time for me to work on Seal Hunter, and to reiterate, I am very sorry for that. I definitely intend to push out the new updated master server code to provide such things as buddy lists and a chat function, but at this rate, it might take me a while. Two hours per day worth of free time just isn’t quite enough, sadly.

I will keep you updated on the host switch as soon as I begin moving things over.

The Master Server has been updated for performance reasons – you should hopefully experience “Unable to contact master server” related errors a lot less as a result. I was doing some very, very bad things in the piece of code that ran every time the game client looked up its stats. (Horribly bad. I won’t mention the specifics to any other living being: it was just that embarrassing.)

Ranking updates for all players are also temporarily disabled – this will be re-enabled with the release of the rewritten master server, which will take me some time to finish – but I hope that you guys will also prefer being able to play over getting disconnected every other game. Use the statistics website to look up the top 100, and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience caused by the recent server problems.

If anything weird starts happening as a result of this update, please let me know – it would primarily be related to things saying “unauthorized account” upon joining a game.

Have fun!

The physical machine that the SH master server is running on is for the moment being unavailable for unknown reasons. Sorry about this – I will try to keep you updated.

Update, 23:30: there seems to have been a network outage which now seems to be fixed. Everything should be working again.

As some of you might have noticed, the SH master server hasn’t been quite as snappy as one would like it to be lately. The reason for this is actually a rather pleasant one – during peak times, there’s a ridiculous amount of connections done per second to it! The downside is, of course, that my network library seems to choke on handling all the connection requests at once. This is bad – and it is also the likely cause of all those “master server unresponsive” messages some of you have been experiencing.

Since that is the case, I will be rewriting the master server communication code entirely in favour of using persistent connections instead of connection on-demand. This might take a while – a week or two, at worst, with lovely 13 hour school days coming back up – but it’ll lay the foundation for several exciting new features that can be added in the future. (To name a few: friend notifications and messaging, possible NAT punchthrough, and dedicated servers!)

So all in all, while this might take a while, please bear with me. It’ll increase the overall stability of the master server as well as open up for future development.

And boy, more than one thousand registered players, with almost 24,000 matches played, in which four and a half million enemies have been killed? I’m thoroughly impressed!