We have been working on a balance, performance and localization update for Star Control: Origins.  Expect it out in May as a FYI.

We don't generally allow politics on the forums.  With the obvious exception of The Political Machine. The Political Machine - The Power of the Presidency Can Be Yours! Forums

But the world trade situation is probably something worth discussing provided people can avoid assuming "the other" are stupid or evil or greedy or whatever.  

Now, I'm a child of Michigan USA.  Detroit area.  That means cars.  And I can say, regardless of political association, the topic of unfair trade has been discussed endlessly here.

I won't get into the issues with the UAW and Unions and whatnot.  But I will say that the global trade situation is more nuanced than most know.

To side-step the USA vs. China stuff, I want to instead talk about UK.

Last UK blast furnaces days from closure as Chinese owners cut off crucial supplies | Money News | Sky News

The United Kingdom is about to close its last steel plant.  I.e. for the first time since the Bronze Age, the land of England will stop being able to make metal.  That's a bit hyperbolic but the point is the same.  Losing the ability to make certain basic civilizational goods is a problem.

If we lived in a world that would never have any supply disruptions and could avoid having any wars, then it would be perfectly fine for the US, UK, the EU, etc. to just switch to a pure information economy of services and leave the production of physical goods to other countries.  But we don't live in that world.

When COVID hit, Americans discovered that most antibiotics and N95 masks were made elsewhere and no longer readily available.  This is a problem when there is a disruption.  

I don't know what nations should do.  I do know that it is probably a very bad thing if the UK, for instance, can't produce steel anymore.  Similarly, I think it's bad for the world in general if a single country produces virtually all the manufactured goods (whether that be the USA, China, or whatever).

Just my 2 cents.

Today we were finally able to get most of the forums back from the dead.  2 weeks ago we didn't think we would be able to bring them up.  And to be honest, we probably will never get everything back.  

Fun fact: These are (one of) the oldest continuously running forums on the Internet.  When we wrote the forums, back in the late 1990s, we had to do everything from scratch.  We built these to replace Usenet.

So a few things:

If you're forum account is "new" (as in the past few years) there's a good chance you'll need to create a new account.  We didn't lose the posts and we didn't lose the user accounts but we did lose some of the blue that pointed a post to the user account.   So if you are having trouble and you're not an old timer, you'll probably need to create a new account. 

We apologize for the inconvenience.

I recently got back into Virtual Machines and found the performance terrible on Windows 11.   

I couldn't figure out why.  There was noticeable input lag and even moving windows around was sluggish.  

I looked on Reddit and elsewhere and got advice about installing tools or configuring the VM differently but eventually just had a feeling that it had something to do with security on Windows.  So after a lot of trial and error I found this option:

Now, I am not recommending you disable this.  But on my home box, that is behind firewalls and I am using myself in relative isolation, I felt comfortable turning this off when doing VM work.  Doing so brought VM speed back to where you would expect it.

Hoe this helps.

Nearly a month ago now I got a call early in the morning. It was from our IT lead. The Datacenter...was gone.

At first I thought we were under some sort of DOS attack. Then I feared the worst, some sort of Ransomware? Were we going to find out that everything was encrypted and gone? We soon learned, no—but in some ways, it was worse. Everything we had at the Datacenter was wiped out. Everything. 34 Terabytes spread across a dozen+ servers of various ages with unique configurations dating back decades. Some of this stuff had been brought over from OS/2 back in the day. Some of the configurations were originally set up on NT 4 for PowerPC! Gone.

We have near real-time backups to dedicated servers at the datacenter but they were wiped out too. For legal reasons, I can't go into anything more specific than to say everything was gone.

We also do nightly backups off-site as well. But these are the kinds of backups you don't really expect to ever have to use. They're the equivalent of the old tape drives we used to use back in the day. You back up to them but you don't really anticipate ever needing them. But here we were.

The backup was a single, 34TB file. We debated how to get the data back fastest. I mean, couldn't we just put them on a removable HD and ship it? Well, not so much. The NAS or whatever it used at the off-site service has a USB 3.0 connection. Getting the data off would take many days and then have to be reuploaded via the USB HD.

Ok, so transferring it is. We have a 10Gb/sec net connection, how long could it take? The math made it out that we should be able to get it in just a few days. Nope. Weeks. It took weeks.

And once we got it back, things didn't look good. While the raw data was there, it was not obvious how all this would hook up again. Remember, we are talking a hodgepodge of servers that have been around decades. You can't just spin this stuff up.

I talked to Jafo and LightStar and others and I told them I didn't think we'd be getting WinCustomize back. Even if we got the skins and themes back, the spaghetti of the skin library databases would not so easily be brought back to life. Even now, it's not clear how well connected the various files will be.

Near the end of March I wrote:

Dear Artists, Skinners and Designers,

For 24 years we have created amazing things together. I am sad report that we suffered a catastrophic data loss. This data loss also consumed all of our on-site backups as well. While we did have many offsite backups, the sheer size, complexity and fragility of the data has made it impractical to restore them. As a result, we have made the painful decision to close WinCustomize.com.

We have enjoyed the near quarter-century of collaboration, conversation and creation with you. I am sorry to see it end. It is, indeed, an end to an era.

Farewell,

-Frogboy

But the team didn't want to give up. Pat, myself, Jillian, and others from the 2001 era are all still at Stardock and the team was desperate to save WinCustomize.

And so tonight, as I write this, we're...almost back. The site definitely is worse for wear. We are going to need your help to rehabilitate the site and we will be grateful for as much grace and patience that can be sent our way as we still struggle to bring it back. But I am happy to report that WinCustomize has survived—and we couldn't have done it without the incredible determination of our team and the loyalty of our community. It's going to be a journey, but it's one we're committed to taking together.

Over at Reddit I saw this post.

Now, so far this year, the best book I've read has been the new Bobiverse book. But what about you guys?

So you want faster internet speeds, eh? So did I.

Let me tell you about my journey.

It all started with Xfinity offering 1.4Gb/sec internet speeds. I wanted some of that. So I upgraded but noticed that my speeds were still maxing out at around 800Mb/sec. That's pretty good, but a lot less than 1.4Gb/sec.

The first thing I did was get a new cable modem. It has a single 2.5Gb/sec output.

My router actually had a 2.5Gb/sec input port. Victory! Or so I thought. Turns out every single output port on that router maxed out at 1Gb/sec. Well, crap.

So I upgraded my router. This time, I went all-in and got a router with three blazing-fast 10Gb/sec ports. Problem solved, right? Nope. These were SFP+ ports. If you're wondering what SFP+ ports are, join the club—I had no clue. After some Googling, I learned about SFP+ transceivers. Bought some, plugged everything in, and...nothing. Zero connectivity.

Turns out my cable modem absolutely refuses to negotiate anything other than exactly 2.5Gb/sec. And even though those transceivers promised they'd work at 10Gb, 2.5Gb, or 1Gb speeds, they flat-out wouldn't talk to the cable modem.

Fine.  Ok.  I wanted to use an enterprise grade Router but I finally caved and grabbed a consumer Wi-Fi 7 router. Thankfully, this one came with two good old-fashioned 10Gb RJ45 ports. And finally, success! It connected perfectly to the modem at 2.5Gb.  But the other ports on it were slower.

So, what's next? Yep, yet another upgrade—this time, a 10Gb switch to connect everything at the speeds I'd originally envisioned.

So here we are after a week of fiddling, swapping, and reordering networking gear, I finally hit that sweet 1.4Gb/sec speed. ..or as someone around here put it: my internet is now imperceptibly faster.

So our friends over at Amplitude have announced Endless Legend II.  It's due for Early Access late Summer.  My good friend Kael (Derek P who was the lead designer on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and did the Fall from Heaven mod) is working on it.

These days I'm mostly playing our stuff.  There's just not a lot of time for other games.  So lots of Ara: History Untold, GalCiv IV, Sins of a Solar Empire II and even some Ashes of the Singularity.

But what are you guys playing? Anything you would recommend I should check out?

You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything.

Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS? 

For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit.

Fortunately, we run nightly offsite backups, but they’re enormous—about 34 terabytes. That’s 34,000 gigabytes, all of which has to be downloaded, scanned, extracted, and then reuploaded to new servers. Just the download alone took over a week. Then came the challenge of figuring out which parts needed immediate restoring, in which order, and whether we should rebuild them piece by piece, create entirely new services, or move to a cloud-based infrastructure to avoid having a single colocation ever again.

We’re talking about a giant library of websites, databases, skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, videos, and more. Some of it’s ancient, from when we started well before Google or Facebook existed. Imagine sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes to find a single legacy web service, built decades ago, that needs to run on a specific OS. It’s a painstaking process.

This outage has been extremely difficult. Everything from old box art for our products to OS/2 programs I wrote in my college days—gone, at least until offsite backups did their job. We had fallback backups on hard drives, DVDs, tapes, and so on, but for a while, it wasn’t entirely clear how much of that would be usable.

A fun fact some may not know: we have one of the oldest continuously used forums around, migrated from Usenet eons ago. That entire environment was wiped, so we’re rebuilding it from offsite storage. Not everything is back yet, and it looks like a few forum user accounts will be lost. That’s not related to customer data, but still worth noting.

We appreciate everyone’s patience. Getting services running again has been the top priority. It’s been a monumental effort, but we’re seeing real progress each day, and the community’s understanding means a lot.

Thanks for sticking with us,

-Brad (Founder & CEO)