Releasing a new build of The Imperial Realm::Miranda is a pretty big job. I need to build new game binaries, build new data, upload those thousands of files to the CDN, upload new code to the game server, shut down the previous version, get the new version running, change various other server things to all point to the new build, and archive all those files. All in all, it is a couple hours of tedious work where any mistake means the game won't run when you're done.

[This battle is not going very well.]

I finally automated all that! Now I run one command to do everything on the build machine, then when that's done I run a second command on the server to set it all up.

The only hitch remaining is that I started moving data from the database into static data files a while ago to reduce how long it takes to connect to the server. Those files have to exactly match the information on the server database. You may remember the bug where players could buy a vendor building from a vendor a while ago - that was because the data files didn't match the server data. So until I can figure out a solution for that, the server has to be down for the full deploy period - about two hours.

The upside of this is that I've been fixing a bunch of bugs lately and now I can get those updates live for players even faster.