After quietly mentioning the words ‘open beta’, the entire internet decided to give our servers an utter pounding. Prison style.


Like the new accountant inmate after his first shanking, our servers were left in a bloody gibbering heap in the corner of the room.


A few teething issues arose, these were :

1. Our first build was 130 megs. After some clever audio compression trickery we chopped it to 38 megs. Much better!


2. The masterserver (the bit of software that lets everyone join games) couldn’t deal with a trillion people hitting it and kept crashing (hence the ‘master server not found error’). This is being fixed today. Also, due to the sheer volume of traffic both web servers went splat.


3. General XNA compatibility/install issues. Lots of people ran the .msi file not the setup.exe. This meant that XNA 3.0 Redistributable and .NET 3.5 weren’t installed. If the game crashes when you try and start it, this is most probably the reason. Go forth and download.


4. Our code that tries to bypass firewalls (aka ‘NAT punch though’) doesn’t always succeed. This meant that lots of people were hosting games which other players couldn’t join. Solution: open port 24816 on your router and software firewall. Head over to http://portforward.com/ for full info.



5. Finally, the game sometimes doesnt quit properly. Many issues (Lawrence thinks 80-90% of them) have been caused by an old Plain Sight process running in the background. So basically, the game running twice. This will be fixed in the next release, however if you run task manager you can remove the PlainSight.exe from the Processes tab - you'll find this should solve many problems.

That covers most of them ... hope it helps!

Also, here’s a game development tip. Once you release your open beta, however great you feel, wait a few hours before going and getting arse-faced in a pub. We learned this last night.

By 11 o’clock it became apparent that using my iPhone's remote desktop app to keep resetting the master server wasn’t the best idea. Alex, with a gut full of booze, had to head back to a late night (drunk) coding session. What a trooper!

Aside from that, everything went grand. We’ve been blown away by the response to Plain Sight. Thanks to all of you for putting up with our slightly turbulent launch. We're working around the clock to fix bugs and we all look forward to hearing your feedback over the next few weeks.