New Server

As you might have noticed already in the past few weeks the CF server became target of some nasty attacks which slowed it down and has lead to some major connection losses.
The performance problems are so "jumpy" that we clearly can say that they are not hardware related and must be caused by someone who wants to harm the server and its players. Another explanation i dont have especially since these problems started at the same time that a different FL mod was released and the observed problems cover with incidents we experienced in the past. We were not able to link it with certain events on the server or the number of players online; the reported attacks seem to happen randomly.

However, we are in the situation that more and more players started to play on our server lately and despite the original decision to think about a server replacement in August I am forced to act now. I am not willing to wait and see how some idiots ruin the fun of our players and our hard work.
Renting a new more powerful server now might improve the serverload while being under attack until we are able to release CF2.0 which eventually can automatically deal with such attacks.

Doing so is not without risk.
Changing the server forces us to do patches to CF1.9 (since for sure we will not be able to get CF2.0 ready in time). These patches are tricky as we have to release the new Launcher which was developed for CF2.0 and this launcher is not 100% compatible with CF1.9.
We first have to develop a working patch routine and do tests... if these are successful a server replacement within the next 1-2 weeks might be possible.

I personally dont like the idea being forced to do a replacement now coz it means additional work and additional costs. But i guess we have no other choice.
Ill try to see it positive... if everything works well we will have a high performance server for the growing number of players, less problems with the attacks and the dev team could use the old server which will be online till mid august for CF2.0 online tests (eventhough that means to change the dev schedule once more).

Server Hardware arrived yesterday.
It took me a while to figure out how the new server OS is working and where to find the settings.
However, this morning i started to transfer the data from the old CF server to the new one and did the most urgent settings. You might experience a bad performance on the old server because of this atm.
I think the file transfer should be finished somewhen this evening (alot of data).

The server performance so far can only be described as "a dream" during some first tests.
A CF 1.9 test server is already running on it and remained stable so far.

Once the file transfer is done i can try to do the detail settings and more tests.
Ill meanwhile try to create a pre-patch for the final CF1.9 patch which will initiate the server switch for the clients.
It took us a while but we believe that we found a working update routine that will not cause compatibility issues.
It is unlikely that the new server get available today and i also dont know if tomorrow the final work can be done... but for sure within the next few days we will see if everything worked as intended.

as you might have noticed we have not done the final patches for the server switch yet
utrack is currently working on a minor glitch of the new launcher and i am sure that soon the final problems are gone

New server is online, patch is out.
The first few players already play.