If whatever math determines the weather is based on server up-time, or is a running simulation, etc, it’s quite possible for the issue to live in some variable that lives in memory on the server, and for it to be resolved by a server restart without determining the actual cause of the issue.
Considering that the reproduction steps are “let the server run for 3 months without a restart”, it could be rather difficult to debug on a dev machine. They should be able to work on it on the prod server, but this issue came up after they stopped actually working on the game so
It looks like the last restart was probably Dec 17, 2021.
3ish months sounds about right for how long it is between this happening relative to known server restarts.
Hopefully @james can address this relatively quickly. I know last time it took quite a while to resolve. I don’t know if it’s possible with their server setup, but it is possible to automate server restarts in most cases.
Wow this thread got out of hand a little lol… on a serious note I will say the weather on the server is screwy. I just carry a weather totem around until the servers are restarted.
I carry a clear weather totem around with me 24/7 anyways it just makes things easier.
I don’t really mind the weather… but when I am trying to make some videos or take screenshots I prefer it nice and clear…
thank you kindly @blake I did a quick check on planets that had the continuous bad weather and it seems that the worlds restart has fixed it.i do hopefully its something that will be looked into
So you’re fine with doing that every 3 months or so, to temporarily fix the issue, until it crops up again? And each time, players are just gonna have to send a similar message to remind you to restart the servers, as they are forced to enjoy half-a-week of a lot of worlds being almost unplayable because of fog and dust-storms, until you guys come down here to react?
Honestly wish they could simply disable the whole weather-simulation thing going on and simply something like “ok this biome is a swamp? 50% chance of clear sky weather, 20% rain, etc etc” and be more in control of the entire thing.
I mean, it sounds stupid to say “yeah, we have to restart the servers because the weather simulation goes crazy and starts to cover the universe in sand storms if we let it run for more than a few months”.
Ha ha, or worse. “After a while, the weather simulation becomes sentient, realizes how meaningless its existence is and tries to push players away so that Square Enix finally decides to shut down the servers.”
Why can’t one of them look at why this happens and fix the root issue?!
Yeah.
But when we’ve been saying for a while “oh the game is in ‘maintenance mode’”, and the truth is that the devs are no-longer really fixing issues like this, just applying temporary band-aids… it’s painful to watch.
Even if the game wasn’t in maintenance mode, it would probably still be cheaper to have a junior employee restart the servers every three months than to track down and debug the root cause, then roll out a fix.
Game companies (and software companies more generally) usually make decisions based on simple economics rather than code quality.