Update on the delays for 0.9.0
1 year ago
After a couple of rough peak times on the servers over the past weekend things should now be a bit more settled as changes have been made to improve performance at peak time by dynamically adjusting when some tasks are completed. This has unfortunatly set back the development on 0.9.0 a little so here I am going to drop a rough "to-do" list for what is still to be finished up before the release goes live.
Patrons currently have access to beta 14, beta 15 is due in the next day or 2 but I am re-doubling efforts to get some of these things fixed over the next 48 hours. STKP is pretty much full time for me now so I can hopefully leverage this extra time to get things done quickly.
Server Load Issues
The server load issues that appeared when we were looking at 400-500 flight concurrency should now be resolved with some dynamic scheduling, there are however plans to further reduce the load by moving no less than 2 functions away from the current API to the new APIv2 which should improve the performance further.
Web Server / Account Functionality
There are still a couple of features that need to be added to the account system including viewing of flights and fleet data, these are reliant upon some stability from the server load issues above. It is planned that all account area functionality will be available with the release of 0.9.0. Here is a brief list of the outstanding work to be done here.
- E-mail templates need to be made up in the same design as the new forgotten passwsord ones.
- Friends management.
- Fleet management and viewing.
- Flight management and viewing including scheduling.
Client work that is outstanding
- Passive flight tracking is sometimes missed out for a second flight completed without restarting the app
- Stepclimb settings are not being passed correctly to the SimBrief API when planning a flight
- Legacy flight summary needs a little bit of work to modernise and improve the layout and consistency of data, including the accuracy of transition altitude/level data
- The new socket map system needs its handling to be moved to a background thread to further improve performance and reduce the chance of UI hangups
- Some minor changes to improve support for the screenshot system to function over a network connection
- Improvements to local caching of screenshots to reduce chance of spiralling network costs.
- Occasionaly issues with enroute fuel burn calculation in the logbook
Ticket Support System
This is being tested and some UX improvements have been made both to the staff end and the user end to make this a more integral experience along with a new method of providing debug logs to staff without digging into folders!
STKP Data Centre
Data centre users are starting to post up corrections now and I am still going through enabling accounts. I am looking for older accounts initially, and will slowly start to add newer accounts. The process will ultimately be automated entirely with the exception of actually actioning the changes to the data set. This is just a last measure to reduce the potential for abuse of the system.
Finally, I'd like to thank all the patrons over on the SimToolkitPro Patreon who are beta testing these builds daily and reporting issues. Remember if you want to help out with these updates and try out the new features, you can become a patron from only £1 a month and support the continued development of SimToolkitPro!
I'd also like to thank everyone for their patience as this patch is slowly assembled, I know its frrustrating and I know you want to get your hands on the new features and I just want you to know I am working every hour I can to make sure this patch is everything you expect and more from me. I'd rather make sure as many of the minor issues are resolved to reduce the natural influx of bugs from a wider release as more edge case bugs show up. So thank you to everyone. I appreciate your patience here! Beta 15 will be out this week to patrons on all tiers with more information coming soon!
Dan <3