I've noticed that the dantom server seems to be hosting a lot in the last few days. That's encouraging! Unfortunately we have to be a little careful since, as I've mentioned before, we are currently sharing the machine with a number of people who were kind enough to lend us the space quite cheaply. We will be getting our own server quite soon (at which point we will likely have to charge for true accounts, but don't worry, I'm sure we'll still manage to lose money). Until then, I apologize for the occassional reboots and sluggishness.

Anyway, I've noticed a few minor follies that I'd like to point out for those working with the server:

* Unless you are doing some fancy stuff with runtime files, you should only have to upload your .dmb and .rsc files. I've noticed that some of you have uploaded code, icon, and map files too.

* If you ever see a "core" file, please tell us! That means that the server crashed whilst running your game. That should never happen, but I've noticed that it happened in four different worlds just today. Oops.

* And, most importantly of all: Check your log files! These report the proc crashes that occur while your game is running. They also report things like pseudo-infinite loops and other fun stuff that can make your game not-so enjoyable. Some of you have some mighty big log files. We probably should have some sort of reporting system to tell when new errors arrive.

The network connection to dantom is pretty fast, so if you have a reasonable connection on the other end (fast modem, whatever), things shouldn't appear drastically different than when hosting locally. However, I would strongly encourage that worlds be built to be reasonably speedy while running in single-user mode since the network overhead and multi-player computation can only make things slower. Furthermore, if you do get into a situation where the multi-player addition makes a huge difference then it may likely be an computation problem rather than a network one. To determine this, I suggest setting up a multi-player simulation either on a LAN or on a single machine (with multiple keys) and see how things work.

If you have a blank log and reasonably efficient code and things perform poorly, then the fault is ours. At that point, we will put the gloves on and see what's going on. Happy coding!