A Quiet Morning at LightBox Interactive

It's about 7am here in the studio and it's calm before the storm! So many great things happening with the solo campaign really coming together, the 1.3 BETA Update dropping world-wide this week, and our Starhawk talk at SXSW with IGN.

And of course... all the amazing work the team is doing to finish up Starhawk's international release!

7am is about the only time when there *ISN'T* intense production going on. And even-though we're really just a "start-up" here in Austin, the team has been working together like a well-oiled machine and it's amazing to see how all the various parts of the game really come together.

For those players who are really loving the Starhawk BETA -- just wait! 

Busy Saturday at LightBox Interactive

It's another busy Saturday here at LightBox Interactive as the team is hard at work on a couple of major things.

We've got a playtest of the solo campaign coming up soon in Santa Monica so the Design team and the Gameplay team are working on various single-player missions. Things like event triggers, AI, Build & Battle challenges, VO, music and cameras.

The team is also hard at work on some of the last remaining items for the Starhawk BETA 1.3 Update.  We're playing online games with the SONY test team in San Diego in effort to reproduce some of the more rare bugs.

It's awesome watching a 32-Player battle in Starhawk and we *CAN'T WAIT* to get it in gamers hands.

Also quite awesome to hear the team in the break room talk about the what they did on Friday night. Austin is a fun and damn crazy town!

Lastly, we're monitoring the Starhawk BETA servers for any signs of connection issues. Right now it seems that our stop-gap fix that we deployed last-night is holding really well and the vast majority of players are having no trouble at all -- which makes us very happy!

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more updates!

Starhawk BETA Servers Back Online

The server maintenance that we started at 9pm Central time is now finished and we've deployed our stop-gap fix for the Server List in an attempt to help stabilize your weekend play of the Starhawk BETA.  We'll continue to monitor the servers for connection issues and other defects over the weekend.

If you experience any connection issues please let us know on Facebook, Twitter or the forums on www.StarhawkTheGame.com.

Enjoy the Starhawk BETA This Weekend!

UPDATE: Starhawk BETA Connection Issues

The team here at LightBox Interactive and the SONY Network team have isolated the major issue, developed a fix, and we'll be deploying it during an unscheduled maintenance at 9pm Central Time.

Anyone playing Starhawk at that time will be logged-off and our moderators will be sending you messages leading right up to the time we take the servers off-line. Once we bring the servers off-line Please close Starhawk and wait for us to deploy the fix and bring the servers back on-line.

We actually developed 2 fixes to the issue that was causing the Server List to flake-out.

The first fix that we have prepared to deploy is a "stop-gap" measure just so people can play over the weekend with a functioning Server List. However, tonight's "stop-gap" fix will limit the max number of games in the Server List.

The root problem was that with all the new players from the Open BETA, there were simply more Starhawk games active than the servers in San Diego could push to the Starhawk client when it would refresh the Server List.

The second fix we developed today is a "real" fix for the Server List and we integrated that change to the Starhawk BETA 1.3 Update. This will allow the Server List to once again display many, many games and not be artificially limited.

We apologize for any frustration this issue caused our Starhawk BETA players this afternoon. Starhawk is still in BETA so these are the kinds of kinks we're trying to work out -- and there will probably be a few more so thank you all in advance for your patience!

We'll post here on the Dev-Blog once we've deployed the fix and finished the server maintenance!

Starhawk BETA Connection Issues

We've been tracking some reports of players experiencing a connection issues ever since we opened the BETA up to all players.

The team here at LightBox Interactive and the SONY Network Team in San Diego have been investigating and the Starhawk BETA is indeed suffering from some issues due to the vast increase in player load. There are a number of factors that contribute to this issue and the teams are aggressively working on a fix.

The image above is one of the many graphs we use to monitor the game and you can see just a few instances of player drops as a result of our connection issue.

Players may experience the following issues until we have resolved the connection instability:

• Server List fails to display any games.
• You might be disconnected when you simply view the Server List.
• Quick Match may fail to connect you to a game.

If you are one of the unfortuante players who is experienceing a borked Server List, there are a couple of other ways you can get into a game by pressing  to activate your Uplink.

First, you can use Quick Match on you Uplink's home screen. Just select either Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch or Both. Then select "Find Game" and press .

Now there have been some reports of Quick Match not working properly. But don't worry - there is another way to hop into a game if you're the doubly-unfortunate player to have both the Server List and Quick Match fail.

At your Uplink's home screen, you will see all of your PSN Friends displayed on the right side in what we call the Social Bar. If you select one of your friends and then press  you will bring up the Player pop-up. This allows you to view that player's stats *AND* it will allow you to directly join the game they're currently playing without having to search the game list for it! 

We'll continue to update the BETA Dev-Blog here with the latest developements as well as our in-game mechanisims for letting you all know what's going on.

Our Starhawk Moderators will be sending you all updates while you're playing and these Moderator messages are displayed in the battle-feed. We'll also update the News in the Uplink as well as the News ticker that scrolls along the bottom of your Uplink.

This is the kind of thing that -- while unsavory -- is the *EXACT* reason why big multiplayer games do a BETA. We care deeply about the player experience and we want to do everything we possibly can to make sure that when you buy Starhawk on May 8th, that you get your money's worth and a game that works!

Thank you for your patience while we resolve these BETA connection issues!

 

Playing Starhawk with LightBox Interactive

Our team here at LightBox Interactive will be checking-in on the games throughout the Starhawk Private BETA and wanted to let you know what some of our PlayStation Network names are:

• LBI_Rico IT Manager & QA Lead
• LBI_Pete QA Analyst (tester)
• LBI_Alden QA Analyst (tester)
• LBI_Josh Lead Game Designer
• LBI_Ron Software Team Associate Producer
• LBI_Bruce Technical Director
• LBI_Jim Lead Network Programmer
• LBI_Dylan President of LightBox Interactive.

Now of course sometimes we'll be playing anonymously too but keep an eye out for us in game and on the Starhawk Private BETA forums!