Replacing all my vendors

Sunday, October 7, 2007

I've started the long process of replacing all my vendors inworld.

The Procyon web server handles, among other things, my system of network vendors. And it does a pretty good job -- when I need to update a product, I only have to do it in one place. It's especially good for little things like the "Procyon Games Info" card that I only need to update in one place.

Lately though, it's been getting a little creaky. The problem is XML-RPC, which Linden Lab never implemented quite properly and has never fully supported. As Second Life grows, XML-RPC gets slower and slower, and the result is my vendors become slower and slower to respond. I see people clicking things 3 or 4 times because they don't get a free card, and then they get 4 of them dumped on them.

Occasionally, it will just fail completely. That's no good.

So I rewrote the backend, using all HTTP calls, and an email poke. It should be much more responsive, and initial tests are promising. The problem now is, of course, that I have to replace all my inworld vendors, which is something that having a network vendor system is supposed to make never happen.

It's even worse than that, because my games themselves use the vendor system to distribute things like the Procyon Info notecard (that way they always give the latest version). So I'll need to send out updates to all my games.

 

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