Welcome to PBW2
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Announcing the alpha launch of PBW2, a replacement service under development for the venerable Space Empires Play By Web.
The original Space Empires Play By Web, created by Admiral and maintained by Geoschmo, was taken offline Jan 20, 2009, after a fatal hard drive failure wiped out critical data. You can read all about it over on Shrapnel Forums. We here at PBW2 deeply appreciate the dedication and hard work of the staff of the original PBW.
PBW2 is an attempt to replace the defunct PBW service with a more scalable and manageable system. Rather than recreating a single, monolithic server, the new PBW2 is being engineered as a more distributed system. The goal is to have two separate types of server: the primary turn distribution server, and a set of back-end turn processing servers. The primary server will be run out of a world-class datacenter on a Linux VDS, and will only be tasked with running the front end of the system. It will collect and distribute savegame files, but it will not conduct any turn processing.
The set of secondary servers will be Windows boxes, tasked with the responsibility of processing turns. All game installation, version management, mod management, and shipset management issues will be delegating to these servers, allowing the primary server to be run with as little extra management as possible. This way, if the turn processing servers go down or are slow to update mod versions, game hosts can still use the PBW2 service to collect and distribute savegame files.
The PBW2 project will be implemented in 3 phases, according to the road map. For the Phase 1, we will only be working on the front end server. Until Phase 2, all turn processing will be done manually by the game hosts. During Phase 2, we will be developing a program game hosts can run on their machines to automatically process their games, using their own installations of SE4/5/etc. During Phase 3, we hope to expand this auto-process program to allow trusted parties to run general processing servers, capable of processing turns for other game hosts that prefer to not process their turns on their own.
The original Space Empires Play By Web, created by Admiral and maintained by Geoschmo, was taken offline Jan 20, 2009, after a fatal hard drive failure wiped out critical data. You can read all about it over on Shrapnel Forums. We here at PBW2 deeply appreciate the dedication and hard work of the staff of the original PBW.
PBW2 is an attempt to replace the defunct PBW service with a more scalable and manageable system. Rather than recreating a single, monolithic server, the new PBW2 is being engineered as a more distributed system. The goal is to have two separate types of server: the primary turn distribution server, and a set of back-end turn processing servers. The primary server will be run out of a world-class datacenter on a Linux VDS, and will only be tasked with running the front end of the system. It will collect and distribute savegame files, but it will not conduct any turn processing.
The set of secondary servers will be Windows boxes, tasked with the responsibility of processing turns. All game installation, version management, mod management, and shipset management issues will be delegating to these servers, allowing the primary server to be run with as little extra management as possible. This way, if the turn processing servers go down or are slow to update mod versions, game hosts can still use the PBW2 service to collect and distribute savegame files.
The PBW2 project will be implemented in 3 phases, according to the road map. For the Phase 1, we will only be working on the front end server. Until Phase 2, all turn processing will be done manually by the game hosts. During Phase 2, we will be developing a program game hosts can run on their machines to automatically process their games, using their own installations of SE4/5/etc. During Phase 3, we hope to expand this auto-process program to allow trusted parties to run general processing servers, capable of processing turns for other game hosts that prefer to not process their turns on their own.
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