XBOX-HQ.COM - XLink One Development News: The Servers

Team XLink posted more about the developemnt of the new XLink One, which will replace XLink Kai:

* What are the orbital servers
The orbitals are the servers that you connect to when you sign into XLink. They in turn communicate with our central database server, which resides in a secure undisclosed location. The orbital servers also communicate with each other directly to keep everything synchronized.

* What's changing
The new orbital server is a complete rewrite of the existing system. The XLink Kai orbital software only runs on Windows, but the new one supports Windows, Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD servers so we'll have more flexibility in adding to the mesh. Hopefully this will result in better coverage outside of North America.

* What's new
Most of the changes to the orbitals are behind the scenes to support new features. The biggest visible improvement is that you'll automatically reconnect if your session drops, even if the server you were connected to goes down and you have to jump onto a different server. If you're in the middle of a game, you probably won't even notice that it happened. If the whole mesh goes down..well..you're still out of luck. The database that keeps track of everything is going through some improvements as well. All of the problems with strange contact list behavior are gone, and we're adding a bunch of new information to support new features (clan support anyone?)

* Where is it
It's not done yet. The framework for the server is done, and it runs just fine. The new engine can connect to it, and it can talk to the new database server and all of the other orbital servers. Features are being added daily, and I'll post updates as work progresses.

Official Site: http://www.teamxlink.co.uk
Discuss: http://www.xbox-hq.com