StarQuest #6: Alpha, Beta, Gamma
Originally posted on Jun 21, 2014
After the fateful meeting, I began to work hard on SQ. At the time, I was writing all of the code for it, as George had not yet learned how to code. He worked on the texture pack, mostly, and collaborated on design decisions. You can thank him for the rank structure; I was actually very opposed to the idea at first. We worked our way through Alpha testing, testing the code at every turn. Mostly, alpha testing took the form of me, deacs, theBigdavidp1, TheGoldilox, and sometimes George flying around in derpy starfighters and trying to kill each other. In those days, both deacs and I developed our iconic starships- together, we built deacs's bat gunship, and I built the first versions of my personal starfighter and space freighter. At that time I was also working on the planets- first Quavara, then Bosquevine (that's how it used to be spelled) then the rest of the original star system. After a few months, we got everything working- I finished up with the code, and George finished up with all of the configuration and resource pack work. I worked with Thedrew655 to create the original StarQuest video trailer and, in one of the greatest moments of my life, released it on the frontpage of the RPMC forums. We planned to open the server a week after the trailer went live.
Up until that point, none of the RPMC players had had any idea what I was doing. Even most of the staff knew nothing. So the StarQuest release was a massive shock to the playerbase, and I absolutely loved it. There were tons of questions, tons of hype, tons of interest in the new server. All of my months of quiet work had paid off. When we finally unwhitelisted the server on October 28th, 2013 there was a flood of people- about 30, which was respectable seeing as we released it to a server that averaged about 10 people online at high time. We immediately discovered that not everything worked quite as well as we had planned, and had a hectic time trying to fix everything that was broken. There were a lot of stress-related problems, as the server machine we were running on at that time was not very powerful, and we had not been able to test for stress-related failure of the code. But, after a month or so of beta, we were doing pretty well and had gotten to the point where we were quite close to having fixed everything. I received several offers to take SQ to other companies - one from madrealms, who decided that the StarQuest concept looked pretty good after all, and one from DF, both of which we declined. After that, DF attempted to contact me directly and get me to take SQ to them, bypassing George and the other high staff. I declined to backstab my friends. DF then proceeded to purchase the domain name starquestmc.com. At the time, we were operating from regalphoenixmc.com/starquest, but had plans to purchase that domain and switch to it when we left beta, and Zreed knew it. We didn't find that the domain had been taken until a month or two later, so we assumed that Zreed had just given up on SQ. He put up a server for StarMade, a space-based minecraft knockoff, and we took that as a sign that he had moved on. So we forgot about it.
All good things must end. I sat down at my computer one day to a scene of utter pandemonium. To this day, I do not know exactly what had caused it, but our server machine had been reset- all of our data was lost. Of course we suspected Zreed- it was just too convenient for him- but we still have no proof of that. The world saves and the configurations were lost. The original world files were intact on my personal computer, as was all of the custom code. We still had the RPMC website, as it was hosted externally on Enjin.
We spent the next month or so reconstructing SQ from the ashes. We had figured that it would take about a week to put everything back together, but a lot of things got in the way and it ended up taking much longer than that. RPMC decided not to reform, so George switched over to StarQuest full time, and we made an agreement to be equal partners, seeing as George's company no longer owned mine. Finally, everything was put back together and we ran a short trial period that I'm going to call "Gamma" to make sure everything was running smoothly before we finally, at long last, released the server to the general public by posting a thread in the servers section of the minecraft forums.
Next time: opening day, the Great Noobrush, and bungeecord fun.
In other news: be prepared for an awesome announcement almost as cool as the starquest one, sometime in the next few days.