Back In Business (Patreon)

The new computer is assembled and running well! But if you followed along on Discord or Twitter you'll know it's been a trying time getting there. So what happened?

The Technical Postmortem

A dead cooling fan on my old PC caused my CPU to overheat which made the PC shutdown randomly. I screwed up taking apart the computer to fix it and ended up having to buy a new rig. I've been hoping to do that in the near future anyway, so that wasn't a big deal. But after getting my new PC set up it quickly started shutting down randomly as well. Temperature and voltage readings were fine. The only shared component between the two computers was the GPU, but it also seems fine. After a few days of banging my head against the wall I finally figured out the culprit was my USB setup.

I got a new, powered USB 3 hub shortly before this whole mess started. Since I can't use a keyboard anyway, I sit at a couch/TV setup while I work. I wanted a way to plug in various devices next to me while only running one cord across the room. Turns out USB 3 has a shorter cable length spec than USB 2. So while I knew I would be sacrificing data bandwidth I didn't need by plugging in a USB 3 hub into a USB 2 extender, I didn't know I was opening up the door for bad things to happen by using an extension cable over 10 feet long. For whatever reason, these off-spec signals resulted in my computer shutting down/going to sleep/restarting sporadically. I only thought to check the USB setup because Windows was logging the shutdown events as user initiated. Even then I had to rule out problems with my voice recognition setup before my thoughts turned to the USB hub.

The wild part is this was probably happening on my old computer too but the CPU overheating happened at the same time and was a much more obvious problem.

Looking Forward

I'm still getting my dev environment reinstalled but work on the remake should resume soon. Unfortunately this whole ordeal has definitely delayed the beta test. My best estimate at this time would be it starting sometime in the latter half of January.

I do apologize for the delay. I know some people signed up for the Patreon this month in anticipation of the beta test. It was only ever an estimated date but I still feel bad missing it.

Thank you so much for your continued support! I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season. May 2021 bring better things for us all!