Recording in the bush this time with my new recorder, so you can hear the birds in stereo, this is a podcast about getting the deployment details worked out.

It was quite a bit of struggle to get it working correctly, but once the deployment does work with Java Web Start, it is pretty smooth. But the most refreshing thing about recent developments has been a big simplification on the server side. I actually said goodbye to Hibernate and Postgres, and with it all the configuration that those require. Many dependencies melted like snow.

I like the idea of making deployment of the game really easy, so maybe it will spread to hundreds of servers eventually, and they could be federated. Now, without the database, there's really only one thing you have to set up and that is an environment variable TETRAGOTCHI_HOME to point to a directory.

The players and their hashed passwords are stored in an XML file there, and a tree of subdirectories grows as the game progresses, where the world is persisted every minute. This will enable a time machine, since we will be able to return to a place and time to relive it. I suspect that it may take a while for people to fully appreciate what that means.

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