Twinity is still in beta and we thus still need to improve many things. We got comments from members who want to learn more about what is going on behind the scenes. That’s why we are happy to introduce a new section in our newsletter with updates about the Twinity development progress.

I will post the same text here on the blog, to give you an opportunity to comment on the development news.

You might have noticed recently an increase in the number of patches. This comes from our new strategy to release bug-fixes and features as frequently as possible. To keep the disturbance to the community to a minimum, we try our best to update Twinity only within two fixed release windows per week: Tuesday and Thursday between 11 and 12am CET.

Last week the patches included fixes for a crash on Athon processors, fix for a freeze during teleport and faster city loading. Also, Twinity remembers your last position in the city now. The next patch will fix an error with flat-mates, should fix a bad freeze during chatting, and will improve the performance on machines with small video memory.

Also you might have noticed a couple of short server outages last week. We updated our MMO server two weeks ago and had some nasty issues with outdated configuration files. Since mid-last week no further server-crashes occurred, so we think we have caught the problem.

For the next weeks our main focus will be stability. We fight hard to reduce crashes, freezes and server drops. This requires some low-level changes on the thread-synchronization layer and our resource management. These improvements take time and some cool features (such as vehicles) unfortunately have to be put on hold, until we are happy with the stability.

Other things we are working on are better media playback, more reliable voice-chat, better performance with long friend lists, and a more beautiful female avatar. More about this in the next newsletter.