v0.1.29b (Early Access)

A fix for something v0.1.29 broke: a cable run straight from one port to another was taking a detour through the rack's cable manager instead of going direct. This release also starts modelling the traffic your machines send each other, which until now was almost entirely missing.

Added

• Your machines now talk to each other, and it shows up on the network. Until now practically all traffic in your datacentre was headed out to the internet, which is not how a real one behaves: most of what a datacentre carries never leaves the building. An app talking to its database, a database keeping its copies in step, an object store rebalancing, a content cache filling, a load balancer checking its backends and the machinery that runs your services all generate traffic between your own machines, and all of it now flows across your fabric on the real path between them.
• Where you put things now matters. Two machines on the same switch talk to each other without touching anything above it. Two on opposite sides of the room push their conversation up through the switches in between. So a chatty tenant whose database sits far from its app costs you fabric that a tightly packed one does not, and the links between your switches can now fill up on internal traffic alone.
• Different tenants are chatty in different amounts. A tenant running an app with a replicated database adds about a third again on top of its own traffic, because the app is talking to the database and the database is keeping its copies in step. A tenant running plain virtual machines barely moves. Expect the customers running real services to be the ones filling your fabric, and the ones just renting machines to be almost invisible on it.

Fixed

Cabling

• A cable from one port straight to another runs straight again. If you clicked a port and then clicked another port without clipping the run to anything, v0.1.29 sent it down into the rack's vertical cable manager and back out, rather than across. It happened to every direct patch, in the same rack or between racks, and there was no way to ask for the straight run you actually wanted.
• This was a side effect of the cable routing fix in v0.1.29, and only that. That release taught the game to recover a run whose manager lane was full, which was the right fix and is untouched here. The mistake was that a run you never routed looked identical to one the game had rerouted for you, so both got sent down the manager. Runs you clip yourself, to a finger pin, a roof hole or a rail passthrough, were never affected and still route exactly as you placed them.

Notes

Save compatible in both directions. Nothing about your world changed, only how existing cables are drawn, so a save from v0.1.29 opens here and a save from here opens on v0.1.29.

Load your save once and the direct runs already in it straighten out with it. You do not need to relay anything, and nothing else has to be done. Nothing is moved, nothing is unplugged and nothing goes down: the only change you will see is that those runs are drawn straight across instead of dipping into the manager and back out. Runs you clipped yourself are left exactly as you placed them, and so is a run the game had to reroute for you because a manager lane was full.

One small thing in your favour: a direct patch no longer takes up a slot in the rack's manager lane, because it is not using the manager, and the ones already in your save give their slot back on that same load. Those lanes fill only from runs you actually routed through them, so if you were close to filling one you now have more room than you did.

Expect your network numbers to go up, and your fabric to look busier than it did. Traffic between your own machines now accounts for a bit over a third of everything your datacentre carries, where before it was close to nothing. Nothing has been taken away from you and no hardware got worse: traffic that was always implied is now actually being carried and counted. A fabric that looked comfortably oversized may now look merely adequate, and links between switches that sat idle will show load. If a switch-to-switch link starts running hot, that is the game telling you something true about how your tenants are laid out.

That is well below a real datacentre, which runs nearer three quarters. That is deliberate for this release: your world was built when none of this traffic existed and your fabric was sized for that, so it starts low.

None of this is billed. Your customers pay for traffic leaving the building exactly as before, and internal chatter costs them nothing, so your revenue is unchanged.

Multiplayer sessions need every player on the same version, as with v0.1.29.