Following the March 11th earthquake that devastated large areas of north-eastern Japan in 2011, electricity supplies in Japan became less dependable. Blackouts without warning were - for the first time that I can remember - fairly common. Electricity supplies in total were cut by 14% to 19% over the whole country, and suppliers in the region where we live were diverting power to share with the other regions. We had a lot of flicker and brown-outs. People were asked as part of the effort to save power and we could no longer maintain our server reliably. In fact, a power-surge later did some damage. With the high deathtoll, most people in Japan felt a malaise and sadness about it all. It didn't seem appropriate to run a game server when electricity was in such short supply. Nobody from Japan was visiting the server either.
My son and I therefore made the decision to shut the server down and wait for awhile.
Everyone was rather depressed in Japan about the earthquake's effects for months. That region (Tohoku) still hasn't recovered, and the Fukushima disaster is ongoing with the government clearly lying about the consequences. On the personal side, I was fortunate not to lose anyone to the disaster itself, but we worried for one of my friends (an English teacher) who lived in a city that was both hit by the earthquake, then the tsunami. I later discovered that he survived and was staying at an emergency shelter, but nearly a year later I am unable to directly communicate with him. Some of my acquaintances, among many other foreigners who were living in Japan have since left the country. They took their families with them. I estimate that in my area, about half the foreigners have left. The economy is in a very bad way, despite the optimistic statistics that the Japanese government keeps trying to convince everyone of, and it's getting worse.
It's taken a long time to get back into the mood for operating a server for Tremulous again. The computer we used before was damaged, and we've had other problems with computers in the house. Still, a year after the earthquake, my son and I are planning on starting a Tremulous server again. We've been discussing the problems of the previous set-up of SenGoku for probably the past 2 months. However, we have to move on with the changing situations and be a little more thoughtful, instead of just madly enthusiastic (as we were before). The SenGoku server never attracted enough people before, and we believe part of the reason was the requirement of downloading the KoRx mod packages, which took too long for those with old Tremulous 1.1 and it's ridiculously slow download rates. Another part of the reason for the lack of activity was our numerous maps; again too much too download for most players. Those who did visit the server and play on it, generally were very positive about the smoothness and good connection. We did actually start to collect a few regulars - - - until the earthquake & tsunami.
So, this is an announcement that SenGoku will be back online soon, 11 months after the March 11th, 2011 earthquake. But it'll just be plain old vanilla 1.1 Tremulous for awhile. I have no interest in the GPP beta because there's nobody on most of those servers; they're dead nearly all the time except for two, and their player numbers make it seem a waste of effort.
I've been getting involved with the TremZ project as well. It if gets somewhere beyond a poorly done alpha release, I may turn SenGoku into a TremZ (or whatever name they decide on) server. Not sure currently.
