[Gandalf Parker]

Servers are perfect for such things. Projects which can take a full day of computing would be fine. Im not tying up my desktop or slowing my usual activities by having it do some major project in the background all day. Ive often wished that more projects actually took that into account. Generators often give up excellent actions because it makes the generation time too long for anyone to put up with. PbEM style games (like Dominions) often cut out some options because the devs feel that most players would not put up with the time it takes (such as extensive AI thinking). I cant really argue their logic but often I wish it stayed in at least as an option. After all its not like the community here NEEDS 30 maps daily in each of tiny, small, medium, large, huge, mega sizes. Even if I only generated ONE map a day it would be a huge boost.

One example is that the DomMap generator was forever without a blur routine even though it made the maps much easier on the eyes. I wrote a script to take the generated maps, save the white pixels, blur the map, restore the white pixels, and resave. It was very time intensive but added a nice new optional group to the maps.

Oh and only one of my servers went down. The main one. The old one (which originally housed Dom2minions) is still up and still running games. I could shift everything to it but I dont expect the main server to be down that much longer.