Genesis Forums

Could you guys introduce a simple flag that will be raised if the game was shut down properly.
If the flag wasn't set, then on next server restart ALL the items will be recovered, not only glowing.
A simple fix to avoid lots of aggravation over those crashes.

mallor wrote:Could you guys introduce a simple flag that will be raised if the game was shut down properly.
If the flag wasn't set, then on next server restart ALL the items will be recovered, not only glowing.
A simple fix to avoid lots of aggravation over those crashes.

Maybe.
The way player saving is done its a bit tricky to do without opening the possibility for item duping.

Better a couple items duped than hours of gathering resources wasted.

That intense imbue you've been saving up for months to make.. Go figure.

Can we reconsider my suggestion now please?

I understand what is the issue though.

When LPMud was first coded, HDD was expensive, the LPMud wasn't designed to save items, at all.

The idea was that the server would start, people would do stuff, things would end on RAM, money was a variable of the char (like HP, Mana, etc...), and server would regularly be restarted, resetting quests, items, etc...

The "glowing" items, is a technical innovation, where some items have their format prepared to be serialized and saved to the HDD, even then, some LPMuds struggle with it (one I played, the way it was done, was that the players database saved only the item name, and during 'recovery' it would create a entire new item, with matching name... thus causing bugs if two different items had same name)

To save ALL items, it would require I guess making a entire memory dump of everything, and restoring everything (including whatever caused the crash in first place), or changing how the items work, so they can be all serialized, introducing potential dupe bugs.

and itis not a "couple items duped", dupe bugs in other games sometimes crippled the game quite hard, for example a dupe bug in Second Life led to the creation of a "virus" ring, a ring that would dupe itself, and filled the server RAM and HDD constantly, crasing it repeateadly (also the "virus" ring if I remember correctly deleted players money, including money they paid for with RL money).

Or in some early MMOs, where online economy wasn't well known, and players figured they could dupe inbue-related items and crash the whole economy.

Character is a file, when you type "save" all the saving items are saved in that file to be recovered in case you quit or reboot happens. You want to tell me saving all the items for couple of hundreds of players will be space stressing? We aren't at 90's.

As for dupping, what I've suggested is a simple algorithm, which stores 2 versions of a file and recovers one of them, depending on a flag. Please do elaborate how it can be abused for duping.

After the last crash I made a timer to send "save" once per hour, hoping it would help.

It didn't.

It sucks that such crashes penalize active players (if your stuff was in guild racks, you'd be unaffected) - while those of us out in the world lost everything non-saving and all the saving items became non-saving.

Is potential item duplication really the big issue here, as Mallor stated? Greneth kept telling us that Knights have reported duplicating racks for over a year and nobody cared enough to go and fix a deliberate bug exploit, I honestly doubt that players would ever be able to exploit a bug of duplicating items by crashing genesis?

Zugzug wrote:It sucks that such crashes penalize active players (if your stuff was in guild racks, you'd be unaffected) - while those of us out in the world lost everything non-saving and all the saving items became non-saving.

I don't think so, unless it affected different guild racks differently (that would be really unfair). Our racks, which were groaning and creaking under the weight of lovely equipment, became an echo chamber. Totally cleaned out.

sylphan wrote:

Zugzug wrote:It sucks that such crashes penalize active players (if your stuff was in guild racks, you'd be unaffected) - while those of us out in the world lost everything non-saving and all the saving items became non-saving.

I don't think so, unless it affected different guild racks differently (that would be really unfair). Our racks, which were groaning and creaking under the weight of lovely equipment, became an echo chamber. Totally cleaned out.

That's a punishment for hoarding, we keep just enough for all the members