Lord of the Files

Well, I feel good this morning, in some whooping Jerry Lee Lewis great balls of fire way. Unusual state for me, and won't last liable another five minutes, but it looks like a Great Bug has been put to rest, at last. It took me a while, always does, but I finally had the idea to grab the total object count from missionGroup, and track it. When I saw the results from that, I knew I was onto something.

And there was the root cause of the "deafness" bug... mobs are spawned and placed without spawnspheres, but underneath it all a spawn marker still gets inserted to pop from. I'd written that basic mob code four years ago, and plumb forgot about that.

And so every time an NPC was inserted, an invisible spawn marker was going in, too. And not getting culled when the mob was removed. Leading, over time, to thousands and thousands of invisible spawn markers, piling up to densities which collapsed into a networking black hole on the map.

Engine is amazingly stable, even with that much constant stupid but eventually it 1) first stops listening for new connections, and 2) chokes. What was causing the collapse--in new, empty zones--was the ramping up of mob insertion as the maps finally start to get missions and ambushers.

Rewards were almost immediate--one tester has been soldiering through endless crashes of late, because his computer seems a lot more sensitive to maps filled with useless objects than the rest of the testers. Last night, he played for hours--with a friend onboard for the first time--and didn't crash.

So they fought the Ssarg at Trevarium... and the game got out of the way and let them play.

Great balls of fire!


Here's the code:

echo (missionGroup.getCount());

and

function missionGroup::onObjectAdded(%this,%obj)
{
	echo (%obj.getName());
	echo (%obj.getClassName());
}

Pretty basic stuff, but it took me forever to think to look there... invisible objects are invisible, and I generally look at code just written as proximate cause of any failures.

But if a dedicated server is hanging up after a couple of days, though continuing to run for anyone logged in for another day or two, or you get mysterious disconnects for no apparent reason in a level "with nothing in it", look at the objects in the map at run time.

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE? TO CRUSH THE BUGS, TO SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, TO HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR CLOSED TICKETS!