[CF-Devel] Apartments & Server crashes - Bad voodoo...

[Mark Wedel]

Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote:
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      Scenario:
     
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      1) Enter apartment
     
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      2) Drop ultra-cool artifact on floor
     
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      3) Exit apartment
     
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      4) Play a while
     
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      5) Server crashes
     
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      Results:
     
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      The ultra-cool artifact is GONE!
     
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      Not in player inventory, not in apartment!
     
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      This is REALLY BAD VOODOO...  It was a VERY ULTRA COOL ARTIFACT!
     
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      Why isn't the apartment saved when you exit?  I think that the
     
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      player autosaved during step 4, which is why the artifact is
     
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      no longer in his inventory, but the apartment did not
     
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      autosave...
     
     
  Define 'play for a while'?

  The players apartment should get saved in a reasonable amount of time after he 
exits (no worse than 5 minutes unless you have changed some of the config.h 
options).

  Maps are not saved the instant a player leaves them to increase performance - 
loading and saving maps is a relatively costly operation, so when a player 
leaves a map, it stays in memory for some amount of time so that if they revisit 
it, it is still in memory (think of the main city map - player hops into a shop, 
but are probably going to be back into the city in a pretty short period).

  If a player can arbitrarily crash the server, all sorts of abuses are open - 
there is no good way to fix those abuses except to make sure the server won't crash.