1  |   Order by index

Oct 7, 2003, 1:39am

Near the evening of October 6, UberMonkey and I began experiencing crash and freeze problems around the ground zero building. Our browsers would completely grey out the 3D pane and chat history areas, consume 100% CPU, and only do this near Proxima's ground zero.

The property was cleared and reloaded, however there are still recurring crash issues. Proxima's game controller is now also experiencing random (and bizarre) disconnections from the worldserver, while everybody else seems to be fine.

These world conditions have forced us to temporarily close Proxima to the public until they can be resolved. If any of you can offer advice about this type of situation, I would be glad to hear it. I have never experienced such problems with ziOn.

--
Tony M.

Oct 7, 2003, 2:38pm

I'd just like to let everyone know that these issues have been dealt with,
and Proxima is once again open to the public.

For anyone who may be interested, I would like to describe the problem we
were having:
A number of "blank" objects had appeared in the world, primarily
concentrated around GZ. These objects had a 0 value for all attributes,
including owner. Loading a large number of these objects in the browser
would result in an always-fatal glitch. For the moment, I have solved the
problem by simply adding a hack to delete any object with an invalid "owner"
attribute, however I am quite curious how such data could come to exist to
begin with (my hypothesis is that aw_object_load () allows one to input any
data, even *bad* data, which can potentially crash the browser... IMO the
server should be checking for these sorts of potential bad data).

While I am unable to confirm this, I believe these "invisible objects"
(which did not even display a missing obj triangle) were also responsible
for severe performance degradation which has been reported near Proxima GZ
lately, and request that anyone who had been experiencing such issues
compare their previous performance with current, and report findings to me
should there prove to be any change.

On a related note, Proxima's game controller has just been converted to a
dynamic memory system, which should result in better overall performance.
World expansion is the current project goal, and as such a number of new
weapons, NPCs, turrets, shops, properties, factions, etc. will be appearing
over the next couple days. Also, look for a detailed manual quite soon.

-UberMonkey

[View Quote]

Oct 7, 2003, 3:29pm

As a matter of fact, you can skip the "built timestamp" when saving,
then loading objects, and create a world with all objects missing the
build date <g>, I have not tried yet to leave out the owner (should
default to 0 then) or object name.

You can delete such invalid items also in a text editor (make a propdump
and delete all lines starting with "0 " (which would be owner 0 then) -
for those who do not have a bot who can check automatically.

In the server logfile, you can see who uploaded the wrong objects and
ask them to improve their upload program. :-)



[View Quote]

Oct 7, 2003, 10:01pm

ISP trouble left me without an Internet connection for most of today. It has been restored, but apparently I now have a new IP address. It will take at least a day or two for the DNS changes to proxima.uni.cc to propogate; someone else controls homeunix.uni.cc, so that may take longer.

For now, the homeunix.uni.cc site may be accessed by IP:

http://24.175.37.134

There is no workaround for the proxima.uni.cc site.

--
Tony M.

1  |   Order by index