Official News - page 1

FIXING THE CRASH BUG

by Hazed

Last weekend there was another game crash, but this time, something was different. The difference was that we had some very useful reports from players with logs that showed what they were doing at the time of the crash - and one of them had the information Bella needed in order to fix the problem.

The crash turned out to be caused by a player dying on a planet that did not have a hospital of its own. Well, there was a location that looked like a hospital, but it did not have the hospital property set, which amounts to the same thing. What's supposed to happen if there's no local hospital is that the corpse is transported back to Earth's medical facility to be cloned and revived. But the game couldn't find Earth, and got so confused it gave up and crashed.

The code was written some time ago, when death was first turned on in Fed DataSpace, which was long before the interstellar link opened and players could visit other systems. It was tested thoroughly at the time it was written, when all that existed was the Solar System, but had not been revisited since the advent of player planets.

Fixing the bug was very simple - the hard thing was identifying which bit of the game code had the bug in it. Bella was only able to do that because the dying player sent in a log. This shows just how important it is to send us details of what you were doing if you are in the game when there's a crash. Don't assume that what you were doing wasn't important - you never know when something in your log might be a small piece of the jigsaw which, put together with other logs, points to the cause of the problem.

We don't know whether this bug has been causing all of the infrequent crashes; there may be something else that only happens occasionally; but if this is why the game occasionally falls over then it's worth pointing out that we could have fixed it much, much sooner if the player involved had emailed us the log.

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