TUESDAY’S OUTAGE – AND A MISSING PLANET
by Hazed
Apologies for the outage on Tuesday when the game failed to fire up after the reset. Thanks to those players who alerted us to the problem. Unfortunately for various reasons neither Alan nor I were around to check our email for a while so the game stayed down for around six hours.
Once we knew about the outage, Alan checked the log file to see if there were any error messages to tell him what was stopping the game from running. But there weren’t any. So he used deductive reasoning and assumed the problem was with a new planet he had linked in that day. Sure enough, when he pulled the files out, the game fired up.
He then spent the next few days trying to figure out what was wrong with this planet. First he looked at the files to see if there were any illegal characters in them – this does happen sometimes if people cut and paste descriptions from Word into the Workbench editor, or if they make changes to the file outside the editor, and the game doesn’t like it at all. But despite the fact that there were some unusual location descriptions that used ASCII art to draw maps of the exits (very ingeniously done, by the way), he couldn’t find anything that would stop the game firing up.
Next Alan wondered if the unusual circumstances of the new planet might have something to do with it. The PO was the first person to take advantage of our new offer to sell players extra planets for slithies, and the new planet would be the seventh in his system, and the third bio planet.
Clearly the game shouldn’t put a limit on the number of planets allowed in a system – after all, Sol has far more than seven planets. Alan also couldn’t see why having more than two bio planets would cause a problem.
So it was back to the drawing board.
Finally on Friday morning he cracked the problem. It turned out there was nothing wrong with the planet files at all – the problem was in the script that Alan runs to link a new planet into the game’s database. The script runs in Python, and a new version of Python did things slightly differently. The result was that one of the planet’s data files did not get created as it should, and that stopped the game in its tracks when it tried to load the planet.
This was a classic example of making an incorrect assumption about where a problem lies – first, being led astray by ASCII art in the descriptions, then by the unusual situation of being the first system with seven planets, and three bio planets.
Still, Alan figured it out in the end – and the new planet is now happily orbiting its star.
