When in the hour does the server save building placement?

[Vattic]

As the title says. I ask this because of how people have lost building work with the server going down and if I knew when exactly it was supposed to save I could build not long before and be reassured that it was safe.

Cheers.

[loftar]

In order to balance I/O spikes temporally, it is intentionally indeterminable, and in fact, different parts of the map are saved at different times.

I am truly sorry for all the crashes, though. I am embarrassed to say that almost all of the crash-causing bugs so far have been simple things which I really have no excuse not to have thought of in advance (and in fact, the kinds of things I usually do think of in advance). On the bright side, the number of bugs in the server has decreased radically over the past two days. I thank you all for your patience in the matter*.

* Though it should be mentioned that it has been worse. In the days of old, maps weren't saved at all except on orderly server shutdown and character data only on orderly logout, so a crash could easily result in days of lost progress. You guys nowadays don't know how lucky you are. In my days, we built our entire camps thrice over, in rain, snow and hail simultaneously, and we liked it.

[theTrav]

Heheh, it's good that you're taking some care to preserve our work, but don't stress too much, I'm sure everyone here knows it's all unstable and probably will be for a few months at least, and then there'll be upgrades to the map generator to take into account as well in which case everything goes.

[loftar]

Maybe I should at least mention that character date are saved upon logout, upping your stats (both on the skill attributes and personal beliefs), buying skills and whenever a food event triggers (when you fill up the food meter, that is).

[Vattic]

Do you save it all before purposefully shutting the server down?

[loftar]

That is the intention, but the last couple of times, the server has aborted in the malloc routines during shutdown. I'm not sure why just yet, and I'm afraid I'm razing malloc fences or doing some other kind of core fandango, because those things can be hard to debug. I'll try to valgrind the server for some debugging, but I'm afraid the error might not be detected if it's not used "for real", and I'm afraid valgrind would make it too slow to be used with real players.