Synchronising

[Raephire]

I find that there are discrepencies between world save and character save. Logged in or not, every 15 minutes the whole game should save. Map and characters.

This means that, logging off will offer no protection from server crash, but it will garantee that your character does not lose hours of hard work, It also means that you wont lose important items from server crash, you merely revert to where both were, at longest, 15 minutes prior.

This would create a more balanced gameplay, and prevent "duplicate items, or "lost" items from server crash..

OH!, restarting a server should autosave it, everything. Characters aswell, I notice when I get popups in game, the game world doesnt save, it reverts, and it's a real pain.

[Peter]

Seems that the saving process takes a long time; consider that it is saving 5000^2 tiles which could contain a very large assortment of possible values. I believe that only small areas are saved at once.

What would be nice is if buildings and the exterior areas around them where saved at the same time; by the way, anyone know what to do with two spinning wheels?

Of course, as much as I hate to toot my own horn, my psudo-fractal world-generation system would decrease save problems by requiring that only changes have to be saved...

[Tahin]

He's right, of course. Assuming that the terrain generation is fast enough, it could be completely ignored and the only thing that would need to be saved would be changes, such as dirt/stone roads, and buildings. I'd imagine that would speed things up a little.

Also, yeah. When you send a restart message, that next minute should be spent saving everything. If it takes longer than that, it's fine, as long as we're aware that it's currently saving.

And it should really save characters and their location at the same time to prevent duplicates. That, or just store every single item in the game uniquely, though that might result in... issues.

[theTrav]

It's an alpha, you are going to lose hours of progress, eventually there's going to be a map wipe and you'll loose weeks if not months of established territory.

They're trying to make it so you don't lose your character, but it is definitely possible that at some point all characters may need to be wiped.


I'm not saying all this to discourage you, I'm just saying that you should try to play the game with a light heart and not get too invested in any one particular thing.
Ideally the work that you're doing should be rewarding in and of itself.


Specific to the crash save bug, this has been mentioned in other threads, there's a bug, he's working on it. The hourly save and the character saves are probably implemented to save on processing time. I don't find it too bad, I spend my skill pretty regularly, I doubt I've lost any more than 10k in LP since I started to it, and probably not more than 4 hours of work. Which is tiny when you consider the total amount of LP and hours I've clocked up overall.