??? Wot happened ???

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thebigbear
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??? Wot happened ???

Post by thebigbear »

I got that error message about there being a problem with the receiver thread and when the game came back up ALL the progress I had made in 3 HOURS was GONE!!! Now, in the past folks have dismissed my receiver errors as being a problem with my server not being fast enough, but is this new problem with the server that wipes out 3 hours of progress? I lost a LOT of play time here--monsters killed, map opened, quests solved, money earned, equipment found and purchased, explorer markers found. I got to tell you, I'm kinda mad about all that I've lost. Can it be restored?
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GolfLima
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by GolfLima »

* this realy seldom happens
* all ig char lost their progress since their last save ((relogg))
* as i know it cant be restored
* i lost my progress too
* sorry for that
thebigbear
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by thebigbear »

OK, that's it. My computer sux. The server sux. My local server sux. The game sux. Everything sux about every on-line game I ever tried to play. Don't send me that lame email that "I haven't played in a while and would I please tell you why I stopped playing?" This is my answer--your game is un-reliable. Some server is un-reliable. Everything is un-reliable. Just smile this shit--the whole internet is un-reliable. It's always "somebody else" messed up. Done. Finished.
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Achae Eanstray
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Achae Eanstray »

I don't know any game that hasn't frozen at some point sad to say. Everyone that has played here for any length of time has had the same thing happen. Join our club :) .. anyway for something major you do like get a big treasure, buy expensive armor, even get gems on tax day it might be a good idea to log and save your efforts before getting back in game. If that rare instance happens, you can only go back to the last log time max. As @GolfLima said, this rarely happens but yes, sometimes it can and it happened not to just you but to all in game characters.
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Morbius
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Morbius »

This has happened to me in very important moments in Illarion. Although it is a very rare occasion, as Achae said it has happened to all of us at some point and we can all testify as to how how frustrating it is.

I think I lost some runes (player taught skills that were combined to make spells in old illarion) when it happened to me once, which was rather frustrating. But everything can get re-learnt or bought again.

Some potentially helpful statistics:

On average humans are awake and alive for approximately 657,450 hours in their life times. You only lost 3 hours. So it's not that bad. In the grand scheme of things. >.>
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Athlon
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Athlon »

Hab gestern Abend durch den Serverschluckauf auch die Arbeit eines ganzen Tages verloren und alles was ich gehandelt hatte .
An sowas gewöhnt man sich im laufe der Zeit .
Sinister
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Sinister »

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Last edited by Sinister on Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
thebigbear
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by thebigbear »

Well, its been a very LONG time since I had to re-log and save files and such. I thought computer science had gone beyond this point. Yes, I remember back in the 90's when I got my first computer that you had to save work frequently because the computer blew a mind-fart and all your work was lost, or the power hiccuped for a moment and again you lost all your work. Well, I guess I can try to remember these things and "save my progress" from time to time. Glad cars aren't like computers or we'd all be riding horses still.

Thank you several responders for your encouragement--I really was seriously PO'ed about losing my progress the other day. Guess I needed time to cool off and take the chance of reading this forum one last time.
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Gishmel
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Gishmel »

Glad you didn't leave forever! Illarion has been a long and wild ride for me. I'm just glad this game is still so important to people that they get angry over some hours loss. I really do feel with you, man. I've been there all too often. Just think of all the progress you didn't lose thanks to dying or even worse, an ending. Smile games with an ending. I've been seeing reliable server status for weeks BTW. Can't wait to Rp with you. I read your interests and shit and was like.. damn, did I write this?
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CJK
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by CJK »

thebigbear wrote: I thought computer science had gone beyond this point.

Sorry if this is a bit of a long time to respond to an inactive thread, but I just wanted to have down a tiny bit of the CS behind why this works the way it does. Mostly because everybody will experience it some time, and I think it's worthwhile to have some idea why it works the way it does. I'll keep it as basic as possible because A) the weeds and details aren't relevant to most people and B) I don't want to give inaccurate information because I'm not an admin and don't work with the server.


Everything you do during a session is stored in the server's RAM. Specifically, your session has a thread spun out just for it, and that thread will terminate either when your session ends or the server is shut down/crashes.

Communicating with that RAM is pretty quick, especially compared to communicating with the permanent storage on disk. I/O with the disk might as well take an eternity in comparison, and is to be avoided at all costs. If every action was immediately written to disk, the server would spend all its time interacting with storage and very little actually running the game. Bigger games are able to get around this by spending a lot more on their server infrastructure. Illarion e.V. is a nonprofit, which doesn't really make it easy to throw money at hardware.


Many things can cause a server crash. Server crashes are inevitable to an extent because software cannot be perfect. Unknown bugs in the code could cause the server to crash unexpectedly, just like they cause your browser, the game client, Office products, etc. to randomly crash. The OS could crash for reasons beyond our control, bringing down the whole system. Too many players online at once will use up a lot of RAM (keep track of all those threads) and a lot of processor power. A power outage at the physical site of the server could bring it down. Every server will have downtime, developers and IT professionals just try to minimize that downtime as best as possible.


When your session ends under normal circumstances (Disconnect, log out, kicked, etc.) the state of your thread is written to the database, which is on disk. This happens pretty infrequently in the scheme of things, so the cost of writing to disk is no big deal.


When your session ends because the server crashed, nothing can be saved to the DB. This is for a pretty straightforward reason: a program that is crashing is generally unable to execute any code. It is only really capable of being terminated, or of causing the system as a whole to shut down.


Potential server changes have been discussed to mitigate the problem of a server crash when there are very long lived threads, like after a 3+ hour session is lost. Some viable possibilities, which haven't been agreed to or implemented but are possible might be like these:

A) The server automatically saves state every X minutes/hours. This is doable, although saving the data for every user all at once could possibly result in server hang-ups whenever it happened. Like the game freezing for a few seconds whenever it happens. Perhaps a timer tracking the session length could trigger a save for your session every X minutes of the active session.

B) Allow users control over when their session is saved. This is actually pretty dangerous to do, because it has the potential for abuse. If I can find a way to make the server save my progress a thousand times a second, I can probably crash the server whenever I want.

C) Have the scripts trigger a save every time some type of special action is performed. Save after acquiring a pure element, giant map, etc. If the player is able to trigger this every time they pick up the element, it has a lot of room for abuse in the same way B would.



TL;DR Your session is only saved at logout because it prevents the server from being incredibly slow, crashing, and costing a lot more money to run. Also, the server is worked on by essentially just Vilarion. Crashes will happen, although they are as rare as possible. However, any good gamer should live by the motto "Save early; save often" anyway. If you're afraid of losing progress, just relog every hour or less.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by Estralis Seborian »

To add one point: If you want to help the team, report exactly what you did at the very moment the server crashed. Maybe your action was the reason. This way, we can track the problem and solve it.

I experienced similar crashes and rewinds in almost every online game I played, including various AAA titles with million euro/dollar budgets. That is not an excuse but it stresses the point that we can only try to mimimised the risk. Help us by reporting server crashes!
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CJK
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Re: ??? Wot happened ???

Post by CJK »

Estralis Seborian wrote: I experienced similar crashes and rewinds in almost every online game I played, including various AAA titles with million euro/dollar budgets.

Yep, this is unfortunately just a bit of the necessary result of working in RAM. Writing stuff to persistent storage is just so expensive, time-wise, in comparison.

Writing to a DB on a HDD can be 100,000x slower than writing that data to RAM (including if the DB is loaded into RAM). Therefore, you just try to never touch it with a ten foot pole except when necessary.
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