Non-pausing saves?

[platypus]

Gotta put my 2 cents in here:

I've played UOSA since one month after the server started. I recently came back after basically quitting (only logged in to refresh houses) over a year ago. I noticed the server is better than ever before, except for TWO things-- no events and horrible world saves. These two things make me hardly ever play, due to lack of motivation to LEET PVP and farm balrons again for the 1000th day in a row.

The events topic is one already talked about in other threads, but the world saves are getting ridiculous. Due to 75% of the population of this shard being griefers with no life, people will continue to hoard shit just because they can. If we had another CUB event, this would get rid of 90% of the items in players' houses.

Dunno how many of you were here for the previous CUB, but this is how it works. You get a varying amount of tickets for trashing an item into a special trash can at the bank. Better weapons/armor/items gave higher ticket values. Pretty much every player on here trashed all of their items except power+, fort+, etc. They also ran crafters as much as possible, crafting and trashing items (also reducing the amount of resources in-game).

Admins - please read this: Yes, players will continue to hoard items after another CUB is done. But for the time being, world saves drop back down to 1 second. At least for a year or two, the problem is solved. Then you do another CUB to fix the problem when it arises again. Seriously, who cares about more players having neon hair or dyed furniture. Its 2012 and we're playing a 14 year old game. Give the players what they want, and the shard will grow. Take away things like daily events and cool rare items, and the shard will die. Long-term players grow bored with doing the same thing, day after day, on UO. Throw em a bone here and there, guys! A few extra rare items won't do anything to the economy, it will just allow newer players to have access to neon hair and useless crap like statues.

[Zim]

How often are there server crashes? Is there a reason we dont just do 2-4 saves day instead?

[Faust]

OSI crashes could lose an entire days worth of data. Would maybe be a good idea to expand the world save script to be based on a crash frequency. IE: when a crash takes place reduce the next save time and do the opposite when no crashes take place to the point of at least one save that takes place a day. That way in times of numerous crashes more saves would be taking place and in times of no crashes the saves would be reduced greatly on a sort of merit based system.

Here is an example using world saves starting out on an hourly basis with a limit of one per 24 hours...

1st Save: 1 Per Hour, no crashes take place, increase the next save frequency.
2nd Save: 1 Per 2 Hours, no crashes take place, increase the next save frequency.
3rd Save: 1 Per 3 Hours, no Crashes take place, increase the next save frequency.
4th Save: 1 Per 4 Hours, a crash takes place, decrease the next save frequency.
5th Save: 1 Per 3 Hours, no crash takes place, increase the next save frequency.
etc... etc.. etc...

The most you could ever lose is a days worth of data and that actually wouldn't be nearly as bad as some of the terrible experiences that took place back on OSI during this time frame.

This would seem like a reasonble solution until the day of non-pausing saves finally exist that have been an issue with player run servers for well over a decade now.

[the bazookas]

Story time:
When I was a kid, we had Ultima 8 on an 80MB hard drive that was practically dedicated to it, and the computer was an old 386 (I don't even know the MHz--probably 10MHz or less). Every time you went to a new screen, it took 30 seconds to load. Every time you saved or loaded (which happened a LOT, because it was a tough game with lots of moving platforms and jumping over obstacles, etc.--all made WAY more difficult by the slow computer), it was another 30 seconds. I was too young to get very far, but my older brother endured and actually beat the game (which, if you've played it, is no small feat). I would say that this is like playing the game on "Legendary" (higher, if such a difficulty exists), and I still can't believe he succeeded (considering even zombies were difficult to defeat because of the slow computer). What's the moral of this story? I like stories.

tbh the pausing saves don't bother me much at all, even if they happen in the middle of a big fight. They really aren't THAT long, and they don't happen THAT often. In fact, it's kind of nice to know when things are saved since, as Faust pointed out, many days of work on OSI were nullified by infrequent saves. Nothing worse than logging in and seeing that all those ingots disappeared that you spent hours mining.

Just my 2 cents.

[xenoglyph]

The pausing saves bother some people. Even if it's not a huge deal, it's better to have non-pausing saves AND it's EA.

Best of all it's already implemented in RunUO 2.2 and is simple to add to RunUO 2.1

[nightshark]

The pausing saves bother some people. Even if it's not a huge deal, it's better to have non-pausing saves AND it's EA.

Best of all it's already implemented in RunUO 2.2 and is simple to add to RunUO 2.1

is anyone listening to this guy

[Faust]

I have not been following RunUO or hardly even UO related matters for quite some time now. However, was not even aware of RunUO 2.2 being released or them finally implementing non-pausing saves.

Would this happen to actually be true anyone?

[Kriav]

I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact they dont use a good SQL db like mysql etc or a nosql db out there.

I mean it is really necessary to load all the items at one time? perhaps only load the items in a house if someone opens the door. Especially with banks, dont load it into memory unless "bank"

[iamreallysquall]

i agree that having the saves every so often is nice so you know how far back you are going and not much is lost at the current rate of saves and the delay is not really that long considering how often they happen either.

It would be awesome if we could have non-pausing server saves in the same way they did on OSI servers. However, I'm not sure that the know-how exists for us to adapt RunUO to operate in that manner, and even if it did exist, this would present a major undertaking in order to successfully implement while making a smooth transition.

Beyond that, the idea of the CuB has been discussed in the past, and we have clearly stated that we will not have another CuB. This is for several reasons, at least one of which has been made clear in this thread.

Finally, regarding the lock down system for houses (this can be considered an adequate response to the other thread as well), we have chosen to utilize the pre-November 23, 1999 housing system, despite the fact that the housing system falls within our time frame. This is because Phase 2 housing (CuB was Phase 1 for anyone who is interested), and the resulting housing mechanics, were intended (for the most part) as a temporary mechanical state until January 24, 2000. Given this, we have decided not to have anything related to the housing patch.

^ sums it all up really