Server saves too frequent

[Hemperor]

Just died during a server save right now, of course it happened during a huge field fight. Went from 100% to 0% during this supposed frozen time. I'm sure most of you have come into some close encounters with these saves, they happen far too often and seem to allow split seconds of shit to happen, whether during or after I'm not sure. It always takes at least a second to catch up after a save.

Now I understand reverts happen occassionally with crashes, but saving every 30 minutes is just ridiculous especially when this shard is trying to increase its pvp scene.

Thoughts, comments?

[noxmonk]

I would rather have the occasional PvP-QQDeath than lose an hour, two hours, or whatever you're proposing worth of time.

[Hemperor]

I would rather have the occasional PvP-QQDeath than lose an hour, two hours, or whatever you're proposing worth of time.

Personally I would have proposed an hour, that is hardly a difference for when it comes to the occassional crash, a half hour extra at the maximum, IMO worth helping out gameplay.

[Faust]

Problem with extending server saves is that a lot of coding revoles around the saves. For example, a lot of the code use date stamps to calculate a delay. I'm not saying this is a huge deal... However, item decay is something that relies on world saves to happen. If you extend saves to let's say 5 hours just for the hell of it. That would mean items that should decay every hour won't decay until every 5 hours. There are many different portions of the RunUO code that relies on world saves. I truly hate how RunUO has coded this feature into the game but its very understandable why they did it at the same time.

[Hemperor]

Problem with extending server saves is that a lot of coding revoles around the saves. For example, a lot of the code use date stamps to calculate a delay. I'm not saying this is a huge deal... However, item decay is something that relies on world saves to happen. If you extend saves to let's say 5 hours just for the hell of it. That would mean items that should decay every hour won't decay until every 5 hours. There are many different portions of the RunUO code that relies on world saves. I truly hate how RunUO has coded this feature into the game but its very understandable why they did it at the same time.

Interesting, I've never played other RunUO shards, how do their saves compare?

[Faust]

Most shards typically use anywhere from 10-60 minute saves.

It would be nice if a new system for collecting and saving the data could be written instead of using these saves that pause. However, this is a huge task that is simply overwhelming altogether. This is a main reason nobody really has ever attempted to restructure this part of the code all these years.

[Derrick]

I am not at all happy with our current saves either. While the present system is very reliable, it is very disruptive as well. I would love to have some form of rolling save feature but the amount of time that is would take to implement and test this is overwhelming to even think about.

I just spent a week out of town learning about all kinds of neat stuff coming in .Net 4.0 (RunUO is built on the Microsoft .Net framework) I'm currently planning a major core overhaul that moves us into some of the features of the new framework and an bottom to top overhaul of the world save mechanics may be a part of this.

In the meantime though, 60 minute saves do concern me a little bit. We don't crash often, but a 50 minute rollback would be devastatingly discouraging no matter how rarely it happens.

[Pro]

Rather the current system then the 2minute saves on every other freeshard