Save <containter>

[Hicksville Hoochie]

Ever noticed how it seems that your clan's footlockers, apartment chest, wardobes, ect ect... seem to take HOURS on end to save something that you put into it? Which leaves you, as well as the staff with a mess, and much wasted extra time seeing these things restored...

What if there was a command to save container objects at will, updating them with items recently put in or taken out, to avoid all the hassle in dealing with it?

>save locker

>You save a mekillot bone locker of holding.

And of course, SAVE without an argument would still work for your PC at the time.

Could probably save a -BUNCH- of time in hassle to the imms and your playability.

Any possible faults with this? I'm the most ignorant person alive when it comes to MUD coding, hehe.

[John]

I believe this was brought up a while back (approximately 1.5 years ago). I believe the problem was that if you save a room then the entire zone is saved. I believe the reason the saves are seperated as much as they are is because to make it any quicker would increase lag.

Save rooms (I believe) use to be unlimited in size, but as the mud grew older and more items were put in more save rooms, saving the zone became more and more cumbersome. So save rooms can be fairly problematic when it comes to saving and lag

This is based on my memory of a post made over a year ago. I'm quite possible wrong. A quick search actually comes up with the original thread. A staff member didn't weigh in but the player consensus was that it would cause too much lag.

[Angela Christine]

In order to prevent abuse, it would have to save the container and the PC who issued the command.  Otherwise a crash could cause item doubling.


AC

[Agent_137]

In order to prevent abuse, it would have to save the container and the PC who issued the command.  Otherwise a crash could cause item doubling.


AC

But how do you predict a crash? You can double items now. Take them OUT of a save room, and make the game crash before the room saves. Blam, double items. It's rather hard (meaning impossible) to abuse though, unless you know a bug that causes a crash.

[Angela Christine]

In order to prevent abuse, it would have to save the container and the PC who issued the command.  Otherwise a crash could cause item doubling.

But how do you predict a crash? You can double items now. Take them OUT of a save room, and make the game crash before the room saves. Blam, double items. It's rather hard (meaning impossible) to abuse though, unless you know a bug that causes a crash.

Hey, I didn't say it would be heavily abused.    Nor would my fix prevent all possible abuse.

>save me
>put 2000 coins chest
>save chest

Right at that moment, until the next schedualed round of saves, there is two copies of those coins in the save files.  Having an unschedualed crash before one or both of those save files is over-written would be like winning the lottery.  But occasionally there are a series of crashes in a short time, which very useful for unloading those 23 scrab shells you've been carrying around.  Durring a period of frequent crashes, you could use fancy saving to increase your chances of item doubling.  The staff would probably be too busy looking for the thing causing the crashes to watch for enterprising save-abusers.    Sure, it is far fetched.  

It could be solved by having the room and all PCs in the room saved everytime anyone uses Save, but again there is the lag problem.  Bummer.

AC

[Cuusardo]

Anyone who abuses a bug that causes a crash just so they can duplicate items in that manner is a fool, because the IMMs will end up tracking down the cause of the crash.

Just my two cents.

[Xamminy]

John was basically right.  I'll add and explain a bit further, though.

Items only 'save' so that they'll reload on someone or in some place when the character or the room saves.  When one room saves, every room in the coded zone (which has nothing to do with geographic region) saves.

What this means is this: If we gave players the ability to save the items in the room, they'd be saving rooms ALL over the mud all time time...and with the amount of recording that can be, this could produce dreadful amounts of lag...and could lead to abuse.

It would take MAJOR revisions to code to change the way it works currently.  I do not see us doing that, due to the sheer amount of work and possibility for bugs to arise.  I also don't see us giving players the ability to save rooms, as we only save rooms when updating them and let the mud's built-in schedule of saves do the rest.

[Fnord]

What this means is this: If we gave players the ability to save the items in the room, they'd be saving rooms ALL over the mud all time time...and with the amount of recording that can be, this could produce dreadful amounts of lag...and could lead to abuse.

The original poster asked about saving containers, not rooms.

So instead of rooms full of containers getting saved all over the mud, if someone affected a container or two in a store room, they could save those. That's probably less processor intensive than saving a single PC, but maybe that depends on the capacity of the container, and number of items on it.

I like the idea. Some cheeser that saves themself, then puts coin into a container and saves the container, then prays to Krath for a crash should have their karma set to Mr. Hanky. Or give me the home address that's connected with their IP and I'll fly to their house and pepper spray them. Or... well, you get the idea. Twinking bad. RP good.

Edit: Clarified.

[Xygax]

Unfortunately, there exists no means (right now) for the database to save anything with finer granularity than a whole zone file.

[Agent_137]

should have their karma set to Mr. Hanky

HAHAHAHHAHAH.

That's the best.

[Anonymous]

In order to prevent abuse, it would have to save the container and the PC who issued the command. Otherwise a crash could cause item doubling.

This can occur right now; it has happened to me several time in the past.

Sa'alam,

Dirr

[Savak]

In other words (to clarify..or confuse..the accurate points made by Xamminy & Xygax), if someTHING -- an object -- is to save through a reboot, it must be saved either on a PC (the player-file) or within the zone (the zone-file).  Most zones we do not edit/save during the week at all, and only edit/save during Saturday downtime.  Some zones, however, ARE set to periodically save during the week; rooms in these zones are sprinkled in relevant places throughout the game, and allow you to leave items (or NPC's) in them (such as most warehouses, etc.).

A container is an object, and cannot be saved independently...only saved on a PC or within a zone.  NPC's are treated similarly, with their reboot locations (and worn equipment) saved as part of the zone file -- thus they cannot be reliably moved except during Saturday downtime either, unless they are moving between the "automatic" save zones.

If we could "partially" save the zone-file relating to only one individual room, or efficiently split rooms to have their own sort of individual zone-file, this might not be as rough a resource problem.  However, currently the only way to save a zone-file is in its entirety.  And we know that saving a zone file can be a resource hog -- it has been so hideous in the past, in fact, as to slow us by tens of seconds on each save (so, roughly a 10-40 second complete game freeze every 15'ish minutes), which required the zorching of oodles of horded crap (mostly unused raw materials, pebbles, and food gone uneaten for Ages) and adding of some efficiency measures.

Ergo, without a very significant code change (which is not on the horizon), the suggestion spurring this thread will not be implemented.  But, it is a good idea.

[mansa]

Back in the day, before the RAM upgrade (In 2000, I believe), the immortals used to tell the kadians:

Your warehouse is causing the game to lag whenever it saves that zone.  Please junk a few hundred of the 'green sap-filled leaves' that you have saved there.