Re: CF: Auto-Saves, Editing, Tobas Tower

["Mark Wedel" <mark@icp.siemens.com>]

On Jan 6, 12:25pm, Anthony Thyssen wrote:

> Let me just finish by saying, problems still exist and the current method
> just seems overly complex to me.

 I'll agree there are problems in the current method.  However, the current
method is actually incredible simple (which is why it is the current method) -
basically, when the player quits, we just save them off.  Duplication of all
the items on the ground is fixed for the next version (calling save player with
the wrong args).  This does open up treasure room bugs and being trapped with
monsters.

 One thought might be to still add a 'safe map flag', and use some combination
of strategies - save the player on the current map when disconnections happen,
but also store the last save location the player was on (which is likely the
entrance to the dungeon.)  If when the player returns and the map he was
originally on has reset, put him back to the last safe location, otherwise, he
can continue to go on from wherever he was when he lost the connection (this
presumes he returns within the 2 hour time window or so.)

 This does not prevent item duplication.  It does allow a character to get out
of a tight situation.  It doesn't give the convenience/penalty of going all the
way back to town (this can work both ways - I could see people wanting to go
all the way back to town, so if that happened it would be a bonus.  However, I
can also see people who want to be where they were).

 It is not perfect.  Some slightly more complex logic could probably be done to
make treasure room cheating even harder (I had speculated before that clever
players could use another character to get the treasureroom map back in memory
so they could loot it again.)  This could be prevented by storing the time an
original map was first loaded, and the tiem the player was saved.  So that even
if the player does use that strategy, the game would see that that map was
reloaded after the player saved, so back to the safe position.

 If abuse is seen as a big problem, my best solution would be to add a good
enough message about disconnecctions and let the server admin do something.
 Ie, a disconnection message could be:

 Player mark disconnected:  map XXXX (x,y), hp 5/100 sp 10/40 grace 3/60

 If the admin sees a lot of disconnections with low hp or always on the same
map (a simple perl script could probably be done to digest these logs and make
output easier on the admin), the admin could warn the player or take some
action (this would obviously depend on the server - one server admin may not
care, where as another may not be happy, especially if that player is killing
other players but then quits before he can be killed himself or something).


> Question. Why, on some maps, does crossedit add a random ``speed_left''
> to all monsters with a negitive speed in their `arch'!

 The speed_left gets initialized when the map is loaded.  Unfortunately, the
common load routines don't know/don't check that the editor is calling load map
and thus that initializing those values are not necessary.  I'll see if that
can be fixed.




-- 

-- Mark Wedel
mark@pyramid.com
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