Internet Dropped - World Corrupt

[Barty]

Hello, all.

My friend had been hosting a server for us to play on since the game was launched, but unfortunately his internet happened to disconnect the last time we were on the server.  This caused the world to lock and also caused us to have errors when he attempts to load it.  On top of that, we tried restoring a few of the backup world files that were automatically created when booting the server up, but we are both unable to connect to either.  It simply just sits at the "connecting to server" part of the process and can never find the host.  That seems to leave us with only one option.  Creating a new world and starting over.

Now, if we create a new world, it seems all is well and works fine.  However, I was just curious if anyone here can tell me if we have any options besides restarting.  It's not a huge deal if that is the case, but I figured I would check here anyways in the event something could be done.  I always tell my buddy that he should make backups more often but he generally doesn't take the time to do them or forgets to do them at all.  I doubt that will be a problem again, but the damage is already done in this case.

I will upload a zipped version of the world file, the unhandled exceptions file and the Arcendebuglog.  If there is anything else needed, please let me know.

Thank you for your time.

[x4000]

The good news is that the errors you are getting in the log there are unrelated to your old world; it's just a bug in the current beta version, which I'll have fixed and pushed out in about an hour -- sorry about that!  Things should work much more smoothly from then on with that world, from the looks of the error files.

[Barty]

That is excellent news but I still have one more question.  Why is it that we are both completely unable to connect to the server whenever is is running since the crash?  We would have tested the world to see if the errors were breaking the world or not, except that neither one of us is able to connect to the world since it crashed.  We can connect to a new one just fine, but we always fail to connect on the old one.  This is what perplexes me about this whole thing.  We know his ports are opened correctly as we can always connect to a new world, but never this old one.  Is there something we are forgetting to do to allow connections to the world again or something?

It would be so much easier if I could physically access my buddies computer to double check everything myself but we have to do it via Ventrilo since we live on opposite sides of the country.

I'll be sure to see if we can connect after the next beta release and if we are unable to, I will let you know here.

[x4000]

The next beta came out about an hour ago.  In terms of why you can't connect to the old world, I'm really not sure.   He could fire it up in solo and see if it's throwing exceptions, but most likely it's related to errors being thrown in that world on load (because you had enchantments there, but not in the new world, and that's where the bug is).

[Barty]

I will be sure to let you know as soon as we are able to try it in a few hours.  Thank you very much for your valuable time.

*EDIT*
I guess I should add, I thought the world was corrupt because of the fact that neither of us could connect to the latest save of our world and the one backup that we were able to connect to, threw the error about the world being filled with errors if we kept playing.  Hopefully the error wasn't entirely accurate, in this case.

[x4000]

My pleasure -- and thanks for your support!

[Barty]

I have some unfortunate news.  It seems that my buddy sent me the wrong files in the first place.  The world file I uploaded seems to be an old working copy, where the only errors were the ones associated with the last beta patch.

We tinkered around with the files and found what we believe to be the most up-to-date version of the world and it definitely will not start, even in single player.  If you could take another look at this world and see if you could figure out what went wrong, I would be most appreciative.  I thought it was odd that the last world had so few regions, so this one looks like our latest.

Thank you again.  I very much appreciate your help with this.

The zip contains the world file and the two logs.

*Edit*

I also removed the wrong files from my original post.

[x4000]

Okay, thanks very much for that -- the errors you are getting there match something that we have two other reports of, but until now we didn't have a savegame to work from.  I'm not sure if the worlds are permantly corrupt or not, but either way this should help us at the very least fix the bug.  Fingers crossed its just a parsing error and not actually a corrupt world -- we should be able to let you know in a few hours!

[Barty]

You are a hero.

I tend to read forums and never post unless I see an absolute need to, but I have been reading the forums for awhile and was really impressed by your responses.  It is the only reason I decided to post this issue here in the first place instead of just starting over.  Hopefully if you can't help us, at least it will potentially help someone else.  I look forward to hearing about what you find and keep up the great work with not only the game, but with the great customer service and responses that you have been doing.  I generally wouldn't waste a developer's time on something like my own save file, since the new world button is right there and I hate to waste their time on something that isn't very important, but you seem to honestly care about helping people with their games, so I posted here.

Also, as a random note, I am loving the Mantis system for voting for suggestions and reporting issues and I am the same Barty who included reports about the battleground missions not completing successfully and such.  It is a great system you have going there and the ideas and brainstorming that goes on there is great.  Being surrounded by such a supportive and helpful community must make you all at Arcen Games very pleased .

*EDIT* For typo justice!

[x4000]

I really appreciate the kind words!  Would write more, but on a bug-hunting spree today and in a big rush to get all that done before... a certain event we haven't been able to announce yet.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks very much for the world folder, it made it possible to find the bug; I've put in a fix for the next version that will prevent the corruption from happening and it will correctly load your world and others that had similar situations

[Barty]

That is fantastic news and Stephen and I are very pleased we were able to provide you what you needed to track down that particularly nasty problem.  I'll be looking forward to the next version.

[x4000]

The new version with the fix should be out in about 30 minutes or so.

[Barty]

I find it interesting after looking at the release notes that the shields were the culprit for the save doing terrible things.  I guess his internet dropping was just coincidental in the whole thing and it actually had nothing to do with the problem?  I admit that we didn't attempt to play again after his internet went out for a few days so maybe I drew that conclusion too quickly in the end.  It was just the very last thing that happened before we lost access to the world, so I made the assumption.

Funny how it always works out like that.  I do a ton of work with computers and have taken enough programming classes to realize how problems on the surface of a program are rarely what you expect to see when you get into the code.  Glad that the save helped though and I hope it ends up helping other people as well.

[x4000]

I guess his internet dropping was just coincidental in the whole thing and it actually had nothing to do with the problem?

Oh, definitely coincidental -- sorry, I should have mentioned that from the start.  If your game crashes or computer shuts off, that's one thing -- corruption city, potentially, if it was in the middle of a write.  But the game is meant to have people connecting and disconnecting at random times, so having the internet connection drop isn't even an error state -- it just looks like everyone decided to stop for the night at the exact same second.