This game is really having its moments....

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Euroman
Doppleganger

awesome....down again...

Thank you.
I can't get to my main computer to fix this, and broadband is still working, but i'm pretty sure i've isolated what's causing this. I'll fix it when i can get home in aruond 2-3 hours, and hopefully the shard will go back up shortly after that.

Thanks Bob!

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Falin(ROT)-Bully
Galen Soulhunter(Deamons)-Money maker
Cutler-Worker Bee
Hook(Daemons)-Mild mannered reporter/Tamer
Mr.Obvious-SUPER Crafter

thanks bob. i hope ur fix works

Thanks a lot Bob, as always your work is appreciated

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Euroman
Doppleganger

Well It keeps on freezing then you can log in 15 mins later. and then its up for 20 mins. somthing seriously wrong with it

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Jimmy[Cult]-Pvp Warrior
Tristan[SOS]-Pvm Mage
Cilit Bang-Alchemist
Bruno Novak-Tamer/Fisherman

I feel something coming... something terribly bad... something we did this whole t4a thing for, to avoid this one problem..

A LOOP, OH GOD!

I'm going to assume that was a failed attempt at sarcasm as merely a manifestation of your ignorance of the issue, rather than blatant stupidity.

So allow me to enlighten you.

The reason we upgraded from t3a to t4a was not to avoid a loop.
The reason we upgraded from t3a to t4a was t3a stores time as a signed 32 bit integer, which can store a value between 2147483647 and -2147483647. It also stores time in 10ths of a second, so 3 seconds is 30 time.
If you divide 2147483647 / ( 600 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 day/yr ) you will end up with 6.8 years of uptime.
Obsidian was up longer than 6.8 years, but due to a few rollbacks or the long downtime in the early years, the in-game time reached 6.8 years a little later than that.

When it hit it's maximum value, it tried to add more time, since it didn't know better.
If you work with computers, you know that when you add 1 to a signed value that is at maximum, it "overflows", and turns negative.
so 2147483647 + 1 tenth of a second = -2147483647.

At this point the server then did 3 things at once.
1. It went about checkign everythign like normal, first checking decay times/etc
2. It realized a lot of things were created at a time that hadn't happened yet, so it either deleted them, or set their create time to the current time.
3. It went oh shit, this shouldn't be happening, and aborted counting time, while resuming all other functions of the shard. As a result, the passage of time stopped.

So after that last tick, we were perpetually stuck at a point in time 6.8 years before the shard went online the very first time.


This is very different from an infinite loop, where the following things happen:

Example Code: The computer will keep dividing x by 2, since it will never reach 0. Since it is not done with what it's doing, it will keep doing it, and will not do anything else.

What sphere does, is when it notices any set of instructions has been repeated for more than 5 minutes, it aborts that instruction, and continues on with what it was doing.

That means that no matter what infinite loop is created, the shard will only pause for at most 5 minutes, then will resume like normal except for whatever minor bug the loop itself created. As far as the computer is concerned, those 5 minutes never happened, so the first second after it resumes is counted as if the loop never happened, not the shard suddenly does 5 minutes of work.

Damn....that a lot of information for one man to handle

Wish I understood computers as much as you Bob

O and Spawn, you just got OWNED

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Euroman
Doppleganger

Well, let me edit my post I had originally since I'm pretty sure I woulda been banned for it.

Anywho, I didn't read any of your post except for your assumption of what I posted, which was a joke..which you can't take apparently.

Sorry for not bitching about the shard being down and making a joke, I'll try to do the opposite next time and get banned.

Poor Apoc, you just can't win.

( LOL )

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Ultima avatar: The Famed JIZABOZ,GWAR Guildmeister

There is no way to beat bob cause he always puts random stuff that confuses you to the point that you exit

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LOL at heart

but ya. I got it all.
but question
Why wasn't T3a set to start time in - negatives,
I forgot how u set things to negative in binary. so i hope i get it right, would make sense for what u said
but for EG.

first 4 letters for command,(xxxx) (bold)
then the next value would set the number to negative or positive (i think..)(colored)
and the rest of the code setting the value 01 being 1, 10 being 2, 11 being 3 (italic)
like 1 is negative (red) 0 is positive (green) ill highlight these to make things easier to understand what im trying to say

|xxxx011111111| would be the highest possible value without being negative(in w.e bit system that is)
so when u add more time in this case to that u would throw the whole binary code to negative..
why wasn't T3a just put in negative to start with?
like things start with
|xxxx1000000|
and then put a gate or w,e there called to do switch all the numbers.

i think its called like, Not command or gate
so it goes from |xxxx1111111| to |xxxx00000000|
then it woulda added from the |xxxx0000000| then it woulda effectively had like double the time
.. what am i missing!! sorry im shabby with the stuff but ya hope you under stand bob i wrote it typo fast lol

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king of the run on sentence.

Very good chips! Actually your logic was right.
And as far as the shard is concerned, it could have been done.

However as to why obsidian didn't start with negative time is simple:
No one thought about it.
No one thought the server had a ticking timebomb that would go off 6.8 years in the future.
Add to that, when it first happened, i was pretty amazed the person who wrote the server was so.... uncouth as to use a signed integer for time(why would you even need negative time), since an unsigned would have given twice the time and would have overflowed to 0.

Anyway, on to the question you really probably meant. Why didn't we just turn the timer to 0, and make all existing values negative?

This was discussed for the first week or so. It was fesible, but produced some little errors here and there. Nothing major, we could have fixed it without losing more than 10% of the world at most.
However all that would have done is bought us another 7 years at most. And that's assuming it didn't create some bug sooner that we didn't notice.

I'm of the belief that i'd rather not do a quick "fix" that is gonna cause problems later, and might cause problems sooner that we won't knwo about. Especially when it would cost almost 10% of the world.

Now it's true the upgrade has taken a lot more work than i originally thought, but it's still going somewhat to schedule(just lengthened due to my downtime to work/etc). I don't mind working more to make the shard better in the long run, even if the returns aren't immediately visible.