"We're fine. We're all fine here now. How are you?"

I’m not saying it was intentionally caused. I’m just saying that the timing of it was pretty funny. Besides, what Zeromus said is right. The game really does not like massive fleet battles.

It says till wednesday… there an update as to what time at all?

From the perspective of someone that was actually involved with the game event going on, nothing was actually happening re: major space battles. Ships were just sort of sitting around in space, although I suppose autopilot targeting could be a thing?

Why does lotj get so choppy during big fleet battles? Just our server cant handle all the information being processed and if so what is the additional cost of upgrading to a server that could make this thing purr like a kitten when shit is hitting the fan?

Like QS said, at the time of this crash no major space battles were going on. Though it sounds like whatever caused the game to crash and burn had something to do with a ship related bug. Ships have been really screwed up this era with pods and hangars glitching out over and over again.

I’m not sure why space battles lag the mud, but my theory is that it is due to a few reason.

1. Old, inefficient code.

2. Space battles involve a lot of variables between a large number of objects. Once squadrons start flying around we’re talking about around 40 objects all the way up to 70 or more, depending on the circumstances. The game is maintaining their position, energy, firing commands, and a bunch of other information for each individual object. It’s similar to why your FPS drops on your favorite RTS or MOBA during fights that involve the whole team or huge armies. It boils down to eating up a lot of processing power.

3. It could be an economy server with lackluster processing power, I don’t know what hardware ours uses or how it stacks up to other muds/servers.

The same reason combat training used to bog the server down so bad. Hardware is important, sure… but if the code is massively inefficient, the best machine in the world is going to stumble over it.

Any good websites/resources if I wanted to try and learn how to code using whatever the hell we use?

You have to remember that muds were originally designed to run on old 8kb memory systems. Granted we’ve come a long way since then, but even an old 90’s cpu is going to be able to nearly instantly chew through even 1000 variables like nothing.

The code is old and innefficient, and likely several million lines of code long. It isn’t easy to overhaul part of a section of mud code to make it run smoother without bungling up something, much less highly complicated and complex multi-faceted sections intertwined throughout the source.

Yeah that’s understandable and for the most part Lotj seems to run pretty smoothly at least in my opinion. I’m just wondering because it seems like there are some pretty legit ideas that float around on the forums etc but a lack of coders. So I’ve been mulling over the idea of trying to learn to code so I might be able to try and submit some of the simpler stuff for addition to the game.

I have a book called “MUD code programming” that gets into the meat of original dikumud and “teaches” some of the programming techniques involved. It’s about 500 pages thick and highly technical. All of the original sourcesoftware of original mud code are easily accessible In their entirety.

At one point Ravaus converted the entire lotj codebase to C++ on his own. It took him a good bit of time, and it wasn’t done to the version we play on, but he did mention that it vastly improved functionality.

There is a website with multiple mud codebases available for download. Among them are some cleaned up versions of SWR including Star Wars FOTE (Fate of the Empire). I actually downloaded FOTE and got it to run on my windows machine using Cygwin, which is a Linux emulation. Nick Gammon has a guide on how to get this stuff running as well.

Mud Codebases:
http://www.smaugmuds.org/files/

Nick Gammon’s (MUSHclient’s creator) guide to compile a mud using Cygwin
http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/howtocompile.htm

Nick Gammon’s guide on what components to include when installing Cygwin:
http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/installingcygwin.htm

SWR and most muds in general are all written in old school C, so that’s the language syntax you would want to focus on. However, learning general programming theory will go a long way in helping you understand pretty much any language in existence. All programming languages have a similar structures for manipulating data ie. varaibles, arrays, functions, loops, conditionals, etc. etc.

C is a strongly typed, high level programming language.

Update: We’re still working on it.

So… while the MUD waits… Let us BGO, shall we? http://tinyurl.com/qa8pp3l

So if i was ponder botting when it crashed that means I’ll be max science level when it comes up right? Right? Guys?

Ya for sure. That’s right. Not like you can’t ponder past a certain level or something. Exactly.