Upcoming change

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Coops
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Upcoming change

Post by Coops »

Core-Exiles has been around for a very long time now in the grand scheme of things. When I started CE I never imagined it would be still going strong over 13+ years later. Over the years certain elements of the game have grown and grown and grown. This in itself is not a major issue but we have players that are still with us from the very beginning.

Therefore you can imagine the size of their ships' stores :) We now have a few players with north of 500,000 items in their ships store! Even a large number in the 250-300 thousand range and that list is only growing by the year.

The change that is planned won't affect players who 'play' and remain playing and don't wander off for a sabbatical only to return many months later. But I need to cater to those that do. A number of years back I created the 30-day rule. This works by scanning the Database for players that have been inactive for 30 days or more.

It then sets up a schedule to move that players ship stored items to the Offline Storage Database. This then moves those items (be it 10, 10,000 or 500,000 to the Offline Database. This frees up a lot of space in the LIVE database and makes life smoother for everyone.

Sadly with these numbers now rising into the astronomical numbers, I have to rethink this. The issue is when a player returns the code that drags it all back can't cope with the huge numbers in players stores. The code is run from your local PC / laptop or phone and depending on your bandwidth etc it is failing more than its working. Nothing is lost it just fails to drag the items back to your ships store, causing me to step in and run the scripts from here and manually recheck everything.

So to the fix, and I should have thought of this before...

The Change
In a few days, anyone that is caught by the 30-day rule will have their items moved to the Secure Store In-Game, instead of the remote store. This is a far more orderly database storage stacking system and operates far smoother than the local ships store, which was never designed to cater for 100,000's of items.

That way when the player returns their ships store will be empty thus 'fresh and snappy'. They can then Choose what to load back into their ships store from the Secure Store. No delay in waiting for me to fix their storage and no bug tracks or cries into the dark night.

A reminder: Changes we made to the secure store some time back. This means items can be deposited into the Secure Store and removed from ANY location that has a Secure Store. No travelling to pick up a remote item and no trying to remember where you left XY or Z.

The Secure Store is a repository that can grow as large as you like and still handle those insane numbers players are now building. It's about 10 times faster to display listings in the 100,000 range and better for you AND the game to store your vast warehouse of items there.

The ship store was never designed that way and thus when you reach a certain point starts to become VERY cumbersome and slow. Due to certain historical limitations, we are limited to the java version we can use (until we find a fix) this limits the methodologies of displaying the data to BOTH sighted and Blind players.

Next...
I will also be running a script over the next week that will take all the Offline items stored in the remote Database (some 25 Million Plus items) and importing them into absent players Secure Stores. With the two scripts complete we will then have a smooth movement of items from Ship Store to Secure Store whenever a player leaves his account untouched for 30 days plus. With no nasty issues upon their return.

Certain screens will, of course, need to be updated but I'll get to them once the main code change and imports are done.

This may take place over the next few days or it may fall to the weekend depending on my workload.

This post is to keep you informed and perhaps to even lift the hood on something that you may be unaware of :)

Coops
A Walk in the Woods helps me relax and release the tension from a hard day at the code.
The fact that I'm dragging a body behind me should be irrelevant!
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