Official News - page 3

WHY A CORRUPTED FILE CAUSES SUCH HAVOC

by Hazed

So why can't the game cope better with a file that it can't read? Why should it bring everything shuddering to a halt, and prevent the game from firing up? To a non-programmer like me, it would make sense for the game to just skip that file and carry on with the next one.

However, that could cause even more problems in the long run, depending on what file it is that gets skipped. It probably wouldn't be a big deal if an infrastructure file wasn't loaded in. It wouldn't really be a problem is a whole planet didn't load because of something wrong. But there are other files that are necessary to the running of the game, and if they don't load some strange things would happen. What's more, since the game is constantly saving stuff to various different files, if strange things happened and then got written out, the oddities could spread and pretty soon the game data would be in a totally unstable state.

Since it's impossible for the game to treat some files as more important than others when it is firing up, and make decisions about whether an inability to read them should be counted as important or not, it is far safer just to stop everything dead when a corrupted file is encountered - then let a human being (or a Rigellian) make the call about how important the file is. Yes, that means there's the chance that the game will be down for a while, but that's something we will all have to put up with to safeguard the integrity of the game data as a whole.

Years ago, back when Fed was on GEnie, we had terrible problems when the system operators put in a backup version of the some of the game files but not others. Planets, factories and player records were all out of sync - for example, a pointer in a player's record said that he owned a company, but the file containing the list of companies did not include his company - and it took a lot of time and effort to sort things out. This illustrates the importance of avoiding anything which can mess up the data files.

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