WHAT TO DO WITH DEAD STAR SYSTEMS?
by Hazed
When a player dies dead-dead she is removed from the game, but if they she’s PO, her star system remains as an orphaned system, until such time as Alan notices the lack of an owner and takes it out of the game.
Abandoned systems, where the owner hasn’t been in the game for a long time, are also taken out from time to time to save space, but can always be put back again should the owner suddenly return from her long absence.
Used until, the method Alan has now to take out these systems is a simple one: he just removes the loader file, so the game doesn’t load the system files in when it fires up. The files remain in their directory on the server just in case they are ever needed again.
But now there is a problem with this method, thanks to the auto-linking code for new systems. The problem is that when a player uses the auto-linking command to become a PO, the game checks whether the names they have chosen for their new star system and planet are not already in use. It checks by looking at the systems currently loaded into the game. Assuming there are no clashes it goes ahead and creates the necessary directory and puts the new system files into it.
But it only checks against names of the currently loaded planets. It doesn’t look at systems which have no loader and are therefore not showing up in Fed DataSpace. And that could cause big problems.
Before the auto-linking code, when Alan was putting all systems in manually, he would have noticed a possible clash and done something about it. Now, who knows what the result would be? A mish-mash of the old system’s files and the new system’s files. It wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for sure!
Fortunately, this hasn’t come up yet, but the realisation last week when he was removing the loaders for all my alt’s systems made him shudder, and he has changed his method of dealing with orphaned and abandoned systems.
This truly is a classic case of unintended consequences.
