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As I gear up for the birthday party in a little less than 8 hours, I wish I could be sentimental, but I’m not. It has been a long haul, and we are nowhere near as advanced as we should be. It has been discouraging in the extreme. Not enough people show interest, and those who do aren’t always helpful.

That said, I’ve been killing myself this week to prepare a few little surprises for our loyal players. What we’ve got are four special presents and one consolation prize for everyone else.

Sora – Sora gets a new spell, Call of Hearthfires. It is basically a quick teleport back to a specified home point. This basically gives him a second beacon to which he can port only himself. The spell is also easier than our standard Teleport spell and is meant to be distributed to players at large, at least to all members of the PW guild.

Zaecus – Zaecus also gets a new spell, Animal Messenger v1.0. It is a silly little communication spell that summons an animal to send a message to a target player. Delivery takes time, and if the recipient logs out, they should get the message eventually when they log back in. The future version will be more featureful, interesting, and reliable.

Garvin – Garvin _also_ gets a new spell, Fire Blast. It is our first 1st order nuke spell, and is basically just Fire Bolt on sterroids. It does about 2-3x the damage and takes less time, more mana to cast. Right now, it has the same description as the 0th order spell, but that will change… eventually.

Focker – Focker gets an artifact weapon. For lack of any better name, I threw together some random syllables and got Sharov. It is a broadsword that does ice damage and has a 10-minute special ability to heal the wielder for a full meter’s worth of readiness points. Cool stuff.

Everyone else gets the potion goodie bag. I invented two new potions for the occasion, bubbling orange and bright yellow. The orange pots will permenantly increase the drinker’s stats randomly. The yellow pots are better than normal heal (white) potions, and will take the drinker over max (to a potential of 225% or so).

I’ve written little boxes to put the presents into. Now all I need are silly hats, firecrackers, and wrapping paper.

Ok, so because of the downtime yesterday and the issue with the whole gateway address changing on me, I figured rebooting the server might not be a bad idea – to flush cached funk.

While not a bad idea, it was apparently not a very good one. Something must have happened that truncated our save file the last time the world did its thing before I shut the mud down – it was about 3mb, about 1/4 of its actual size.

When the game came back up, we were lacking a great many areas, so I brought things back down, dug out the last backup save (we make backups every morning at 4am), and tried installing with it. Even wierder errors happened, so I gave up and called Adam for help and spent the hour before he wrapped things up at work in attempts to fix the network so he would be able to repair us

He got the world back up and running and all was well. He went home, I went home.

Then the trees came out to play.

Something wierd is going on with the tree death code. They’re spawning like rabbits on fertility pills. Malap just complained to me of having discovered 14 trees in his current location. Typically, the math won’t allow for more than 4 or 5 in the average overworld room.

Every second or so, we get spammed on the error channel and the trace log gets an entry like this:

2005.07.15 05:33:47 2005.07.15 05:33:47 program: econ/plant.c, object:
    econ/trees/appletree#52300 line 303
'    room_growth' in '        world/area.c' (' world/maparea#20833') line 87
'        on_grow' in '        econ/plant.c' ('econ/trees/appletree#52300')
    line 303
2005.07.15 05:33:47 Error in call out.
2005.07.15 05:33:47 call_out: user 'world' had an error: rescheduling
    call_out.
2005.07.15 05:33:47 call_out: user 'world' had an error: rescheduling
    call_out.
2005.07.15 05:33:47 call_out: user 'world' had an error: rescheduling
    call_out.
2005.07.15 05:33:47 call_out: user 'world' had an error: rescheduling
    call_out.
2005.07.15 05:33:47 call_out: user 'world' had an error: rescheduling
    call_out.

So, I check line 303 of /econ/plant.c and find that it is the end of the block of code where trees die from overcrowding. The block simply executes a call_out() on the function to update the room map and then destroys the tree.

The problem is… these call_out()‘s aren’t happening, thus the trees aren’t destructing. So, I commented out the call_out(), made it call the room update immediately, and rebooted the game. Why reboot, you ask? Simple.

The update wiz command isn’t working now either. This is troublesome in the exteme. Acius has a lot of work cut out for him.

And, argh… the errors persist. It looks like code isn’t getting recompiled? Grumble, mumble. destruct() isn’t working. I’m scared now. Definately a job for Adam

And here I was hoping to get birthday presents finished this morning. Oh well.