These are both from Nabigah's PBF:

Wed Jun 1 00:19:07 2011 by 'An Immortal' at level 16 (12 hrs):
An Immortal added 2000 exp for: Great story about a good man, tricked into doing evil things for love and power that never panned out. He's a spy for the Sultan charged to infiltrate Scion and slowly gets warped into being evil.

Role
Chapter 1
Fate Set In Motion
Added Mon Jun 20 21:15:49 2011 at level 20:

Is one of those dates wrong? If not, how did he get role exp before actually entering the first chapter of his role?

It's unfortunately pretty much impossible to track down this memory leak but every once in a while it'll chow down someone's role. Usually we'll have the person just re-enter it for a 0 xp add.

That if the mud goes down while you have a role entry in the process of being written, it may result in the loss of previous role entries.

This is based on only the fact that I was adding a role chapter when the mud crashed, and when I logged back in my uber-role was also gone.

Don't think that's it -- I've been hit by it twice in not-that circumstances.

But it does seem to eat bigger roles more frequently. Woe are my twelve-chapter tragic-love epics.

I got a note in response to my role contest entry for that one saying something along the lines of, "I heard this role was really good, but since it's blank I can't judge it." I then went something like seven more months without a win. :(

Which, you know, not every role I write is gold, but I think this is my best one in a while.

Oh?

If you think it is a good role (and you are done with the character), you should go ahead and post it so we can enjoy the read.

Unless of course you are the type to recycle roles...

<"that was a low blow, try to keep the gloves up!">

Chris.

See PBF!

Ya know, for as much as we laid down punishment on people the few times we actually were online at the same time...

Gosh, I am a terrible ex-chancellor for not following through and reading all of the former scion's roles.

Bah.

Out of curiosity, how are role entries stored? Relational database? Files on the file system?

If someone does "role add" and can see the role as "added" then it seems pretty odd for it to subsequently disappear. I say that not to make any sort of accusation; it's just really "weird" behavior.

It's part of the pfile, so in memory but also the filesystem.

It's easy as #### to leak memory in C. Alas. If I ever became independently wealthy I might rewrite the game in C# or something.

Blasphemy!! You should write the whole thing in Java, ditch the ridiculous area file format for JSON and store everything in MongoDB.

Honestly it would be pretty straight forward except possibly the network code.

For the non-programmers out there, the problem with C is that you can make a variable (pointer) point to anywhere in memory, and then write there. And that spot happens to be outside your data or code space then the operating system will just crash your program (seg fault). Your less lucky if you accidentally write somewhere in your data or code space because then completely unpredictable things can happen. These bugs are hard to track down because the memory corruption could affect any totally unrelated part of your program. It could trash data, alter the code, etc. it could be a random bug in an mprog somewhere can be trashing random roles of players that might be on the other side of Thera, and then once the pfile is saved to disk it is gone forever.

This is one of the reasons few people write in C anymore, outside of high performance applications that need to be as close to the hardware as possible.

Sounds like someone needs to come back on staff and show us how it's done. :D

>Out of curiosity, how are role entries stored? Relational
>database? Files on the file system?

Flat file on the drive.

>If someone does "role add" and can see the role as "added"
>then it seems pretty odd for it to subsequently disappear. I
>say that not to make any sort of accusation; it's just really
>"weird" behavior.

As Daev mentioned, in C it's fairly easy to overwrite/corrupt a data structure if you're not really careful, especially one as big and full of strings as the player data.

Definitely.

*grumbles like a cantankerous old man in his bitterness*

Marcatis took the time to write me a note explaining that you need to have a role in order to enter role contest. Newb.

Le sigh.

I believe Iunna pulled me aside after she had added my role EXP and told me the role was gone- I had to re-enter about a week after I received the EXP.

Seriously guys- #### happens ;)