Feedback on cross-server presence system in testing on BG

[Basilica]

I hadn't experienced the "possible lag" issue Rorax noted until last night. There was a pretty huge string of TSM "leaves and joins" (probably reflecting something like 9 people DC and rejoin) maybe before midnight last night Eastern. Sometimes I gather it's not an actual crash / rejoin, more like "this presence monitoring thing loses touch, but regains it quick", almost like an IRC netsplit.

Anyhow, it was all during a conversation type time, not combat, but I'm going to guess that a huge amount of orange message clutter broke up some talks we were having with an NPC, then again, it was also 10+ people on our end as well. Basically a pretty brief chat window seeming overwhelmed kind of spike. I know a couple of us noticed it, couple people I was at least able to share the #notify off command with, which I did after that little oddity.

Once BG has the new code in place, I'd be interested in you could turn notify back on and see whether it appears faster in these circumstances.

With respect to when TSM was marked offline and then came back on last night: This is a longstanding problem that occurs when a DM pauses a server for a long time. The pause prevents the server from talking to the database long enough for it to be considered offline. A fix for this is already in place for the next ACR release (1.85), but the other servers need to have the new script code running on their end to prevent that from occuring. The good news is that when every server rolls out the cross-server presence system, they will also be deploying the fix for this problem, so it will go away at that time.

[Basilica]

BG has been updated to strip the enclosing color tag on the character join/part messages. If you were seeing performance glitches with those (maxcell), please re-enable them and report back as to what sort of difference you see, if any.

[Brokenbone]

Hmm, just #notify on'd and saw a DM join TSM in "orange"... maybe it isn't color-updated yet?

[Basilica]

The colors that appear to show should be the same.

The default notify/part messages are sent to the client as "server" channel messages. The client encloses all "server" channel messages in a (hidden) color=gray tag. The change was to break out of that color tag. (It didn't change the color of the body of the message anyway as there were nested color tags that set the desired color. So there isn't any display change, just a reduction in the complexity of the tag structure to not include nesting inside the hidden color=gray tag.)

[Brokenbone]

And oddly, while I'd seen H Dawg (heero) log in and noticed no [DM] stuff by name, people who I know only had player status, well, got [DM] misidentified.

EDIT - somehow crossed posts with Bas, but the odd DM tag on 'wrong guy' still take for what worth.

[Basilica]

Thanks for the report. The color is as it should be.

The reason that some players appear to be marked as DM incorrectly in the notification is due to bugs in the pre-1.85 ACR, where the server marks a player as online, and then only later actually marks whether the player is a DM or not.

As a result, when a player logs on to a pre-1.85 ACR server, you may see whether they were a DM or not as of their previous login.

This bug has been fixed for 1.85, but the other servers will need to roll that release out for the bug fix to apply to players logging on to those servers (because it is the server that the player logs in to which updates the database as to whether the player is now acting as a DM or not).

[Brokenbone]

Ahhh Heero had "just" been on BG, and Ronan I suspect had just recently been on as a DM in BG. Explained!

[Basilica]

Right.

This, the problem with characters in quarantine being considered 'online' at their home server, and the problem with characters that successfully server portal being shown as logging on to their old home server, logging off, and then logging back on to their new home server all relate to issues with how incoming players had their database state updated when they logged in on previous ACR versions.

It just used to be that many of these issues were less visibly apparent because they only affected the user counters (mostly) for the website and channel bot. Now that we have a more comprehensive in-game representation of what is going on, these dormant quirks became more glaringly noticible.

It's believed that all of these issues should be fixed with 1.85, but, again, many of the fixes have to be deployed on the server that the player logs in to in order for them to be visible elsewhere.

But please continue to post any strange findings like this, just in case they might not be a known issue. Thanks for helping out!