We experienced a full-blown server-program crash today, the first in.. probably years. The game was back up within 5 minutes, but I apologize to anyone who was kicked off in the meantime. No significant character data should have been lost, it's no different from a shutdown (although more, uhh.. sudden). The game server hit an assert, and we have a core dump, so fixing it shouldn't be a problem. We think it may have been related to deliverator/kourier (a currently less-important adjunct system under development that handles pirates and trade convoys) crashing repeatedly over a period of time and maybe killing/spawning large numbers of bots, but we'll know more in a few hours.

Anyway, sorry for the outage and interruption of play, however brief. As most will attest, this is a pretty rare occurrence.

augh! will kourier need to be restarted as a third attempt now because of this?

third times a charm, my mother always said.

Och, worse things happen at sea as my mother used to say .I have no idea why she used to say that given that her entire marine experience was a trip on a cross channel ferry ....

The significant point is that it was back up in such a short time, sharp work devs.

Ecka

Too much TISP users clogged teh sewer system. No wonder it crashed. :D

I did noticed it.....I was middle of an battle....when it crash =/

Itani need to decrease the frequency of their BMs. We all know it was the Itani's fault.

Finster did it. <.<

A fine scapegoat you are.

It's Blak! Has to be. They're like 50-armed puppeteers, pulling their strings all over the galaxy, steering every one of us toward their own devious end game!

you sure it wasn't another garbage truck?

Woodstock

Mynt, shut up. Just because you say it doesn't make it any less annoying -.-

Last time I (entirely accidentally) crashed the server, it hit an assert as well. Perhaps it would be a good idea to grep through your server code and replace all the asserts with something... umm, less lethal?

Well, that's the whole point of an assert. Yes, it's lethal and breaks things, but it makes damned sure you fix the problem. Without asserts the problem often goes unnoticed in the background, creating much larger, harder-to-debug problems. The fact that we use a lot of asserts is a big part of the reason why our core game-server code is as stable as it is.

Your project :-) I would just make asserts log to files at super-important-need-fixing-now level and check the logs often. Your way works for you though, so I won't complain.