Forums » Bugs

Stuck on "Entering Universe" dialog for one charater

May 05, 2007 Mann link
When I log onto my main character, VO just sits on the "Enter Universe" dialog for ever. I created another character and they entered just fine.

I check my errors.log file and it shows that I did get in when using my main character and I even see chat log messages in there. I have played with this character before and I'm just in the starting station for the Itani.

I'm on an amd64 linux system.

What can I do?
May 05, 2007 moldyman link
Did the other character start at the same station? If not, then the sector may be frozen. If yes, then I have no clue.
May 07, 2007 Mann link
I was in Itani K-11, which I've seen other people in game mention is dead. I've just started another character since I hadn't done too much yet,
May 07, 2007 moldyman link
Ah, heh. Yay, stuck sectors... that's been happening more again recently.
May 07, 2007 LeberMac link
Yes, Itan K-11 was hung/broken/notloaded last night, Sunday May 6, 2007.

We all think it's haunted.
May 07, 2007 a1k0n link
>:(
May 07, 2007 a1k0n link
Update: Whoa. I found a stupid bug that caused this one; figured one "stuck sector" problem out at least. Need to do some more testing and then I will push out a fix. Only happens with a relatively long mission loaded and on sectors that happen to run on a particular cluster box...

A side issue is that the policy for dealing with this kind of error on the sector sucks, too... aside from someone's character getting stuck in that sector, everyone else subsequently trying to enter has a good chance of also getting stuck. The main server thinks the character logged out just fine, so it reuses their "node id" (which is how we enumerate players in the sector as a shorthand way of referring to them - kind of a throwback to our original "characterless" universe, but also is efficient for compression). But the sector thinks the "stuck" character is still using that node id, so it's confused and passively rejects the new player, spitting out an automated bug report and leaving them in limbo.

This enables a kind of "hopscotch" thing where if someone is logged in with the stuck nodeid and someone else comes into the sector, that other person loads just fine.

Anyway the fix is obviously to believe the server and actively kick off whatever's consuming the stuck nodeid. But over the years I've focused on fixing what got it stuck in the first place, so I never got around to it.
May 09, 2007 thurisaz link
mmm....

step 1 - spawn randomly wandering NPC
step 2 - watch where it goes?

"...can you hear me, now??"
May 09, 2007 RelayeR link
Andy, I dropped that particular sector twice to get it going again. It had approximately 30 NPCs in it at the time. Should I have left it for you to look at? I was unaware of Mann's problem and only knew that someone couldn't jump into K-11.
May 09, 2007 a1k0n link
That was probably a separate incident, then. The thing I found only happened once. No, if it's stuck go ahead and kill it; I can always look at the logs.