OK, this happened to me once that I can verify, and once that I'm not sure of if I imagined it or not.

If you're online during a flagcap and you get your cash, then stay logged in untill the server reboots (no crash; an announced reboot with countdown and all), you lose your cash. I was logged in during a flagcap, got the mil, gave my extra cash I still had to another char. Then left the account logged in untill the server reboot. Lost my cash, got my extra cash I gave away back.

Apparently the game doesn't save your progress when it reboots. This is a bug, and a bug report has already been sent. I don't know if it's only money related, or if it applies to your whole progress.

So next time you guys get some free cash from a cap, or even more when you worked hard yourself for that extra million, briefly log off and on again to make sure the game saves your character. Otherise you might be in for a bad surprise next time you log in and find you're still bankrupt. ;)

Yes. You need to log off or change sectors before the server goes down. Otherwise changes in your inventory or status will NOT be saved.

Well, it's still a bug; the server has all this info in memory, so it should be written to disk at shutdown time.

Apparently you seem to know this already; it's a known bug then? How long has it been known? Might give us an indication on how soon they're gonna fix it. ;)

It's not a bug. It's just how Vendetta's server works. Whether it'll be changed or not remains to be seen.

I think all the data is on the client side until warp or log off.
And it has been the way allllll the way since pre 3.2, probably even pre 3.1.
And it's a nice way of preventing lazy ppl from picking up couple million.

"It's not a bug! it's a feature!"

and it's a nice feature as well, or the server will laggggggggg

Hey, the devs DID tell you to logoff before it shutdown, and even gave a nice second-by-second countdown..

They should make it so the server doesn't accept new connections for 30 secs before shutdown, though. That way no one will logon with 1sec to go before reboot, then get kicked and lose stuff.

Yes, We tell people to log off or risk losing their stuff.
The server itself doesn't know your character's info. Each sector is a different process and the one you're on knows.
When the server gets killed, the robots stop but can't save the info to the database because the server is not there anymore to respond to the request.

So, Heed our warnings when we restart the server and all will be ok.

Well, not to criticize your work or anything, but it seems like kind of a sloppy way to handle user data in a persistent world, no? If the main server goes down it should just signal this to the sector processes who can then flush their data to the main server, and if a sector gets restarted/shut down it should flush its data to the server first.

Why call a bug a "feature" or "quirk of the system you just gotta live with" when you can easily work around it by adding a couple of RPC calls or whatever to be triggered before shutdown? Ever seen a database system or a filesystem manager that didn't flush its in-memory data to disk before it got shut down? From a programmers point of view I can not understand the reasons behind this decision (if it actualy was a decision, and not just something that hasn't been implemented yet). But if there is an actual reason why this is so, please enlighten me. Always eager to learn something new when it comes to game design and coding techniques in general.

Anyway, it seems like a trivial fix to me. But then again, you probably got tons of trivial fixes on your TODO list, so I understand this is not on the top of your priority list.

Just my humble two cents.

I am not a dev Nighty, It was a joke.
it's a classic microsoft joke.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature"
this is a beta, they are allowed to make mistakes.

Lol, wasn't directed at you either. And sure, it's a beta, and quite a good one too (wouldn't have stayed here for so long otherwise). But I was just wondering why they haven't put some data-flushing routines in the game yet for when they shutdown the server. It's one of the first things I would do: make sure I can guarantee my data integrity.

Anyway. I know the bug is in there now. It's not realy annoying, but I just wanted to report it in case it was a new bug recently introduced. I just never realised before that it had always been in there.

btw: ever played Discworld 2? They have some primitive computer made out of tubes with ants running trough it, called "hex". They put them ants in there so that later people couldn't complain about bugs; the response to such an accusation would be: "It's not a bug, it's an undocumented creature!" ;)

Timmy don't light yourself on fire!
*timmy lights self on fire*

Timmy learned his lesson, will nighty?

Heh, it's just not very high priority.

Yeah, the server only goes down when it gets broken or when a new version comes out.

BTW, any time there's more than 100 lightning mines in a single sector, ping goes WAY up for everyone online. My usual 40 ping goes to ~600. This is bad.

Mines eat up ping and rendering power.

Having calculated it, each mine is between 5 and 10 ms added to my ping.

Nighty, that is, of course, a good point. What we really want is a graceful server shutdown procedure other than just killing it. If we schedule the shutdown, then each sector process can force-save all data at the ten second count or something like that.

No, what you really need is to have all the sector bg's switch to the sector 0 bg for the last 10 seconds before server shutdown. That'll get everyone logged out REALLY quick!