Forums » Suggestions

Give convoys back their cargo.

«12
Jul 10, 2016 look... no hands link
At this point I am not seeing ANY convoys, loaded or empty. Did Deliverator die again?

Whatever you guys did, it only lasted a few days, maybe a week? Can it be done again or automated to happen every 3-4 days until a permanent fix is in?
Jul 10, 2016 incarnate link
Your original response on the third was basically mistaken.. we didn't do anything at that time.

It takes about 2-3 weeks for Kourier to start experiencing convoy issues. And it requires a full server restart to change anything.

It's now been a little over 3 weeks since the last restart. I raised this with Ray on Friday, and we scheduled a restart for early next week.

No, it will not be done on an automated basis. He's supposed to be keeping an eye on it and restarting every two weeks, but it's clearly been slipping his mind.
Jul 10, 2016 look... no hands link
Ok, so it requires a full restart, never knew that. You guys have any idea what caused the problem to go away? I guess it doesn't really matter that much, if it takes a few weeks to develop, and is relatively manageable on your end. Thanks for responding on this though, blasting the voys (stupid though they may be) is fun.
Jul 11, 2016 incarnate link
You guys have any idea what caused the problem to go away?

Basically, it's a chaotic problem. It isn't just something "breaks" and then stops working (not everywhere, and not absolutely). The way Michael had written it was fundamentally unstable in the way that it would count active convoys and maintain them across the galaxy. So eventually it would get to points where the numbers would really drop, and then they'd spike up again (but not as high as before) and then drop down again, etc. This is pretty evident in our graphs of convoy activity.

Figuring out exacty why this happens was a bit more complicated, because of the sort of.. nested rule-based nature of how it was implemented. Stuff updating numbers read by other stuff, which then updated other numbers somewhere else. Basically, the accounting system was/is really complicated and obscure, resulting in a situation that's difficult to debug and "trace", as so many variables are feeding other variables.

Ray did a deep dive on it last year, and we came away with the conclusion that it really just needs to be torn out and re-written from scratch. He did a bit of a hack-job at the time to make it not go haywire as easily, or quite as badly (there was actually a case last year, where kourier took the entire game down, when it tried spawning several hundred thousand convoys).

We've been letting it limp along, for the moment, forcing a restart every couple of weeks, because a total re-write is probably a week or two of work. And that's been impossible with the other priorities we've been juggling.

So, anyway, that's where it stands. It "works" for awhile, and then sucks, and we just need to restart the server periodically and it is "okay" for the moment. Not my favorite thing to do, but making the best of it for now.
Jul 14, 2016 Savet link
You should reverse Y and X and then invert the sine wave.