Re: Dies Irae

[Jennkryst]

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation.

So who were they that they had a reputation in need of laundering?

I mean, if you look at her characters’ names, and then go to other WoD games and check the bboards for similar names whomst were recently (for variable definition of recently) banned, you could start to follow the papertrail.

[Jumpscare]

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

what was occurring was that it was moving the character object to the location, which left the account “object” (or meta object?) in the previous location

I can answer this!

First, a quick overview.

Accounts aren’t objects. They’re just Django accounts that have permissions on objects. Typically, the account is linked to a character object when it’s created. When you log in with your account, Evennia allows you to “puppet” objects to run commands as them. I could code it so you could puppet a table object and then you could roleplay as the table, provided the table item has RP commands attached to it.

That being said, when an object is accessed (either by being puppeted, or being seen in a room, or by being a room itself), the object is grabbed from the database and stored into memory. Because of this, you effectively have two copies of the object: the one in working memory, and the one in the database. If I recall correctly, the database is synchronized to the working memory every few minutes. This reduces the number of database writes.

With that being said, there are three ways the bug on Dies Irae could be happening.

1. If there are too many database writes, you’ll get the error “Database is locked.” That means anything that was attempted to be synchronized didn’t get synchronized. This is fine if you make another modification to the object, because then it’ll try to synchronize again. But if you’re just doing things like sending RP messages, your character object will still be in the previous location in memory. This will cause you to receive messages from the original location, but you’ll send message to the current location.

2. If the server doesn’t have enough memory, it’ll happen in reverse, IIRC. It’ll write the new location to the database, and it’ll appear like you’ve moved. But the game didn’t have enough memory to process the move, so it thinks you’re still in the original room. When that happens, you’ll send messages to the original location and receive messages from the current location.

3. Dict attributes (such as {1:“a”} ) are serialized when they’re pulled from the database. If you do my_dict=self.db.special_dict, that means if you make a change to my_dict, it’ll be INSTANTLY reflected in special_dict. So if you make multiple changes to a dict in a single method, you need to .deserialize() the dict as you’re copying it, or else the database will SUFFER trying to update the same attribute over and over again. Chances are favorable that you’ll desynchronize the object and you’ll get one of the two previous bugs.

4. There’s one more way this can happen. But you’d have to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Evennia works or be reliant on AI code. That’s to somehow deserialize the character object itself. I can’t think of a single reason you’d want to do this. Should you do this, may god have mercy on your server.

[Muse]

@Jumpscare Wow Jumpscare, thank you for putting this together, I don’t know nearly enough about coding in Evennia, but I know Evennia has some very special features that I’m interested in and anything that contributes to community knowledge about it is a win in my book!

[catzilla]

@Jennkryst said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation.

So who were they that they had a reputation in need of laundering?

I mean, if you look at her characters’ names, and then go to other WoD games and check the bboards for similar names whomst were recently (for variable definition of recently) banned, you could start to follow the papertrail.

[Warma Sheen]

@Ashkuri said in Re: Dies Irae:

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Yes, I forgot about that part. I didn’t really have much issue with that. I ran into a few times and it was a simple fix (at least for me). But other people really struggled with it, supposedly.

I did feel like some used it as a convenient excuse to bail, but it is what it is and as excuses go, it was a solid one. Not being able to see people’s communication is a pretty big deal on a MU*.

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

I think the first big death knell or sharp decline of the game was when @somasatori left.

I thought that at the time… but I had desperate hope that something else decent would step in and fill the void. That didn’t happen.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation.

I will say that in my time there, I never had much an issue with Scylla, personally, but I know others did. I think people have long memories in this hobby and reputations aren’t easily repaired, regardless of how you go about it. If anything, people just wait for a chance to use reputations and prior bad acts against you years/decades down the road. So sometimes, despite doing decent stuff in the present, you’re doomed to fail for your past mistakes and then… whatever you’re working on in the present goes down with it.

[dvoraen]

@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:

I will say that in my time there, I never had much an issue with Scylla, personally, but I know others did. I think people have long memories in this hobby and reputations aren’t easily repaired, regardless of how you go about it. If anything, people just wait for a chance to use reputations and prior bad acts against you years/decades down the road. So sometimes, despite doing decent stuff in the present, you’re doomed to fail for your past mistakes and then… whatever you’re working on in the present goes down with it.

[Prototart]

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Muse said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori while I never played there past a flirtation with Alpha, I will say, I still remain thoroughly impressed with the pioneering you did with Evennia. It’s incredible how much you taught yourself, and what you pulled off.

I think the first big death knell or sharp decline of the game was when @somasatori left.

I think I logged on maybe twice after that.

Scylla was insane even with someone theoretically over her. I had zero interest in finding out how much worse it was going to get.

[Prototart]

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jennkryst said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation.

So who were they that they had a reputation in need of laundering?

I mean, if you look at her characters’ names, and then go to other WoD games and check the bboards for similar names whomst were recently (for variable definition of recently) banned, you could start to follow the papertrail.

[Taika]

$5 it was a HoneyBadger alt. CoH loves dropping bans on ‘female that didn’t lick HB’s chocolate starfish 24/7’.

[Wyrmsign]

This PC/Player has also been banned from Retro. She is not missed.

[catzilla]

@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:

This PC/Player has also been banned from Retro. She is not missed.

From what I have seen about Retro, she was the other player caught up in Pika/Jujube/etc’s war about who is the prettiest princess?

[somasatori]

@catzilla would it be surprising to find out that the reason for Dies Irae stemmed from exactly that? There’s a lot more that went into it, but when I was added into the DI discord group, it seemed to be immediately following some fallout with Pikachu (then Polk took down the NM server as he is wont to do).

[somasatori]

This post is deleted!

[Jennkryst]

Honestly, there is a disturbing number of times a simple question was asked and Scylla answered in such a way that multiple people just wanted to flip a table and never log in again.

… I’m not saying this is the reason I distraction squirreled away, but it was a non-zero factor.

[Prototart]

@Jennkryst

You basically couldn’t have a conversation with her and couldn’t tell her anything. It was insanely frustrating. I say that as someone who really, really, really tried to be a good girl - i wrote up every Lost Breed gift and rite - and work with her even as the, like, basic ability of my who-gives-a-shit character to exist was eroded every time she made a decision.

(A couple of people tried to get me to make a Changeling but that crew was so much worse. Like, every single thing I saw from them that wasn’t amateurish love-bombing was an out and out tantrum.)

[Wyrmsign]

@catzilla Oh they absolutely butted heads, to a massive degree. However, her behavior outside of that was so reprehensible that /all/ staff had enough.

[Prototart]

@Wyrmsign

i mean

what did she do tho

i only know her from DI and that post someone gave me

[Yam]

I’m gathering that this person might be what some people would grudgingly call a Bad Fit, which is generally a summary of someone being kind of a bummer to be around, or exhausting, or non-collaborative, or just straight up rude. There’s usually some list of smallish slights (as shown above) rather than some kind of wild, explosive crashout on pub chan (to my dismay). General Bad Behavior that you don’t want on your game.

Of course… there may be hot spicy deetz we’re not privy to. You really have to be a certain something to get barred from multiple games.

[Wyrmsign]

@Prototart I unfortunately have had experience with this player across three different games. On all of them there has been a prevalent theme best attributed to a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions. Several times she has decided that I am enemy number one that must be completely destroyed because…wait for it…I dared to have an rp partner she wanted.

That was it.

She wanted them, they were already playing with me (and in all cases long time mush friends, we’re talking a near decade in the case of one of them and very close in another) and they didn’t decide she clearly had the best virtual vagina in existence and jump ship for her. After that all bets were off. She tried to get me sitebanned…for what I don’t know, other than not bowing down when she came for me, we had little interaction. She’s resorted to cross-sphere assaults on alts, slander and other obsessive and generally all around shitty behavior. And I made the mistake of not boo-hooing and slinking off into the dark so she could have her way. She’s done this personally to me on two games, I watched her from the outside do it on a third. This is her MO.

[Pavel]

@Wyrmsign said in Re: Dies Irae:

a Pick Me Girl of psychotic proportions

Could someone translate this into Old People, please?