Discord
Changelog
Hunter's Housing was/is a script system on the NW Vault site that allowed for persistent player-owned buildings. It is, in fact, the base for our system - although heavily modified and expanded in almost every respect for Thay.
Because I need EVERYONE's help address this, and because DMs trying to replace lost furniture will be a never-ending affair until this is resolved, I've made the dictator-like decision that lost furniture items will not be replaced anymore. This decision is perhaps unfair, and I apologize for that, but I hope it will be incentive for everyone (as almost everyone has a house with one or more of their characters) to provide all the information you can when/if one of these crashes occur. So if you're reading this, I need your help right now with either trying to repro or create one of these server crashes so that I can figure out the root cause. Right now these crashes happen about 1-2 times a month, so they are relatively rare. But the first step to fixing it is to determine the cause, and I can really only do that with confidence when I have a set of steps laid out that produce the problem.
With that plea out in the open, if this continues to drag on for many more months, I do have a Plan B:
Destroy the database file entirely in the hope the problem is 'just' operating system file corruption that gets fixed when it is rebuilt. Although, without determining what the cause truly is, there's no guarantee this would permanently fix the problem. But, at least to start with for the first year(s) or so, I'd put the odds at better-than-average it may.
Or Plan C:
Move to an entirely different database system, which will be very design intensive as I will need to learn how to use the new scripting functions for a new database system. This is almost guaranteed to fix the problem, but will require a lot of my time to implement.
In either case, both backup plans are painful because they would require everyone to completely redecorate their buildings. So that brings us back to Plan A (see above).
Because I need EVERYONE's help address this, and because DMs trying to replace lost furniture will be a never-ending affair until this is resolved, I've made the dictator-like decision that lost furniture items will not be replaced anymore. This decision is perhaps unfair, and I apologize for that, but I hope it will be incentive for everyone (as almost everyone has a house with one or more of their characters) to provide all the information you can when/if one of these crashes occur. So if you're reading this, I need your help right now with either trying to repro or create one of these server crashes so that I can figure out the root cause. Right now these crashes happen about 1-2 times a month, so they are relatively rare. But the first step to fixing it is to determine the cause, and I can really only do that with confidence when I have a set of steps laid out that produce the problem.
With that plea out in the open, if this continues to drag on for many more months, I do have a Plan B:
Destroy the database file entirely in the hope the problem is 'just' operating system file corruption that gets fixed when it is rebuilt. Although, without determining what the cause truly is, there's no guarantee this would permanently fix the problem. But, at least to start with for the first year(s) or so, I'd put the odds at better-than-average it may.
Or Plan C:
Move to an entirely different database system, which will be very design intensive as I will need to learn how to use the new scripting functions for a new database system. This is almost guaranteed to fix the problem, but will require a lot of my time to implement.
In either case, both backup plans are painful because they would require everyone to completely redecorate their buildings. So that brings us back to Plan A (see above).