City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Does your published arc suddenly "break"?

Alari_Azure

By Alari_Azure,
Posted on: 2009-05-25 06:37 in Mission Architect

 

Posted

Heya:

I'm investigating an issue with my second arc (Turg Fiction: Ghost in the Machine, Act II), where the following symptoms have occurred:

1. I am able to publish the arc without error, and get dozens of players to run through it without serious technical issue.

2. Roughly a week after publishing (starting Saturday, 5/24), the arc suddenly no longer becomes playable. You can search the arc out, click "Play", but nothing happens: No error message, no "Architect Options" button in the compass window, no contact appearing on the pad.

3. I can resolve it temporarily by re-uploading the arc, where I can then log out, pick the arc with another toon, and start playing. A short time AFTER that, though, it seems to fall off AGAIN, becoming unplayable with the symptoms described in #2.

It's weird enough to happen at all the first time; it's really ticking me off that it's happening repeatedly, and from the people who've commented, it's not just my arc: Other arcs appear to be having the same problem (Gulver and AquaTiger are two players who've mentioned the bug with other arcs).

So, has anyone had this happen to their arc, or seen it happen? I'd like to get some conversation on this to see how widespread it is, and see if there's a common element to the arcs having the problem. Please share if you have any productive commentary - thanks!

 

Posted

One of mine broke, because the devs removed the Burning Forest map. And I do not remember seeing it in the patch notes.

@Blood Beret(2)Twitter
I am a bad speeler, use poorer grammar, and am a frequent typoist.
MA ArcID: 1197
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. Winston Churchill

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
One of mine broke, because the devs removed the Burning Forest map. And I do not remember seeing it in the patch notes.

[/ QUOTE ]

I guess I should be more explicit... does your previously published arc break for no apparent reason? For instance, if you edit the arc, does it show no error msg's? That's what I'm experiencing here, the arc itself is valid and HAS been played publicly, but suddenly it stopped being "playable"; if I republish it, it fixes it for a short time, then it breaks again.

I'm bringing it up here because, from the small group of people who've said they're having problems, they seem to be having problems with more arcs than just mine: Published items are suddenly non-playable, but show zero errors in the mission auditor.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Don't know about the "zero errors" part since it hasn't happened to my arcs, but I've come a cross a few highly-rated arcs with many plays that won't start.

[/ QUOTE ]

Eva: Think you can post their Arc IDs? I'm kinda making this my pet project, so I'd be interested in seeing if they show the same behavior as what my arc seems to be falling into.

 

Posted

Have you edited your enemy group or changed any of the characters in that group? I've done a lot of changing in my group lately and have found that it does affect the playability of the arc.

I have also found that just changing the character descriptions can affect the overall size of the file, too, since long descriptions make those chars take up more file space. (didn't dawn on me before. DOH!)

No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback

 

Posted

It's good to know that it will start. I did some major changes to the enemy group, trying to find a way to get the mix of chars I want without going over the 100k limit.

Thanks for checking that for me.

In another thread, someone said the amount of text allowed has been reduced. If that's the case, then a lot of arcs will be 'broken' for no apparent reason.

Since I like to give my enemies a little more 'character' and use their descriptions to add background to the story, I find myself having to cut them down or eliminate characters in order to stay within the 100k limit. It's hard to find a happy medium. I really wish they would give us a bit more file space.

As it is, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to make a 5 mission arc with all custom chars unless you make a very small group. That tends to make custom groups a bit boring when you keep seeing the same ones over and over. It works ok if it's a military type enemy, but not as well if it's a large street gang. I really don't want to have to add 'standards' in, just to add 'variety'. It tends to mess up the level ranges too much.

No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback

 

Posted

Oops.

Since it seemed a response to me I 'assumed'. I'm sure we all knows what happens when we do that.

Thanks for checking, though.

No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback

 

Posted

Turg, if instead of republishing, you do a "save as" locally, are there any differences between what's stored that way and what you originally published?

Did we ever resolve the issue you were having where you could publish from some machines but not others? I have a vague suspicion they're related, and that what's happening in both instances is post-publication HTML expansion. The other player who had a mission mysteriously start being non-playable had the   problem, and it sounded like that problem had mysteriously started appearing in between patches.

Actually, I wonder if what's happening is that the MA server is being restarted.

And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

 

Posted

This happened to my arc (139671) just this weekend. Thursday/Friday there was an upsurge in plays (went from 13 ratings to 36), then nothing. I assumed that was normal, considering how long it's been up.

Then I decided to run it again myself on a different character, and it would not come up. I had to republish to make it playable again.

No changes of any kind have been made to it for a couple of weeks now.

 

Posted

I'm wondering if it's related to the fact that there seems to have been (another?) reduction in text limits. There do seem to be a lot of unexplained 'bugs' that can't be found because they're 'invisible'.

No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
I'm wondering if it's related to the fact that there seems to have been (another?) reduction in text limits.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not convinced there has been another reduction - when would such a reduction have occurred? There don't seem to have been any relevant patches.

That's why I'm wondering if the problem is related to MA server resets.

And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

 

Posted

Is your arc close to the 100k limit? There seems to be a lot of fiddliness with whether the MA considers you to be over the limit once the mission file has been turned into server-speak.

Arc #41077 - The Men of State
Arc #48845 - Operation: Dirty Snowball

 

Posted

But then why would republishing (with no changes) fix it, if it were a text limit issue?

 

Posted

My theory goes something like this:

- Arc is published with some field close to the character limit
- Post-publication validation code runs, adding extra characters. Since the arc is already published it's still playable.
- MA server restarts, and all validation code is re-run as the server spins up. Field overrun is detected, and arc becomes unplayable.

Why republishing would even be possible in this scenario is something I haven't worked out, but the basic idea is that it's another case of validation code not running when it should, in combination with HTML expansion happening when it shouldn't.

And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines

 

Posted

*looks at the single star* Huh. Wonder what I did wrong by starting this convo? o.O

Anyway... yeah, I'm hesitant to point fingers at a text reduction, since (I would think) the MA auditor would kick in and check the file for any overages when I save or republish, right?

KD: On the publishing difference between machines, yeah, I'm kinda in limbo with that one. It's with this arc: I did try wiping all content locally (critters, villaingroup, other arcs, etc) and just holding the one .storyarc file in there, and its filesize dropped to about 97% (from 104%). Now, if I do the SAME thing on my laptop, I can get it down from 99% to about 94%... so again, unsure about the discrepancy, except for looking at "file size on disk", or something else the bit-brains might know about.

I guess the first problem here is getting a verbose error message, instead of just "nothing"... am going in now to check if it's still playable. See, the thing that bugs me is that it went through a full week without failure, then suddenly it started borking over.

 

Posted

Two of mine did recently.
One of the numbers of glowies went up by 2 and made it unplayable. ALthough it was ONLY after editing it. It was fine till i edited it as published.

These were broken in sense but not unplayable.
The boss wasn't showing up after clicking the glowie.
And in another, the boss stopped doing his animation and reverted to the usual default one.

 

Posted

Turg, this happened with my arc, #175660. Republishing seemed to fix it. I haven't tried it again since yesterday, so it may be broken again. FYI, the arc was at about 95% capacity.

I also had another arc break, but that was due to the removal of the Burning Forest, so that's a "known issue."

"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"

Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers

A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
One of mine broke, because the devs removed the Burning Forest map. And I do not remember seeing it in the patch notes.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's nice...we earn it with tickets and they take it from us. That explains why my first arc stopped working.

 

Posted

I discovered that my previously working arc was broken by feedback from a kind soul. It just wouldn't start anymore. I went into edit & it showed no errors. The Clone map that I was using was removed and I didn't see that in any Dev generated note or post. I have since republished but the removal of the map ruined the arc.

I spent a lot of time on that story and I'm not pleased by "silent removals." If your arc suddenly stops working it is probably related to a Map or enemy change. I doubt it has to do with text limits since I notice no change there.

I have unpublished it since I have lost the desire to fix it. I am done with MA for now.

 

Posted

I'm not aware of any new text limitations. If one of your text fields is suddenly too big, it might be some sneaky HTML that shouldn't be there. I've also had some HTML sneak into one of my character bios, where it is invalid, and prevent me from testing an arc.

Extra objectives might also sneak in, and break the arc. Some maps allow you to place more objectives than the map, technically, allows. The later ones just won't spawn. This might possibly break the arc.

I think I managed to "break" one of my arcs as well, when I added some custom enemies that pushed the file size up near the limit. Suddenly a triggered boss on the final mission, that had been spawning fine during testing and for about 20 plays, started refusing to spawn. The arc was still playable, but people would fail it and tell me the ending sucked. So I had to take him out.

Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper

Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
I discovered that my previously working arc was broken by feedback from a kind soul. It just wouldn't start anymore. I went into edit & it showed no errors. The Clone map that I was using was removed and I didn't see that in any Dev generated note or post. I have since republished but the removal of the map ruined the arc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sam: Those were my exact symptoms. My map selections, however, seem to be the same, and I got no validation errors in editing my arc before reposting...

Still seems to be up as well. Someone mentioned the MA server restart as being a possible issue. I'll leave the arc exactly as-is and see if anything comes up post-Tuesday servicing (should be done very soon I gather).

Also: A very math-oriented forumite (Arcanaville) has kindly reviewed my arc, and suspects that some of the errors may be occurring on the final boss's text fields, where I dropped in Chinese (Traditional) characters for effect. I left them in place for now, but if it breaks again I'll upload a version with the characters removed. I figured they were "valid" since they could copy/paste fine and display correctly in the mission (whereas some other "alternate" text, like my first choice of Hindi, would not), but if it continues to fail, maybe it's not as valid as I thought...

 

Posted

Mine is also "broken" in the same way, #14121.

Never argue with stupid people. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

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