Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 21 Mar 2007 Posts: 14

After sitting in my game for about 9 hours, I fumbled some odd key combination while working in the automapper and CMUD crashed out with an exception error that I unfortunately missed (the fumble included hitting the enter key right away, closing the error window).

Undaunted, I reloaded it and entered the game.

To my horror, every single action I took in my on and off play over the last 9 hours has been erased from memory. Every macro/button/alias I created or edited. Over 100 new rooms, including room names and full descriptions (note - these are all manually entered - Fed II doesn't play nice with Automapper). All gone. The package is exactly as it was when I first booted up the machine today. Shocked

Now, I can take an occasional quirk here and there. But, really, this is too much. I am definitely daunted at the prospect of repeating an entire day's exploration in the game (not to mention trying to remember what scripting work I did!).

Since the automapper has no SAVE button (only a Save As... good for backups, I suppose!), I assumed it was all being saved to disk as it went along. The package editor DOES have a Save option, but every change of an alias, button, etc. also is accompanied by a save, so it's not clear if an occasional CTRL-S is required or not.

When I am writing a document or working in Excel, I have a tendency to hit CTRL-S every minute or so, just because I hate redoing work lost in some odd crash.

What can I do to prevent another major loss like this? What can Zugg do to the program to keep it from happening again? Will quitting CMUD once an hour help flush everything permanently to disk? Must I make regular (e.g., hourly) backup files to ensure no major work is lost?

I am enjoying the product (especially once I read that undocking the Automapper removes a lot of its quirks), but this is painful.

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 5:02 pm

That's actually nearly impossible. CMUD uses a database which is updated constantly. It doesn't just save settings when you exit like zMUD did. My guess is that the package file is just stored somewhere else on the disk. The mapper is also stored in a database that is constantly written to disk, and the mapper rooms are stored in a different file than your aliases, triggers, etc.

So, before you panic, check some other disk directories. By default, CMUD stores it's data files in My Documents/My Games/CMUD. There should be a folder in that directory named for the MUD session that you were playing. In the folder named for your MUD there will be a *.PKG file with your aliases etc, and a *.MDB file with your map information.

The automapper doesn't have a Save button because it's a database file on disk that is constantly updated. Same for the package editor. The mapper *.MDB file is a Microsoft Access 2000 database file. The *.PKG package file is a SQLite database file. The Save button in the package editor is just for saving the specific record that you are editing and not for saving the entire file. The entire file is saved automatically.

So, click the Edit Session action for your character icon and go to the Files tab and make sure the filename and path of the *.PKG file is correct.

If CMUD was not able to write to the databases, then you would have gotten errors when you were using CMUD. Hopefully you will be able to find where the files were written to. But as I said, CMUD was specifically designed to use database so that this kind of data loss could never happen, so there is really nothing else I can think to suggest.

Beginner Joined: 21 Mar 2007 Posts: 14

This is CMUD v1.26, by the way.

I checked and the package filename is correct, from the right directory. The path given is also correct (My Documents\My Games\CMUD\FederationII).

That directory contains:
FederationII.ini
FederationII.mdb
FederationII.pkg
FederationII.tbz
FederationII.xly
federationii.zfg
FederationII_bak.pkg
federationii_bak.zfg

There are no other federationii files on my machine except in my zmud directory and those have not been modified since I downloaded CMUD (3/18). So while it may be "nearly" impossible, it is clearly not "entirely" impossible. :)

If it was just one or three things missing, I'd chalk it up to my memory, but three entire new zones went missing and I am not likely to mistake having had those.

Edit: Because I hate my own typing mistakes. :)

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 11:30 pm

I'm afraid I don't have any other suggestions then. Obviously, somehow your computer wasn't able to save data to the PKG database files during your session. Maybe the permissions on the files are messed up or something. On my system, if the file can't be written to, I get an error in CMUD. So I don't know why you didn't get the error.

As I said, the mapper used the Microsoft MDAC/ADO database for the *.MDB file. If it isn't able to write updates to the database (like if I make the *.MDB file readonly) then I get all sorts of mapper errors in CMUD. So I don't know why you didn't get errors if Windows couldn't update your MDB database. You can download the MDAC Repair tool at http://www.zuggsoft.com/data and run that on your MDB database to see if it's corrupted and can be fixed. Although if it was corrupted then you'd also get a lot of errors.

I'm not calling you a liar or anything, but I can't figure out any way to reproduce the situation you described where neither the PKG nor the MDB map would update and you'd not get any error or indication. So I'm completely stumped. You are the only person to ever report something like this. You might want to do some simple experiments to see if the files are still not updating on that computer. If it is something you can reproduce, then we might be able to continue working on this to determine the cause. But if everything starts updating without any problem, then my only guess is that you got an error early in your previous session that indicated a problem with saving data which was ignored and you continued after the error without restarting CMUD.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

I've had CMUD crash on me before and I've lost 20mins of work. Never 9 hours, but more than the last edit. Not been able to reproduce though. Sorry to not be able to offer any more help but I'm sure I've had a similar thing. Will update if I can reproduce anything.

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:39 pm

Guinn: Are you sure you are talking about the public versions of CMUD (v1.24 and later), or are you talking about one of the beta versions? The beta versions had a lot of problems and this was pretty common with them.

Also, as I said, the problem usually only happens after you get an initial error message. Some people keep playing after getting an error message, and this can be dangerous if the error was related to a locked database.

Unfortunately, current and previous versions didn't show the actual error message unless you clicked the Show Error button on the crash report. The 1.27 version will be showing the error message itself so that it will be easier to see if the error relates to some database or disk error problem.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

tahnar, do you have Norton Utilities (or something similar installed)? It will keep a copy of every single version of every file (for a while). So I've still got quite a lot of the MUD files that zMUD deleted when I saved a new copy of my settings, in Norton UnErase. Of course, this won't help if your changes were never seemed, which seems to be the case, but that is very odd. The only thing I can think of that file system changes were cached by the disk drive or some low-level software intended to speed up disk write performance and not actually flushed to the magnetic surface of the disk. What O/S are you running (including Service Packs) and do you have any software intended to speed up the performance of your computer?