v0.20d locking players out

[dpezet]

I run two Usurper games over at the Mushroom Cloud BBS. The first is v0.18 in classic mode which has been running fine for quite some time. The second is v0.20d in new mode which up until a few weeks ago has been running fine also, all be it definitely slower than the v0.18 game.

My latest issue is that occasionally a player will be locked out of the game. They will try to log into Usurper v0.20d and it will tell them they are already online. Or, it will say they are on a quest and are out of town in the event they were in the middle of a quest when they were locked out. My solution is to wait until no one is logged in and then delete the ONLINERS.DAT file in the NODES subdirectory for Usurper. This flags everyone as logged out and allows the locked out users to log back in. The file is usually pretty small (less than 6K), but I have noticed it is usually larger when someone is locked out (around 14K).

Any thoughts on that? Like I said, when someone gets locked out, I just delete the one file and everything is fine. I just hate having to make users wait until I can kick them off.

Thanks again,

Don (Constantine)
The Mushroom Cloud BBS
telnet://tmcbbs.com
http://www.tmcbbs.com

[Knight]

Yes, I've been having the same problem...any fixes found yet?

[Lenny of Repan]

Don's problem at the Mushroom Cloud, seems to have been involved with players getting dropped when F)inishing Quests. I'm not certain if there were other issues as well, but he has disabled the Quests on his newer versions of Usurper, and whem we last messaged, seemed to be helping.

[haakon]

this is how i circumvented the problem, well, alleviated it rather. unless your bbs is just totally slamming, you probably only have one user in usurper at a time, so that when the user gets kicked out and is still online there are no other players in there, making it safe to delete the onliners.dat.

So, the solution is natural...

Just make your usurper.bat file place a semaphor file in your BBS node directories and delete it at the end of the batch file. Then, at the front of the batch file, check to see if any of the semaphor files exist, and if they don't, it means nobody's in the game, in which case it's ok to delete the onliners.dat file, so that if somebody was stuck it'll go ahead and kill the file.

Once I did this, I never had anybody complain about getting stuck online.

Here's my batch file, since you may have difficulty setting this up:


c:\\tame\\tame-nt.com
set i=0
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node1\\usurper.flg set i=1
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node2\\usurper.flg set i=1
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node3\\usurper.flg set i=1
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node4\\usurper.flg set i=1
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node5\\usurper.flg set i=1
if exist c:\\sbbs\\node6\\usurper.flg set i=1
if a%i%==a0 call c:\\sbbs\\xtrn\\usurper\\killons.bat
c:
cd\\sbbs\\xtrn\\usurper
echo asdf > c:\\sbbs\\node%1\\usurper.flg
usurper /N%1 /PC:\\SBBS\\NODE%1 /B57600
del c:\\sbbs\\node%1\\usurper.flg


The killons.bat file just does this:
del c:\\sbbs\\xtrn\\usurper\\node\\onliners.dat

It really didn't need its own file, but anyway...



That should help!