Usurper Board

I have been having some issues with quests in v0.20d for a while now. We run 4 different v0.20d games on the Mushroom Cloud BBS and this happens in all four. Here is what happens:

1) User logs in and accepts a quest
2) User continues to play and is then disconnected somehow. Usually their internet connection dies or something.
3) The user is left in the ONLINERS.DAT file.
4) If the user logs back in, the user cannot continue the quest because it shows them as already being on the quest.
5) Automatic maintenance fails because the user is stuck in the quest.
6) The game is brought to a screeching halt since maintenance is not being run.

To fix the problem I have to delete the ONLINERS.DAT file and then force maintenance on the game.

Does anyone know if there is a fix for this, or if there is a way to disable quests in the game? I looked through the config files and I do not see a way to disable quests.

Thanks,

Don

dpezet wrote:I have been having some issues with quests in v0.20d for a while now. We run 4 different v0.20d games on the Mushroom Cloud BBS and this happens in all four.
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To fix the problem I have to delete the ONLINERS.DAT file and then force maintenance on the game.

Does anyone know if there is a fix for this, or if there is a way to disable quests in the game? I looked through the config files and I do not see a way to disable quests.

Thanks,

Don

Hayle thar Don
Aye dydst log onto thy websyte and took a look. I was booted from the game when I P)icked the Quest to F)insih. I immediately went from the usurper prompt to the door menu. I suspect a corrupted quest file.
Now as to your other question. In version 0.20d, configuration lines 129 through 135 control whether a monarch can issue quests, and the rest concern how many.
First, make a full back-up of all doors you will modify, in case this doesn't work..
I tried the following, and it worked, but THIS WAS JUST A TEST DOOR ONLY, NOT A LIVE DOOR!!

In your case I would suggest setting 129 to NO, and reducing all the following 5 items to 0 or no. Then you will need to delete from the /data directory RQUESTS.DAT. I would suggest just renaming it. It will be recreated as needed, empty.
Then you will need to do a normal daily maintenance for all this to take effect.
Once completed, players are able to go to Quests, and look for quests, and willl find none. My test subject had one quest to finish, after maintenance, it had dissapeared, as had all existing quest not completed. The Quest Masters record was still valid. When the Monarch then tryed to iniitate a quest, the message says
"The Super-God has ruled that no Quests can be issued!"..
That should fix the quest problem.
As I stated initialy, I suspect those files to be corrupted from some unknown cause. I hope this helps.

Well, I went ahead and disabled the quests in all four games. I have done some pretty extensive testing on it and I can recreate it pretty easily on my BBS server. It works fine on my laptop at home (Windows XP), so it may be some kind of incompatability between Usurper and the software I run on my server. Here is my basic server config:

Windows Server 2003
Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition
Synchronet 3.14a

All four games are clean installs that are independant of each other. Since the problem is in all four games I am hesitent to say the problem is with the RQUESTS.DAT file becoming corrupt. It could, however, be a problem with how Synchronet is handling the door, or how Usurper is handling dropped calls.

Disabling the quests is fine as far as I am concerned. It is still an awesome game with a ton of stuff to do even without the quests.

Thanks again,

Don

Thanks for the update, Don. I'm hopeful that will
work out best for you. I have seen similar situations
where usurper would work fine on one machine,
but not work on a different one.

On my one of test setups, I have one that is now doing just like
what your's were. It has an NPC as Monarch,
and has now degraded to the point that it'll never finish
daily maintenance. It'll crash leaving maint.flg in the root.
I was studying the actions of NPC monarchs in a game. He
started creating quests, and none of them are able to be
completed. The player that tries to finish the quest getts
dropped from the program immediately. And, this is all
happening in LOCAL running with XP-Pro.

I've disabled quests, and that hasn't solved the problem.