MONDAY’S FED OUTAGE WAS NOT THE PLANNED ONE
by Hazed
Last week I told you that Alan intended to put some security updates into the server, and this meant the game may have a short outage. As it happens, Alan didn’t do the updates after all. However, there was still an outage – due to something completely different!
The game did not fire up again after the usual daily reset, because it encountered a problem with one of its files. It is set up so that if a file can’t be read properly, it will stop trying to read the file. In some cases it will carry on firing up, just ignoring the file – for example, a dodgy planet file just means that planet won’t be loaded into the game.
In other situations, a problem with a file aborts the whole process of trying to fire up the game. That’s what happened on Monday.
The file which the game objected to related to a cartel with a graving dock which had initiated a Blish City build. The Plutocrat had given the city a name which included an apostrophe.
In all cases where there are restrictions on what you can call something, the game is supposed to check the name when you issue the command, and if there’s a problem with what you typed, tell you to come up with a new name. That happens for system and planet names, player names and so on. If you try to use punctuation in the names, you will get an error message.
But for some reason the game is not conducting these rigorous checks when you name a Blish city, so the name that contained an apostrophe slipped through and was written to the file.
The reason punctuation is forbidden in names is because the files are in XML format, and an apostrophe has a meaning all of its own in XML.
Anyway, Alan has now fixed the problem, so you can no longer put punctuation in the names of your Blish cities.
Incidentally, we didn’t realise there was a problem right away because nobody emailed feedback to tell us they couldn’t log on for quite some time. I guess you all just assumed that the outage was the planned one we had warned you about. What bad timing!
