'Tis the season for holiday cheer. 'Tis also the season for in-game events. So on that note, have you ever had any "mishaps" while running/making a special event? Special events such as holiday quests, mobs giving out presents, etc. I have my own story…
I started working on BIYG's holiday quest last week. We decided it would be a quest to catch snowmen. Wouldn't be too hard to make the progs, etc. I finished making the small snowman without any problems. I went on to make a large snowman (who I dubbed as "fatty" at a later time) as a copy of the small snowman, and started to add progs to it. Finishing up, I started to test the progs. All of the progs worked just fine, except for… the rand progs. Both snowmen had identical progs, and I had them sitting in the room with me. The small snowman had his rand progs fire just fine, he would say various phrases off and on. The large snowman just sat there, not saying a word. I spent several frustrating minutes attempting to figure it out, deleting the prog, re-applying it, editing it, etc. I finally gave up and deleted fatty, and re-made it from scratch. I stayed away from making a copy, and everything went smoothly.
The day came when I was ready to start the event. The snowmen were ready, and so were the rewards. I forced the snowmen to teleport out of my office, and thus started the event. Some time later in the day, a player with the rare scry-like ability noted that a snowman was in the introduction area (only new players could get there). I said that the snowmen teleport from time to time, and it would leave soon enough. I checked back later on, and it was still there. I figured the rand prog chance was just being unlucky and hadn't gone off yet. I forced it to teleport. I setup a yell on the snowmen when they teleport, so players could tell when it enters a new area (and I could see it as well). Went to bed, woke up the next morning and saw that… the snowmen had almost never teleported. Great! So I spent 30min trying to figure it out (and praying they didn't suddenly catch on to fatty's rebellious mindset). Eventually I figured out that Smaug's rand progs do not fire when no one is in the area. Doh.
Sounds like fun eh? Well it wasn't over yet. The last issue I had was the case of the disappearing snowmen. Every once in a while a snowman would simply be missing. Gone. I made sure they couldn't be attacked, so players haven't been killing them… No Imms have purged them… I tried an 'owhere snowman' to attempt to find a corpse of it. Nothing. I figured I'd set up a debug prog for the snowman to yell when it died. Checked around a little bit more and found nothing, so I invoked the missing snowmen and did some gaming for a bit. When I came back, I checked the scrollback…
Quote
A large snowman yells 'FATTY IS DOWN!'
Bingo, my debug prog went off. So the snowmen are dying, but how? I did an owhere again, but I was too late (the corpse had decayed, most likely). Eventually I caught the prog as it went off, and did an owhere. So where did the corpse end up? In front of a 10 story apartment building. What does this mean? Well, you can go to the roof of the apartment and jump off. So apparently that is what the snowmen were doing. Suicidal snowmen, great! The probability of actually teleporting right to the roof seems very rare, but regardless… they were doing it. I went and gave them more HP to survive any future suicide attempts, and everything has been fine since then.
And that is the story of the suicidal/shy/rebellious snowmen.
I started working on BIYG's holiday quest last week. We decided it would be a quest to catch snowmen. Wouldn't be too hard to make the progs, etc. I finished making the small snowman without any problems. I went on to make a large snowman (who I dubbed as "fatty" at a later time) as a copy of the small snowman, and started to add progs to it. Finishing up, I started to test the progs. All of the progs worked just fine, except for… the rand progs. Both snowmen had identical progs, and I had them sitting in the room with me. The small snowman had his rand progs fire just fine, he would say various phrases off and on. The large snowman just sat there, not saying a word. I spent several frustrating minutes attempting to figure it out, deleting the prog, re-applying it, editing it, etc. I finally gave up and deleted fatty, and re-made it from scratch. I stayed away from making a copy, and everything went smoothly.
The day came when I was ready to start the event. The snowmen were ready, and so were the rewards. I forced the snowmen to teleport out of my office, and thus started the event. Some time later in the day, a player with the rare scry-like ability noted that a snowman was in the introduction area (only new players could get there). I said that the snowmen teleport from time to time, and it would leave soon enough. I checked back later on, and it was still there. I figured the rand prog chance was just being unlucky and hadn't gone off yet. I forced it to teleport. I setup a yell on the snowmen when they teleport, so players could tell when it enters a new area (and I could see it as well). Went to bed, woke up the next morning and saw that… the snowmen had almost never teleported. Great! So I spent 30min trying to figure it out (and praying they didn't suddenly catch on to fatty's rebellious mindset). Eventually I figured out that Smaug's rand progs do not fire when no one is in the area. Doh.
Sounds like fun eh? Well it wasn't over yet. The last issue I had was the case of the disappearing snowmen. Every once in a while a snowman would simply be missing. Gone. I made sure they couldn't be attacked, so players haven't been killing them… No Imms have purged them… I tried an 'owhere snowman' to attempt to find a corpse of it. Nothing. I figured I'd set up a debug prog for the snowman to yell when it died. Checked around a little bit more and found nothing, so I invoked the missing snowmen and did some gaming for a bit. When I came back, I checked the scrollback…
Bingo, my debug prog went off. So the snowmen are dying, but how? I did an owhere again, but I was too late (the corpse had decayed, most likely). Eventually I caught the prog as it went off, and did an owhere. So where did the corpse end up? In front of a 10 story apartment building. What does this mean? Well, you can go to the roof of the apartment and jump off. So apparently that is what the snowmen were doing. Suicidal snowmen, great! The probability of actually teleporting right to the roof seems very rare, but regardless… they were doing it. I went and gave them more HP to survive any future suicide attempts, and everything has been fine since then.
And that is the story of the suicidal/shy/rebellious snowmen.