Server-Killing World Formation

[MercuryFyre]

Me and my friend were flying about mining peacefully when we came under attack by bandits or whatever you call them. No big deal, we have damn good ships and easily shredded them to pieces. But then, out of absolutely nowhere for no reason at all, the server started lagging extremely badly. With no idea as to what was going on, we saw that blocks were forming out of nowhere, namely gold and rock. In an attempt to wait out the lag and strange formation of blocks, we parked our ships beside the local Shop tower an talked.

Pointless story aside, about 15 minutes later and there was thick wall of blocks that spanned the entire sector. I would have gone to another sector to see if the wall kept going, but the server promptly died and we lost connection. Is this a bug, or some sort of intention random event? If it's an event keep in mind something like that can blow up lesser servers. Pics below.

http://imgur.com/a/zL2Bj

 

[canadianchuck]

No way this happened to me too.
several versions ago i think shema changesd the asteroid generation code. This casued some odd gigantic asteroids to form but not like the wall more like a spire(for me). in a recent version i think the code was changed again and as a result this must happen for some reason..
For me though it was in singleplayer while playing "Team Deathmatch". i just entered the sector and had a huge drop in FPS like 0. I think the slow down was caused by a physics error and not the size of the asteroid wall. See 4 mobs spawned in the sector as i entered it with one inside the wall causing it to go crazy trying ot get out of the wall. When it did jumble it's way out the Fps became much smoother with a little slow down when trying to look at a bunch of past generated sections as i explored the wall.

One other weird thing is an asteroid formed right inside the wall but the game cutaway a square chunk so the asteroid that was inside the wall never actually touched the wall.

I think it's really cool. At the same time this could cause some issues like with you, Fyre.

 

[Elladan]

It's a problem i noticed with some asteroids. Suddently, it appears one goes crazy and expand until it dominates universe. Unfortunatly, we are the first target of those asteroids and we are quickly surrounded until they crash us.

 

[schema]

We call that a Anomaly :D

This happens due to a bug in the asteroid creation algorithm, where the algorithm goes self aware for some reason and is trying to take over the world. Joke aside, it's just when the algorithm just isn't stopping creation of an astorid, which can happen on cetain seeds of the randomizer.

while I absolutely love this bug, it has already been fixed (in the next version)
I've actually been thinking about putting it in the game in a controlled environment.

 

[canadianchuck]

Please do put it in the game but conrolled. It would be sweat to mine these things out or make them into some sort of hanger.
Even better a BFG or pirate base.

 

[MercuryFyre]

Huh.... well at least I know it's a bug and not some server-eating feature xD Well it'll give us plenty of money, assuming the map still works. Well, thanks for replying.

And you say it's fixed in the next version eh...? I assume that's the one you pay for. Coo, because for such a low price, this project deserves it. Seems very fun so far.

 

[schema]

In the alpha, all updates/versions are going to be free, and I'm still far from entering beta stage (maybe another 4 month or more).
By "next version" I only mean the version I'm going to release soon

 

[Zer0t3ch]

Good! Plenty of time to buy! BTW, just an idea, rather than having a special environent for these astroids, maybe make one sector per server have it, but ONLY one, and make it generate at the beginning world gen. It seems that the main problem now is that when you destroy all the AIs in a certain sector, the generation begins, crashing everyone clients and forcing everyone to get stuck inside of the generated land-mass.

**EDIT When is this version going to be released, schema?

 

[schema]

The problem had nothing to do with the AI. An asteroid's generation process is gradually: meaning, it will grow as it is requested over time. The full asteroid doesn't exist anywhere unless it has been requested by any client.
This bug may therefore seem connected to the AI, as it could 'catch up' with the players just as the AI is destroyed.
There is no generation causality between destroying anything. Just clients getting near 'ground zero'. As the algorithm is now caged into a restriction to not build over its initial boundaries, an abnormal asteroid won't happen anymore.

The next version will be out tomorrow or the day after that.

 

[Zer0t3ch]

Ok, thank you.

 

[clearskiesNL]

this happend once at a test with beetle i was like 0-o riiiight and started to bomb it with beetle XD

 

[canadianchuck]

If i was there i would of loaded up my nugget or nugget_cruiser and see how big of a hole i could make!

 

[S-Guy]

I've seen this happen a few times - although they didn't just keep generating ad infinitium. Every so often a massive wall of asteroid just spawns in a random place - usually between sectors - and lags us all up a bit. We actually mistook them for planets because of their size and shape.

 

[schema]

huh, wow, I thought I have fixed the issue. My generation algorithm isn't out of surprises yet, it seems. If anyone encounters another anomaly like that, could you send me a bug report please.