Patch 96 - Happy Easter

[Derrick]

• Easter gifts.
• Camp Keys now drop on the camp guards, instead of in the chest.
• Books can be read from library shelves
• Some player written books can now be found on library shelves.
  • If you have a player written book that you'd like to submit, please contact staff
• Ghosts will no longer block living creatures
• I must consider my sins will no longer reveal your short and long term counts.

We also fixed the shard lag problem a few days ago. For the geeks, this was a problem with .Net garbage collection which was scanning all allocated shard memory on a fixed interval. The GC was running in a default configuration which is fine for single thread application with lower allocated memory, but in this configuration it blocks the main thread during the scan which was causing global freezes for a few milliseconds or so every two minutes. Simple fix in the end but took a while to discover the cause.

In the end four major problems were contributing to the lag issue, all of which seem to be fully resolved at this time.

• House placement blocking the core process during the validity check
  Excessive Disk accesses for map information
  System garbage collection
  Shard Statistics generation

I appreciate everyone's patience with the lag issue. I am confident that server performance is no longer an issue.

[ShastaMcNasty]

Awesome patch!!!

Black Dye Tub = BEST EASTER PRESENT EVER!!!


Happy Easter!!!

[eniave]

Fantastic thank you for the fix and also the Dye tubs. The Easter Bunny was a cute idea as were the Easter Eggs.

[d'Troyes]

Yes, too funny chasing the easter bunny. I couldn't bring myself to kill him, just followed and grabbed easter eggs! Thanks for the tubs!

[Safir]

I can finally dye my boots black! WOOTS!

Awesome prezzie Derrick! Thank you!

[slida]

Thanks Derrick that was a nice little treat, easter bunny is a nice touch as well.

[Godsend]

Black Dye Tubs? Easter Bunny? When did all this happen?

[Kryptonical]

Thanks for the great easter!

I followed the bunny and picked up some eggs but couldnt control my self and had to slaughter it....after a grueling 20 minute battle of me running out of regs going to my house getting restocked and finally killing it, I got 1k gp and some various other easter items...Well played

[Derrick]

I'm glad everyone had such a good time with the bunnies


Clarification on the stat loss message:

• If you have counts, but < 5, the message is:
  • "Fear not, thou hast not slain the innocent in some time..."
  If you have no counts, the message is:
  • "Fear not, thou hast not slain the innocent."
  If you are red have < 5 shorts the message is:
  • "Although thou hast slain the innocent, thy deeds shall not bring retribution upon thy return to the living."
  If you have > 5 shorts, the message is:
  • "If thou should return to the land of the living, the innocent shall wreak havoc upon thy soul." <- will be red text tommorrow.

[Creager]

From my memory, the messages were hued like so...

If you have counts, but < 5, the message is:
"Fear not, thou hast not slain the innocent in some time..."

If you have no counts, the message is:
"Fear not, thou hast not slain the innocent."

If you are red have < 5 shorts the message is:
"Although thou hast slain the innocent, thy deeds shall not bring retribution upon thy return to the living."

If you have > 5 shorts, the message is:
"If thou should return to the land of the living, the innocent shall wreak havoc upon thy soul.

The first two messages were blue, the red/notstat message was grey, and the red/stat message was red.

[ClowN]

maybe its just me but i dont remember the messages being hued at all. its been a while tho

[Michael Malloy]

maybe its just me but i dont remember the messages being hued at all. its been a while tho

Check the thread in the Suggestions forum. I posted a couple of Adam Ant screenies that verify it.

edit: was a little buried in there. Here's a link.

[Derrick]

Here's another from UO:R

Mal%27sMessage[1].jpg (106.44 KiB) Viewed 8271 times