Hercules: 1st 2014 MEGAPATCH
Helloooo! Starting 2014 with a boom, yet another outstanding patch from Hercules!
Patch Item #1: Scripting Level UP
Char and account variables overhaul
They're no longer limited to #define ACCOUNT/GLOBAL_REG_NUM, they're now limitless
Their storage capabilities have received a colossal improvement, each numeric variable now uses at least 1/10 the memory it did previously, and we achieved it while increasing speed, simply outstanding as expected from us.
Thanks to their quantity no longer being limited, char and account variables now support arrays, i.e. setarray #accreg[y],...;
Saving and loading procedures have been improved outstandingly! for instance, previously, if you had 100 char regs but only one had been modified or deleted, map server would need to send all of them and char server would have to re-insert all of them; now only modified or deleted ones are saving, increasing saving speed of both map and char server procedures and decreasing inter-server bandwidth by dinosaur steps.
Magnificent Array Improvement (to all variable types)
Size limit modified from 127 to ...2 billion!
Speed of countless array operations have been improved thanks to new array handling, e.g. whereas previously upon deleting any array it'd set its 127 possible values to 0 (regardless of how many values it actually had) now it only deletes as many members as it possesses
getarraysize (the-oh-misleading-function since it returns the arrays' highest index) has been sped up as well thanks to this, and it no longer wastes script stack room on every interaction
And the futureThis improvement has open way for many other amazing features, for example, Haruna has designed a foreach implementation for scripting among some other useful enhancements
Global account variable handling redesign
To clarify, this is that ancient type used on multiple-char-server setups, ##varname, which are present in all servers an accounts logs into, as opposed to #varname which, while account-wide, are considered 'local' to a char server.
Saving and loading have been modified to match char/local-acc variable new design, on its own it already is a major speed boost and bandwidth saver, however, it has also improved login servers overall processing speed, thanks to its processing no longer being attached to ordinary account handling, this means that all operations that required login server to use an accounts data (i.e. login/pincode change/ban/block/etca) have been sped up, and use less memory.
'.', '.@' and ''' variables write operation speed up
trying to write ''' variables outside instances will now print warnings instead of silently doing nothing
runtime read/write operations of global/temporary(@) char variables, as well as account variables, have been considerably sped up, whereas previously it'd run a str lookup to find a match for read/write it now uses the variable id, furthermore it now relies on DBMaps to handle the lookup (whereas previously it was a normal loop).
Database tables overhaulWe've analysed global reg data storage and we've decided that it not only is a memory waste, it is a processing one as well due to how int and str variables share the same storage, we've analysed global reg data for a number of large servers and have identified most variables are numbers, by a outstanding majority, with that in mind, this patch introduces 6 tables that will improve this drastically. You'll notice this patch's SQL upgrade file will take care of this, and thus migrate the data properly into the new tables.
Special Thanks To:
Haruna ! <3 wouldn't have gotten half of it done if it weren't for Haru, thank you so much sensei!
jaBote, for proposing it!
Emistry
Yommy
Streusel
Patch Item #2: @autotrade Persistency
Also known as: @at merchants survive server crashes/restart, as soon as the server starts again they're re-spawned.
May be disabled on src/config/core.h by commenting out AUTOTRADE_PERSISTENCY
Special Thanks To:
Haruna!
Michieru, this feature wouldn't be out now if it weren't for him, lets all thank him!
Dekamaster/Nightroad for helping me on this features original design, 3-4 years ago. Thank you master <3!
Link'u!
Commit
Upgrade files
#1 (Autotrade)
#2 (Scripting Level UP)
