Zugg Software :: View topic - [1.13] Clicking from Trigger to Trigger can Erase Settings

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

Reproduce:

Create a blank MUD, and create several silly triggers, aliases, and variables. Their content is irrelevant.

In the Package Editor, click rapidly from trigger to variable to alias. You don't have to go insanely fast, though I believe the speed is related to the speed of your computer... a slower computer would be able to reproduce this with slower clicking, a very fast computer might not be able to reproduce this at all.

Result:

When clicking from item to item, sometimes an item well get 'blanked out', and then deleted, without you editing anything.

Expected Result:

Simply clicking from setting to setting should never modify anything.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 12:20 am

Are the settings themselves getting deleted, or just the names? When you click the Refresh button in the toolbar, do they come back?

As you can imagine, I haven't been able to reproduce this, but I do have a pretty fast computer. But I can't think of any way for the settings to actually get completely deleted. It just sounds more like a refesh issue with the tree view.

Magician Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 482

its a problem with settings. I have had this happen after running a refresh spell script that basically looks and resets a string variable. As soon as i run it i can open the settings editor and it blanks out the first trigger in my list. Of course when i close it it saves this oddity. Its one of the things i hate about autosaving. I lost 4 triggers before i realized it. this is why i make backups :)

Imagine this

--> Trigger 1
--> Trigger 2
--> Trigger 3
--> Trigger 4

upon reopening the triggers you get

--> Trigger 1 <-- highlighted and blank
--> Trigger 2
--> Trigger 3

If you save it shows you 3 triggers but the first one is what it should have been.

I think the settings editor is screwing up on its refresh tree.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

I had a trigger disappear on me, too, and it was cleared out when I selected the trigger and then completely removed from the list when I moved to another trigger. Something in CMUD must've changed this recently, unfortunately.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:30 pm

Hmm, that's definitely very bad. I'll see if I can find a way to reproduce this.

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

The trigger gets completely erased. It may be related to running triggers, but I don't think so. It seems more likely to be related to the number of settings available. A data point: I use lots and lots of classes and subclasses, that might be related.

What happens is I click from one trigger to another. I *believe* that for a fraction of a second the trigger I clicked on gets DRAWN at the location of the trigger I'm leaving (in other words, the settings editor starts drawing the values for the new setting before the new setting in the list on the left gets selected).

Half a second later my cursor is sitting looking at a blank setting.

I'll try to reproduce it some more, and see what the sequence of events is.

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

Woohoo! I made a video of the problem occurring. You can download the huge 18MB video. Sorry about the size, the screencap utility I used does no compression at all. It's only about 30 seconds long.

Raven

Edit: Just as a clarification... all I did in that video was click and use the scroll wheel. I did not press the delete key or touch the keyboard.

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

Another note: A smaller settings window prevented the bug from occurring. I resized the Package Editor to be larger, and then the bug started happening regularly. It definitely seems to be a timing issue with repainting the screen.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:16 pm

Good movie. I think I fixed this in some bug fixes that I did back on Tuesday. I remember having problems with it changing the name of the trigger pattern like that. But it's working now, so hopefully when you try it again in 1.14 it will be fine. Definitely let me know after 1.14 is released.

Magician Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 482

yeah thats what i figured.. its like a variable / trigger problem on updating different things with the tree refresh

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

This bug still occurres. I cannot reliably make it happen, unfortunately. Sometimes it works fine, even with a big window, as I click rapidly from item to item... other times it eats settings left and right.

Hey Zugg, how about an 'auto backup' feature? It could make a copy of your settings when you open CMud, so if your settings get borked you can close CMud and copy the previous version of the settings back over the destroyed ones.

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 8:06 pm

I'll consider doing a auto-backup system. But if you find a way to reproduce this, please let me know. What causes this problem is that the name field of your trigger/alias/whatever is getting set to a blank, and then when you click away, it thinks this is a blank setting and removes it. However, there might be other cases where it is changing/corrupting data, and just doesn't happen to make it blank and delete it. So this kind of bug is very serious and can cause data corruption.

Removing data corruption was one of the main design goals of CMUD and is the reason it uses an SQL database, transactions, etc. This kind of system shouldn't need backup files, and this kind of bug is really something that I need to find and fix.

But a backup is probably still a good idea anyway, since there's always the "i can't believe I just deleted that folder..." kind of oops mistake :)

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

This problem will also show up when crawling through the tree using keyboard arrows.

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:35 pm

That would make sense. The problem really has nothing to do with the mouse. It's some sort of timing issue between when you select a new item in the tree (either with mouse or keyboard) and the background updating of the tree happening. It might also be effected if you are online to the MUD and have triggers and stuff running and changing in the background.

As I've said previously in this thread, it would be really useful if you could turn off the Auto Update option in the View menu of the settings editor and see if it still happens then. If you are offline (so no scripts are running) and the Auto Update is off, then that should remove anything that might cause the tree to update while in the middle of selecting a new item. This would confirm whether or not this problem is related to the background update timer and would really help me pin down the problem.

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

I do not think I have been doing 'active' stuff when this was occurring. By that I mean that text was going by on the MUX, but none of it was trigger text (just people chatting, etc) while I was working with the triggers. But I'll try turning off Auto-Update and see if that alters the behavior.