Re: A Circle 2.2 thingy

From: Ron Poulton (ron@res.com)
Date: 08/10/95


CC: Gary <gwalicze@students.uiuc.edu>

> > I noticed that routines I wrote that accessed the descriptor data for a 
> > character (or a mobile) crashed when the routine attempted to access a 
> > mobile.  It sounds like this single character is crashing the game,
> > though, however many things could be considered without knowing more 
> > about the MUD.  Seems odd that a single character would crash things..be 
> > an idea to look at the stats, see the differences and try to duplicate 
> > them bit by bit to find out what's wrong. 
> 
> First when accessing ANYTHING through a pointer, make a check to make 
> sure the pointer is not null. Accessing a null pointer is the quickest 
> way th crash your mud. As for your specific problem, descriptor_data is 
> the data about the network connection for a character, so unless someone 
> is switched into the mob your code will try to access data from a null 
> pointer and *CRASH* > -- Gary

Oddly enough, though, I switched into a mobile and it still crashed.  And 
when I switched into a linkless player, the routines worked just fine.  I 
suspect that mobiles aren't equipped with a non-NULL descriptor, and 
linkless PCs have non-NULL descriptors but are nullified in operation 
rather than in pointer.

I suspect exploring the code further would answer these curiosities.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/18/00 PST