Bugs, bugs, and more bugs

One nice thing about the (relatively) small userload we have right now is that reboots and the occasional crash aren't so much of a problem. Which is good, because today has been awful.

A confluence of factors served to get some really terrible code into the system, but by far the biggest one was my acceptance of pretty well untested code without thoroughly testing or reviewing it myself. This was the cause of several crashes and an almost-severe memory corruption fault (which was fortunately cleared by a crash in a different, unrelated section of code.) While my code was definitely not bug-free, it was at least not crash worthy material.

The only saving grace in this mess is that I found and fixed a bug that has been occasionally plaguing the system for over ten years: memory structs on players were not being properly cleared in an obscure scenario, resulting in use of mob structures after death. Were it not for the crash-resistant pooling memory architecture that we've been using since 1996, this would have caused major problems over the years. As it was, it simply cut warnings and bailed.

In exchange for this though, I now have a host of other plausible wierdnesses, including a bug that appears to corrupt the destruct timer on dead players. Again, the design of the codebase is happily tolerating this and simply cutting warnings, but it is disturbing nonetheless.