Why does the master server save

[Luieburger 15]

EDIT: Screwed up the title. Should say "Why does the master server save all of our dead characters?"

We just passed 1 million "characters" in DayZ as can be seen on the homepage. http://dayzmod.com/index.php

And... that is causing a few problems, which will most likely be fixed shortly: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=6064&pid=56495#pid56495

It seems like each time you spawn, the master server creates a completely new character entry in the database. We have 92684 people who have played this mod, and on average each player has died 10.87 times. If I read correctly, only players who live longer than 2 minutes are entered into the database.

My question is this... Why is the DayZ database storing each of our player deaths? It would be more efficient to store only one set of character information right next to the player ID, etc. One to one. Of course it would be. But...

My theory is that eventually we'll be able to go to a website where we can see each of our characters, their stats, where they traveled, etc. Of course, we'd be able to see our current character too. A full history of our play experience would be pretty awesome.

[jordnz 102]

Moving to suggestions.

Cheers.

[rocket 16567]

Even if the characters were deleted, we can't reuse old ID keys for the characters.

The issue was the ID keys went above 1 million, and ArmA2 stores values over 1 million in a special format. HIVE did not like this format. Much like win2k, this wasn't really something that was considered during the development (who would have thought we'd have 1 million characters in a month?)

[iexus 6]

You are eventually going to have to recycle keys though right? You will run out keys again eventually ... although not sure how large a number you can represent in Arma, you might be OK for a fair while.

I remember at a place I used to work though that there was a weekly database run that would essentially defrag all the keytables so that there were no longer any gaps and allowing all those wasted keys to be reused.