[FIXED] Auction House Crashing

Katherz

UPDATE: This issue has been fixed! You will now be required to type two letters and a space to start populating a search. We apologize for the inconvenienced this has caused everyone, and thank you for your patience.

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Hello everyone,

Please be aware that there is currently a known issue with the Auction House crashing clients when searching in the Total Section. We are currently looking into this issue. Until further notice, please SELECT A CATEGORY and a SUB-CATEGORY before typing in the search bar. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.


- The Mabinogi Team

PlatinaKoki

Its simple. Disable auto-searching. Force the player to hit ENTER after typing something before showing a list, then let them select with arrow keys, followed by a second ENTER to search for said item.

Froglord

It also helps to open up a text program like notepad, type the item's name in notepad, and copy/paste it into the auction searchbar to avoid lag.

The reason why the lag occures is that if you manually search an item, the first letter you type brings up hundreds of item results which can overload the client and crash it.

Shroomster

It's not that complicated guys. It's the font. IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THE FONT

When you start typing the search immediately tries to populate and render the entire list. This is a problem because the game is now shoving ALL resources to trying to render the name of ALMOST EVERY ITEM in that horrible lag-inducing font. This is the same kind of problem you get when you open your pet tab (if you have a lot of pets) in your homestead with homestead edit mode on. If you don't have a lot of pets, try opening the character info screen followed by the chat log after spending some time on the market channel.

You can still freeze/crash by following their directions and starting with a lower case common vowel like "e" in a very large category, like "Consumables" or "Misc."

SURE turning off the auto-search would fix THIS symptom, but they would continue to ignore the real issue.

It took them 10 years to give us commas, after all.

THICCthighssavelives

Who writes the programming for the game, Nexon in Korea or Nexon NA?

Greta

Lmao people blaming font. Ok. I'll blame commas instead
Obviously the lag is caused because it tries to "guess" and auto complete the item you are searching (like Google likes to do) and that's why you are getting lags. The list keep changing with every added letter, not because of "font QQ". Best solution would be to change how searching works, as example, shut down all that guessing/auto completing names or make so that player could finish typing keyword and then let them press search and make it load afterwards without trying to shove in all these items at once while player types. Simple.

Pie5434

THICCthighssavelives wrote: »

Who writes the programming for the game, Nexon in Korea or Nexon NA?

Devcat which is a Korean company does. Nexon NA doesn't do any of the coding that I know of.

Shroomster

List population is not that computationally hard of a problem and Mabi's item database is not so large that a computer would struggle to populate a list of that size (unless your processor is almost 40 years old); and Nexon isn't even doing a proper auto complete here, they are just running through all records that contain the (case sensitive) string you type. You'll find you get the biggest freeze in the auction house if you just type "e" and nothing else with the "total" highlighted. This is identical to the little freezes you get opening the chat log or the pet tab. Anyone remember accidentally pressing "c" or "l" while standing next to a fire?

The resource issues of the font are well established, and that is why changing to a bitmap font is among the primary standard mods for improving performance. Unless you have another reason why every computer runs Mabi measurably faster in all scenarios with the bitmap font change. This is also why hiding names at large population events improves your performance. This is also why you see a framerate drop just by having character page or chat log open.

This is another of those things needed since the beginning that Devcat or Nexon probably refuse to do because it goes against their artistic aesthetic or whatever.

Sherri

Ooh and there might be an addition of a hotkey for the Auction House?

Pls

XxBearslayerxX

THICCthighssavelives wrote: »

Who writes the programming for the game, Nexon in Korea or Nexon NA?

The old dev team for the game is out the door, theres a new dev team as of a few days ago, as for who writes the code idk.

Sherri

Now it's not letting me search through the whole auction house?

Katherz

You need to write at least two letters and a space to start a search.

Sherri

Katherz wrote: »

You need to write at least two letters and a space to start a search.

Hardmuscle wrote: »

@Sherri -- As Katherz said. -- I just tested using the word 'Dye' -- (Type Dye and then put a Space to see everything with 'Dye' in its name. ~ ~ @Nexon ( @Katherz ) - Thank you for ending the freeze.

Thank you very much ♥

Crimsọn

Oh it's functional now? Cool beans.

Shroomster

Yeah they didn't actually fix it. They just rigged it to force a smaller possible set before the list tried to populate, you can still get freezes if you have a common enough pair of letters.

This is a workaround, no more than a hack to avoid a bug. I'm hoping they have a real fix.

Shroomster

I never said I got a crash. I never did get crashes even when pressing "e" before. Using a common enough two letter string with a space will still give a freeze up to a couple of seconds. Granted, this is nowhere near the 10-20 second freezes you could get before this "fix" and likely unnoticeable by anyone seriously attempting to use it but it is in no way considered a complete fix; especially since the system can no longer search for words without using the space bar, even if the item you want has no space ( "potato" as opposed to "potato " ). This is a counter intuitive "hack" to temporarily work around the existing issue by reducing the namespace before processing a request and deserves to be addressed more deliberately.

I'm well aware that this is a common tactic for search forms, but you'll also notice that simply starting to type into your file explorer or google search box that your browser or file explorer do not freeze for up to 30 seconds while it tries to figure out how to list less than a hundred thousand entries on a 5GHz processor. I have used the words "hack" and "workaround" properly here and I'll appreciate if you avoid further ad hominem arguments to make yourself feel better.

Shroomster

Of course you weren't able to reproduce it, I even said it was no where near where it was before. Obviously I can't produce a "crashing" example because I never crashed in the first place. Are you even reading my posts or just getting the impression that I disagree and typing away?

It is hackish because it's a quick and dirty workaround that forces particular behavior from the user to avoid an actual problem that has not been directly addressed. You may find that "er" in the total category may cause a freeze for 1-2 seconds after pressing space while it tries to render the list. You can get the same kind of freeze opening a full chat log on a busy channel. Again, since I feel I'm going to need to repeat myself, this is obviously nowhere near as bad as before because they have drastically reduced the possible namespace to render by forcing the system to have at least two characters and a space before attempting the search.

Shroomster

It would be better overall if they changed the font, or maybe the interface in general, to be less of an obvious impact on the performance of the game. This is the underlying issue they are avoiding with their little workaround. It may be a standard practice function for you and your site, but you use it to directly address a communication resource issue. Here they are using it to avoid addressing the client resource issue. Hence why I call it a hack, in the literal sense of the word "...a quick and inelegant solution to a particular problem." The cause of the lag has not been addressed, only sidestepped, again.

Why they didn't just copy the search setup for the housing board is a complete mystery,.