Writing Ages for Shards

If you want your Age to work on Shards, and not be confused when there are multiple players on it, there are some issues that you have to be aware of. You will not notice any of these problems if you test your age offline, on your own machine. So please double-check that you did not accidentally run into one of these pitfalls!

Issues on Uru:CC Shards

These issues apply only to Shards using the old Uru:CC.

  • Be careful about your SDL file. The server will directly read this file to manage the state of the age, to store it and to synchronize it with the clients. First, double-check the syntax, as servers are more picky than the client. Secondly, it is crucially important to strictly follow the rules regarding SDL version numbers that are described in the SDL documentation. You must never change anything in a STATEDESC block that you released!
  • (3ds Max only) Be sure that you don't have any linking responders using anything but "kBasicLink" for its linking rule. For more details on this issue, please carefully read this forum thread.
  • (PyPRP only) In case your age has many animations, be aware that every single animated object will per default cause Uru to send network data to the server. If you have hundreds of objects animated, this may cause issues for people linking to your age. The solution is to configure your age such that most of these animations are not network-synchronized. This means that different players can see the animation in different phases, but for most animations (e.g. waving flags, flames, waves), this doesn't matter. Please carefully read this forum thread for more information.