I posted this in discord yesterday, but felt it was important enough to post here.
Today we lost a bunny. She was a good bunny, but fell victim to second life weirdness. She did not come out of her cradle properly, and was a blank bunny with a script error.
I’ve not worked out what the issue is exactly, it seems to happen only occasionally (this is the first time).
Unfortunately, as I try and create low cost pets, there isn’t the robustness in the systems I have to restore every lost pet. ie. I can’t afford the servers I’d need to store every detail about every pet (other breedables do this, imagine pinging a webserver from 100,000 pets every 10 minutes or so..)
I suspect the blank bunny issue could happen to any of my pets given the right conditions, so I am working to try and minimize it happening as best I can, this will mean updates in the future, but I’ll try and stagger them.
If you do have a blank bunny, or spider, or whatever, I am happy to replace it with a starter of the same type, but I suspect the reality is we will have to accept lost pets occasionally.
I’m still a bit annoyed that this happened and that I didn’t have the tools necessary to resolve it. Unfortunatley the more I think about it, I don’t think it’s possible without recording all the details of every pet on the server - because, once the script stops working, how do you get the information out of it? I suppose the data could be stored encrypted in the Object Description or something, but I am not sure that is long enough, and as most of my pets are single mesh objects there’s not the space needed.
Flutterbugs and Unicorns (to be released soon) do store the basic information on the server, but they do not store the age etc unless redelivered, in order to reduce calls to the server. So while I can recreate them, I can’t restore them to their exact state.
On the plus side, this has only happened once - to one pet - in over a year, so perhaps it’s not so bad, but it’s not perfect.