Smarter reporting of dimension ID overlap (other mod stealing id of existing age)

[BlackAce21]

This is more of a request if you have time kinda thing. I noticed in other posts as I was browsing for information on an issue (that I am not going to post because I am pretty certain it is cauldron related and thus has no bearing on your dev time) that you handle Myst DIM registration later on in the startup phase or something like that. Regardless of when its handled can I request you add a check for whether a dimension ID is already taken over by another mod?

Allow me to explain. I was updating my servers mod pack to its recommended version (Infinity mod pack) and a new mod was added that has no config yet, namely Thaumic Horizons and it took over DIM69 without so much as a nod in mystcraft's general direction or a config to change the ID of it. This is said to be added by the developer later in his forum posts but I was thinking it would be a good idea if Mystcraft had a check during its registration phase to see if the DIM ID is taken, and if so, reassign it, or move it out of the way somehow? How you handle it is your business, if it can be reassigned easily I think that might be the best course of action. This would make updating to future versions of mod packs where a new version might add a new dimension or something a lot less troublesome for server owners who might not be clever enough, or good enough with google, to locate the agedata.dat file on your wiki FAQ like I did xD. We already wiped a lot of old Dimensions made by mystcraft, this being one of them, and just had the agedata still so it was still trying to load and threw out a nasty error and crashed because it was already taken by THorizons by the time Mystcraft tried to load it.

I think this would be a good idea for handling special case situations at load time for long term servers like mine during mod updates in general. Hope you are well, as a fan of Myst (the origonal) since it was released, I can happily say I love your work. Keep it up ^_^

[XCompWiz]

Glad you enjoy it! :D Thanks for the support! :)

I cannot, reasonably, relocate a dimension. Neither theirs nor mine. I can try and handle the issue with a custom failure screen, though that would only help on clients when loading a save. If you can think of a good way to report the issue to the user for server startup I'm all ears. Note that the server startup MUST halt to prevent save corruption.

The fix for this must come from the mod adding the dimension. Static dim ids must be configurable. It is recommended that static ids default to negative numbers. Per-save ids are easy to do and will never overlap existing ids, so that's the safest route.

Mystcraft binds the dimension ids at server start, since they are per-save, for the record.

[BlackAce21]

Is it possible to dynamically get the name of the mod that has control of the dimension, or the one that created it? even knowing that information might save a lot of headache owed to the fact that it is mystcraft throwing the error and not the mod that took over the dimension. Even if it is not possible, I think a reference to removing the agedata.dat files and their location if the user intends to remove the dimension themselves post failure in the log file, might be of some benefit if we are talking about simply idiot proofing it as I am fond of thinking of it haha and god knows we can all be "idiots" at times. I know it took me a good 30 minutes to fix this issue and I consider myself pretty handy around servers. I am sure others might take longer to find the cause and others still might decide it isn't worth the hassle and reset or roll back to previous mod pack versions. Just my thoughts.

[XCompWiz]

Getting the responsible mod, or at least the dimension name, might be possible, yes. :) That's a good idea.