Sharing is utterly and ridiculously broken. My theory is that sharing has been broken since before MOUL, before UU.. in fact back at prologue. That's why the barricades were added... Cyan can't trace down the fault and fix it because it's buried
that deep.
Why? Look at it this way. In UU it went wild when shared. Random hoods. how did they fix it? We don't know, but now suddenly notice how the hood is named after the person who creates it. As in X's Bevin (which is another fault but that was a deliberate change and unrelated).
Why? Simple. My proposal is they tweaked the game to make hoods a private instance owned by all members. It even says all owners. So why is that so big? Because of sharing.
See, when you share a book, my theory is that it has never worked, once. We think it does.. but that's because there's a level of error catching, and we've been using that 100% and never noticed. When you share, it presumably would pass along a reference. It does not. Instead, seeing it never got a reference as to who's specific instance it is, its first default behaviour is search for a public instance. If one is found, assume that''s where you want to go. If however one is not found, assume it is the owner's private instance. Thus we never notice this behaviour in the case of say a pod or one ouf the four ages.. if vid shares the er'cana book with me, I want to go to his er'cana. The game gets no reference, gets confused, searches for public, doesn't find one, then sends me to vid's private one (as he was initiating the share). All's ok, no one's the wiser. However, when he shares the descent stone with me, the game lacks a link, gets confused. Tries to find a public, fails. Sends me to his private instance, since he initiated the share. And then we see sparks. If however he shares the ae'gura stone, it gets confused, searches, finds a public instance, sends me there.
My theory then is that the hood stones now work by the fact that the hoods have an actual specific first owner. If vid shares his hood stone with me (silly, we both have same hood, but roll with it) it lacks a reference. Gets confused. Searches for public. Can't find one. Then sends me to vid's private instance of bevin. However, as vid is a member of UruObsession, that hood IS his 'private instance'. So it sends me there. Thus hood sharing
works. (And it also means the hoods ARE instances of Bevin, OOCly, but we all knew that already).
The only real way I can think of to test this would be if they say put a stone or book or whatever of K'veer in the hood, that links to a hood instance. We have no reason, as we use a special method to get there. If however we had a sharable book, my theory is on share it'd get confused. Hunt for a public instance. Find one. And then anyone I shared this theoretical K'veer book with would end up in the
public instance of K'veer.
If however we ended up in a specific private instance, we'd know I had something wrong and had to look over my theory again.
Fully testable, but not at this given moment. Alas.
Really however, as little sense as this makes, it fits all the facts we have and does them quite simply. It's also probably why the one book in the relto bookshelf that falls apart under sharing rules, notably the instanced cavern locations of which is all hood instanced and under those results, CANNOT be shared. It fails to lock correctly in relto, but if the person uses it they get a grey 'bad link' void.. implying either the game not getting a reference in relto and not seeing a name attached to it bugs out, or implying it's even weirder than we thought.
We'll find out when Open Source comes, whenever.. maybe. I imagine that after a decade of everything Cyan has no clue how the code works anymore, and it'll be another grand ball of spaghetti code to rival all commercial ventures with rewrites and changes over years with no full throw out/redo allowed.
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You know, I wish we would learn Atrus loved the 1812 overture, and in turn we had a copy for our relto.
That's right, a canon canen cannon!
MOULa KI: #00027582
Welcome back all!