Lost Character Restore Information

Update regarding Server Owners reporting players with lost characters on local database

Some players have lost characters from their account due to a bug in local database changes. We are incredibly sorry for this.

Servers that use the remote database are NOT affected. The issue is only on servers using the local/filesystem database.

The changes have been rolled back, so no more characters will be lost. Server owners with a backup of their database before the update will be able to restore the backup to fix the lost data.

Without a backup, the characters still exist in the database and will be able to be manually restored by chat commands, and as a last resort through manual editing.

Restoring Character Data via Chat Commands

For players:

1. There is a chat command added to the game called /RestoreMyCharacters. Create a new character and type this command in chat.

2. This command will find as much data about the characters as possible and send a request to the server. The server will attempt to restore the characters from this data.

3. If some characters are not restored, please contact a server admin for assistance.

For Admins:

1. There is an admin-only chat command called /RestoreCharacter. Using this will attempt to find a character with a certain name, and add it to an account of a certain id.

2. Example: /RestoreCharacter 123-456-789 RedShark will attempt to find a lost character named "RedShark". If found, it will be added to the player's account with AlderonId "123-456-789".

Manual character restoration:

1. Back up the database. Copy or Zip the "DatabaseCache" folder before continuing.

2. Locate the account in the database. An account is saved as the player's Alderon ID. For example, a player with ID 123-456-789 will be saved as 123456789.json. The full file path to this will be {ServerDirectory}/PathOfTitans/Saved/DatabaseCache/Account/123456789.json

3. Locate the character that was lost. This can be done by searching the "Character" directory for the character data matching a character name. Using a tool such as Notepad++, Go to Search->Find In Files..., set the Directory to {ServerDirectory}/PathOfTitans/Saved/DatabaseCache/Character and search for the character name (e.g. TitanJaw). If a character is found it will appear, the ID of the character is the file name. Copy the file name (without ".json"), example "35FB3F52419143E347089789CDB6D84C"

4. Open the account file found in step 1, locate the "Characters" section. "characters":[]. Paste the character id into this field with quotation marks, and a comma if there is to be multiple added. Example "characters":["35FB3F52419143E347089789CDB6D84C"] Example with multiple "characters":["35FB3F52419143E347089789CDB6D84C","E734FBA52148451F8748D97798A73DB3"]

5. The character should now be restored to the account.

Create Character Server / RCON Command

We have added a new command called /createcharacter which can be quickly used to create characters that are pre-grown of a certain dinosaur, dinosaur name, marks, and growth level. This can be used for characters that can't be restored to get users up and running without much loss.

Syntax:

/createcharacter AlderonId CharacterName DinosaurType Growth Marks

Example

/createcharacter 123-456-789 Bloodclaw Allosaurus 1.0 3000

This will create an new character on account 123-456-789 with the name Bloodclaw with a growth level of 1.0 and 3000 marks.

Note: This command only works on Local / FileSystem Database types, we are adding support for Remote Databases Soon.

Changes we are doing to prevent this from happening again

1. New Tool: AlderonDatabaseUploader: We are adding in a new tool called AlderonDatabaseUploader which will let you upload characters from a local database to the remote database, which will let them be automatically backed up by our managed database service.
2. New Local Server Backup Feature: We are adding a automatic local backups and automatically backs up the database when updating to a new patch. The reality is most server owners don't backup their data because they don't know how or it's too complicated. We are solving this.
3. New Offsite Server Backup Feature: We are adding a feature to the game to upload character data backups to a S3 bucket so if your server hard drive dies you still have regular backups.
4. Improved Testing Process when releasing updates / patches: We are improving our testing process to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Bugtracker Skins

We are giving out server owners with some bugtracker skin keys to give to their Admins / Staff / Communities / Game Server Providers who ran into this issue. This can be given out to staff who have extra work now to help restore people's characters. It can also be given out to players who character data can't be restored.

Questions?

Please reach out to Server Owner support channels or support ticket system here: New Support Ticket

Thanks

Matthew Cassells

Director of Alderon Games