BridgeLink owns a TcpClient to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else touches it. Emit() is
called from the Core thread; it enqueues onto a bounded drop-oldest queue and
returns. A link thread drains the queue and reconnects with backoff; a reader
thread parses inbound lines and marshals each to the Core thread via
Timer.DelayCall. An absent, slow, or wedged sidecar therefore cannot stall the
shard, which is the property the rest of the bridge depends on.
Outbound JSON is written by hand into a StringBuilder because it runs on the
Core thread for every event and the measured budget assumes that cost. Inbound
uses JavaScriptSerializer: commands arrive at human rates, so correctness beats
speed, and parsing happens off the Core thread anyway. That needs a
System.Web.Extensions reference.
server.hello is emitted per connection rather than once at ServerStarted. A
sidecar that restarts independently would otherwise never learn which shard it
is attached to. It carries a bootId, stable across reconnects and fresh on every
shard restart, so the sidecar can tell "I reconnected" from "the shard
restarted" and keep or discard its cache accordingly.
Two defects found by testing and fixed before commit:
- Backoff ceiling was 30s, so a sidecar restart cost up to half a minute of
buffering on a loopback socket. Now 5s.
- A stale reader could kill a fresh connection: reader.Join(1s) can time out,
and the old thread's finally block then set the shared _dead flag, possibly
tearing down the connection that had replaced it. Connections now carry an
epoch and a reader only marks dead the one it owned.
Acceptance evidence recorded in docs/PLAN.md §11: boots with no sidecar, buffers
through the outage and drains on connect, round-trips ping/pong on the Core
thread, survives unknown kinds and malformed JSON, and reconnects unattended.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ScriptCompiler.Compile() runs `dotnet build Scripts/Scripts.csproj -c Release`
with no Platform, so MSBuild defaults to AnyCPU. Scripts.csproj gated both
OutputPath and DefineConstants on Configuration|Platform == Release|x64, so
under the server's own build the DLL landed in Scripts/bin/Release/ (while the
core loads Scripts.dll from the base directory) and TRACE;NEWTIMERS;ServUO went
undefined (XmlSpawner compiled its non-ServUO branches).
Compile() also never checks the build's exit code before Assembly.LoadFrom, so
the failure was silent and the stale DLL reloaded. Runtime script compilation
had had no effect since 2026-05-30.
Condition both property groups on Configuration alone. Server.csproj is left
alone: nothing under Server/ uses those symbols, and giving it OutputPath=..\
would make the boot-time build try to overwrite the running ServUO.exe.
Verified end-to-end: a plain boot now logs "Core: Compiling scripts... / Build
succeeded." and loads 206208 items, 42771 mobiles.
Also adds the implementation plan, the measured performance budget, the test
scaffolding used to produce it (seeder + probe, both default-off), and the
record of shard repairs that had to precede any of this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
