BridgeTownCrier handles inbound towncrier.add / towncrier.remove, pushing
website-published news into GlobalTownCrierEntryList so every town crier
announces it until it expires. Both run on the Core thread (required: AddEntry
mutates a shared list and the criers send packets). An id maps to the created
TownCrierEntry so a later remove can pull it, and re-adding an id replaces the
prior entry.
Caps are enforced before touching the shared list -- line count, line length,
active-entry count, duration -- as defense in depth on top of the loopback trust
boundary: a buggy or compromised sidecar still cannot flood the criers or pin a
message forever. Config: Bridge.TownCrierMax{Lines,LineLength,Active,DurationSec}.
Verified with a sending stub and a probe that logs the actual crier list. Replies
and game state agree: add n1 -> towncrier.ok and the entry appears with the exact
lines; add n2 (8 lines over the cap of 6) -> towncrier.error and never enters the
list; remove n1 -> towncrier.ok and the entry is gone; remove unknown ->
towncrier.error. Evidence in docs/PLAN.md §16.
Adds BridgeJson.GetStringList for JSON string arrays, tools/stub_sidecar_crier.ps1,
and tools/scaffolding/BridgeCrierProbe.cs. This closes the pure-plugin inbound
work; only the PlayerVendorSale core edit (Phase 7) remains on the ServUO side.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
BridgeAccountLink ties a game account to a website account. [link mints a
one-time, 5-minute code from an unambiguous alphabet (no O/0/I/1), holds it in a
Core-thread dict keyed to the account, and emits link.request. The website
relays the code back through the sidecar as link.confirm; the shard validates,
writes the WebsiteUserId account tag, and replies link.ok. A bad or expired code
gets link.error.
The tag persists to accounts.xml in ServUO's standard <tags> format, read by
LoadTags at boot, so a link survives restarts with no new persistence layer.
mob.login now carries webId when the account is linked, so the sidecar can
attribute a session to a site user without a lookup.
Safeguards: one-time codes; only the newest code per account is valid; per-account
30s rate limit against code spam; a 1-minute purge bounds the code table; the
websiteUserId is trusted only because the socket is loopback-only. The tag reaches
memory on confirm but disk only on the next save — a hard crash between loses it,
and the player just re-runs [link.
Verified end to end with a smart stub that reads the emitted code and confirms
it: link.request -> link.confirm -> link.ok, a bad code -> link.error, and the
tag observed in accounts.xml after a save. Evidence in docs/PLAN.md §15.
The [link command body is exposed as RequestLink(Mobile) so it can be driven in
tests without a client. Adds tools/stub_sidecar_link.ps1 and
tools/scaffolding/BridgeLinkProbe.cs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
BridgeProfile builds the read-models the website consumes; BridgeRequests
registers the inbound handlers. The sidecar asks, the shard answers on the Core
thread (inbound lines are marshaled through Timer.DelayCall before a handler
runs), so all of these read live world state safely.
- char.request: resolve by serial, or by account + slot, and reply with a full
profile (stats, all trained skills, worn equipment with flattened AOS mods,
resists). Works for offline characters since a logged-off mobile stays
resident until Delete.
- account.roster: light per-character summary, offline chars included.
- vendor.snapshot: every player vendor owned by an account, with held gold and
priced listings.
Each request may carry a reqId the reply echoes so the sidecar can correlate.
An unresolvable request gets a bridge.error reply rather than silence, so the
website can show a real failure instead of hanging.
Verified against the real world with a sending stub: all five requests answered,
both char lookup paths (account+slot and serial) returning the identical profile,
vendor.snapshot returning seed_000's two vendors and 80 listings, and the bad
account returning bridge.error. Two real-data findings noted in docs/PLAN.md §14:
a GM character can have skill base > cap (the website must not assume otherwise),
and the mod-flattening path still wants a genuinely kitted character to exercise
against real suffix gear.
Adds tools/stub_sidecar_request.ps1 (sends requests) and a hardened
tools/stub_sidecar.ps1 (survives reaping/rebind).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
BridgeSweeps runs three repeating Core-thread timers for the state that has no
EventSink. Cost measured in Phase 1 is why they can run on the main thread: a
full pass of all three is well under a millisecond at the seeded scale.
- Vitals: online players only. Small and volatile; the sidecar diffs snapshots.
Offline characters do not move, so they are served on demand as full profiles
instead, not swept.
- House decay: emits only on a level transition. A silent baseline on
ServerStarted records every house's current stage, so a restart does not
re-announce them. Payload carries from/to, coords, nested ban location,
region, sign name, owner serial+account, and built/refreshed timestamps, all
null-guarded.
- Economy supply: periodic sum of every account's currency as a snapshot. The
level; AccountGoldChange and the vendor events are the flow.
All three re-arm on `[bridge reload`; `[bridge sweepnow` runs one of each on
demand; `[bridge status` reports sweep counters. Sweeps skip emitting while the
sidecar is disconnected, since their state is perishable and re-emitted next
tick anyway (unlike events, which queue through an outage).
Verified on the seeded world with 8s intervals: baseline recorded 29 houses
silently, a probe bumped one Somewhat->Fairly, and the next sweep emitted exactly
one house.decay and none for the other 28. Economy emitted a supply snapshot per
interval. Vitals emitted nothing, correctly, since all seeded characters are
offline. Evidence in docs/PLAN.md §13.
Adds tools/scaffolding/BridgeSweepProbe.cs (never deployed) to force a decay
transition on demand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
BridgeEvents subscribes the streams selected for tracking, economy, and cheat
detection: Login/Logout/AccountLogin, AccountGoldChange, ValidVendorPurchase/
Sell, PlacePlayerVendor, SkillGain, FameChange, KarmaChange, QuestComplete,
PlayerDeath, PlayerMurdered, OnKilledBy, FastWalk, OnPropertyChanged, Command,
and Before/AfterWorldSave.
Every handler runs on the Core thread inside the path that raised it, so each is
wrapped to never throw, does only Emit (which enqueues and returns), and never
mutates the args. Three of these are veto hooks and are read strictly:
AccountLogin (Accepted/RejectReason, and a plaintext Password we never emit),
FastWalk (Blocked), and the login decision path generally.
Testing on the live shard found that SkillGain fires for NPCs, hard: the first
boot emitted 115 skill.gain events in four seconds, all spawned creatures
grinding Meditation, zero players. That is the general rule here — most "player"
events also fire for NPCs — so SkillGain, FameChange, KarmaChange, and OnKilledBy
all filter to players on the Core thread before the socket. Gold, fame, karma,
and the save boundaries were fired through their real code paths and observed at
the stub sidecar; gold.change round-trips the platinum->gold conversion and
persists across restarts. Evidence in docs/PLAN.md §12.
Adds tools/scaffolding/BridgeEventProbe.cs (never deployed) which triggers those
events through real world mutations rather than synthetic Invoke calls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
BridgeSeeder and BridgeProbe are not part of the bridge, but living under
overlay/Scripts/Custom/ meant deploy.ps1 would copy them onto any server we
deployed to. Move them to tools/scaffolding/, which nothing syncs.
overlay/Config/Bridge.cfg now carries the bridge's own settings (host, port,
queue cap, sweep intervals) rather than the scaffolding flags. Config.Get
returns false for a missing key, so a deployed server never runs the seeder or
probe even if their .cs files are present.
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>