Two things the screenshot rig needed and the dressing pass could not give it (runicgateway.com PLAN.md §13 phase 9). GUILDS. The world had none — the guild board on the site was two rows of week-old cache for guilds that had been deleted, and the website's Teams reconcile from that board, so Teams was empty too. There is nothing to rename here: a guild has to exist before it can be called something, so this builds four of them out of characters the seeder already made, with a leader, two officers per guild and an alliance across the first two. Idempotent by name, and a character already in a guild is never moved. IDOC. "Houses in danger" reads a column the ingest only writes when the plugin reports a house CHANGING stage; the registry frame carries the stage too, but the ingest leaves that column to the transition feed so the two cannot clobber each other. A house that is already collapsing when the site connects is therefore invisible: the sweep baselines it at IDOC and no transition is ever emitted. The staging is now two passes — prime a few houses at a middle stage at boot, collapse them 150 seconds later — so the site watches it happen. Where too few houses can decay at all, their owners' accounts are backdated, which is the same lever the seeder pulled and the same one a real shard pulls when somebody stops playing. Also: "Bridge Test Shop", left over from a hand-run smoke test, now gets a name like every other vendor. Both of the site-side asymmetries above are recorded as product observations in the file rather than patched from here. Test scaffolding, in tools/, never deployed — deploy.ps1 copies overlay/ only. Verified against the local ServUO tree: four guilds and their rosters reached the website over a real sidecar, and two houses reached "Houses in danger". Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Test scaffolding
Not part of the bridge. Never deployed. deploy.ps1 only copies overlay/, so nothing here reaches a server unless you put it there by hand.
These two scripts produced the measured budget in PLAN.md §1. They are kept because those numbers should be reproducible, and because re-running the probe is the only honest way to check whether a change to the plugin's read path got more expensive.
| File | Server path when testing | What |
|---|---|---|
BridgeSeeder.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeSeeder.cs |
Populates a synthetic world: 50 accounts, 150 characters, 30 houses, 30 player vendors with 40 listings each. |
BridgeProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeProbe.cs |
Times every read the plugin performs, on the Core thread. Read-only. |
BridgeEventProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeEventProbe.cs |
Fires gold/fame/karma/save events through their real code paths so the emit path can be verified without a game client. Mutates the world and saves. Flag: EventProbeOnStart. |
BridgeSweepProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeSweepProbe.cs |
Bumps one seeded house's decay stage after baseline so the decay sweep's transition detection can be observed without waiting a real IDOC stage. Flag: SweepProbeOnStart. Pair with short *SweepSeconds overrides. |
BridgeLinkProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeLinkProbe.cs |
Triggers [link for seed_001 without a client, then saves so the WebsiteUserId tag reaches accounts.xml. Flag: LinkProbeOnStart. Pair with a sidecar that reads the code and sends link.confirm. |
BridgeCrierProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeCrierProbe.cs |
Logs the global town-crier entry list every 3s so towncrier.add / remove can be seen landing in game state. Flag: CrierProbeOnStart. |
BridgeVendorSaleProbe.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeVendorSaleProbe.cs |
Fires PlayerVendorSale (Phase 7) with real seeded-vendor data so vendor.sale can be verified without a live buy. Requires the Phase 7 patches applied. Flag: VendorSaleProbeOnStart. |
BridgeDemoDress.cs |
Scripts/Custom/BridgeDemoDress.cs |
Renames a seeded world so it is presentable in a screenshot: shop signs, vendor and character names, house signs. Also stages a few condemned houses back into IDOC, and sets a known password on seed_000 so a character can be logged in. Flags: DemoDressOnStart, DemoDressPassword. In game: [demodress. |
Deploy overwrites Bridge.cfg
deploy.ps1 copies overlay/Config/Bridge.cfg, which deliberately omits the scaffolding flags. So every deploy strips SeedOnStart / EventProbeOnStart / etc. Re-append the flag you need after deploying, or the probe silently does nothing on the next boot. (This bit once during Phase 2 testing.)
Using them
Copy both into Scripts/Custom/, then append the flags to Config/Bridge.cfg:
SeedOnStart=True
CensusOnStart=False
ProbeOnStart=False
Boot once to seed and save, then set SeedOnStart=False. CensusOnStart reports what the loaded world actually contains; ProbeOnStart prints timings two seconds after ServerStarted.
Because Config.Get returns false for a missing key, a server whose Bridge.cfg lacks these keys never runs the scaffolding — even if the .cs files are sitting in Scripts/Custom/. That is the safety net, not an excuse to ship them.
In-game, [seedworld and [unseedworld (Administrator) do the same work on a live shard.
Dressing a seeded world for screenshots
BridgeSeeder builds a world at realistic scale, which is all the bridge ever needed. It does not
build one that looks like anything: a vendor is seed vendor trading as Seed Shop 810, a character
is Seed004A, a house sign says Seed House 12. Those strings travel the whole bridge and land on
the marketplace, the guild roster and the housing pages of the website — fine for a protocol test,
wrong for a screenshot.
BridgeDemoDress.cs renames them in place. It seeds nothing: prices, listing counts, decay stages,
fame and skills stay exactly as the seeder left them and as the shard has moved them since, so the
data keeps its provenance and only the strings a human reads change. Names are drawn from fixed
tables by a hash of each object's serial, so a re-run reproduces the same world, and shop and house
names are re-dressed when they are names the pass itself produced — so a change to the tables can be
applied to a world that has already been through here.
DemoDressOnStart=True
DemoDressPassword=<a password you choose>
Boot once, then set DemoDressOnStart=False. The password is written to seed_000 so a real client
can log a character in — the only way to make the website's online roster non-empty — and it is read
from the config rather than compiled in, so it never lands in source control.
It dresses seeded objects only, which means your own characters keep their names. That is the right behaviour for a test shard and a thing to remember before pointing a camera at one: a dev world usually also holds the accounts, characters, guilds and houses of whoever built it, and those are real identifiers on a page that may end up public.
The sidecar's board is cached, so the website lags a rename. A shop name reaches the site on the
next market sweep, and a sweep advances MarketSweepBatch vendors per tick — 27 vendors at the
defaults is two ticks. Allow a couple of minutes before concluding that a rename failed. This cost a
debugging detour once: the shard had the new names all along and the sidecar was still serving the
previous ones.
Back up Saves/ first
[seedworld and SeedOnStart write to the live world. Copy Saves/ somewhere outside the repo before running either. Backups/Automatic is rotated by AutoSave.cs and Backups/Temp is deleted outright, so neither is a safe destination.
[unseedworld deletes every seed_* account, which takes their characters and houses with it — but not necessarily their PlayerVendor mobiles. Restoring a backup is the reliable reset.
What the seeder had to work around
Worth knowing before you trust its output:
- Plate needs strength.
BaseArmor.CanEquiprejects whenfrom.Str < strReq(PlateChestneeds 95). A rejectedEquipItemleaves the item parentless, and theCleanuppass later deletes it en masse. The seeder gives charactersStr100–125 and deletes any item whose equip is refused, rather than orphaning it. VendorItem.Priceis get-only andPlayerVendor.SetVendorItemis private. Dropping an item into a vendor's pack firesOnSubItemAdded, which registers the item at the default price of 999. The seeder reachesSetVendorItemby reflection to set a real price. Acceptable in throwaway scaffolding; do not do this in the plugin.- Houses only decay when condemned.
BaseHouse.CanDecayis true only forDecayType.CondemnedorManualRefresh. An active owner's newest house isAutoRefreshand never decays. The seeder backdates 18 accounts pastAccount.InactiveDuration(180 days) to condemn them, then forces stages withSetDynamicDecay— not by backdatingLastRefreshed, becauseDynamicDecay.Enabledis true on this expansion andGetOldDecayLevelis unreachable.
Reference output
Census after a fresh load of the seeded world:
[BridgeSeeder] houses=35
[BridgeSeeder] decay Ageless 13, Slightly 3, Somewhat 7, Fairly 3, Greatly 3, IDOC 6
[BridgeSeeder] seeded chars=150 avgEquipped=8.00 naked=0
[BridgeSeeder] playervendors=30
Probe, best-of-20 on the Core thread:
[BridgeProbe] char.profile 0.069 ms/char 2386 bytes json
[BridgeProbe] vitals sweep 0.223 ms for 150 chars (0.0015 ms/char)
[BridgeProbe] decay sweep 0.007 ms for 35 houses (0.0002 ms/house)
[BridgeProbe] economy sweep 0.001 ms for 51 accounts (supply 110,478,209 gold)
[BridgeProbe] vendor snap 0.343 ms for 30 vendors (1200 listings)
Seeded characters carry 8 items with ~6 mods each and ~12 trained skills. A real endgame character has more of both, so profile cost and payload are a floor — budget 2–4× for a fully-kitted character.