What are your favorite NRAAS features?

"MKSizzle;c-16608963" wrote:
I've been seeing a lot about ErrorTrap here. I don't have it but I went to the nraas wiki to read about it. It doesn't say much about it (unless I'm missing something). What does it do? I would love my game to run better. OverWatch didn't do much, TBH.

ErrorTrap tries to correct and, if it cannot, captures ("traps") programmatic and data errors that could otherwise damage the ongoing game or cause it to crash, and reports on them by way of script logs. The logs can then be uploaded to us at NRaas and a support thread opened if the player needs assistance in interpreting them and fixing whatever the underlying issue is.

http://nraas.wikispaces.com/ErrorTrap%20Patch169
(this is the 1.69 version but it's the same for 1.67)

Here's an example, although it's kind of abstract.

The game sends an instruction to carry out that is the equivalent of dividing by zero. There will be no meaningful result, and the game will crash or whatever is supposed to really have taken place just doesn't. ErrorTrap catches that, tries to correct it, or traps the error and produces a log that says (with some practice at interpreting it) the sim's career level is undefined or the outfit they were meant to be putting on has no ID number so it may as well not exist, or an infinite number of other possible things. The sim stops in their tracks or gets reset if necessary instead of the game session just ending leaving the player looking at their pretty desktop all of a sudden and wondering why.

Along the way the mod also performs trash collection that should have been programmed into the game but wasn't. Not rubbish items that our sims throw away, I mean it removes garbage (useless data) from our games that could never have been needed for anything or was already too corrupt to be useful and thus helps keeps our long running games going.


This page could use some updating, but it provides a partial list of what Overwatch is doing.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Overwatch%20FAQ

If you were to switch Overwatch logging on, you would get a log a few sim minutes after each startup saying exactly what the mod has done to correct issues it finds. For me it depends on how long the prior session ran and how large and populated their current world is as to how long that log is, but most of them are in the many thousands of lines. I think most players prefer that the mod just does what it's supposed to silently on startup, for sanity's sake. Then there's the overnight cleanups and what the mod "watches" for along the way during gameplay, but those tend to be lighter and less instrusive. :)