THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING COMPANIES

Disaster struck yesterday when the game came back up after the
morning reset, and some CEOs discovered their companies had
completely vanished. There seemed to be no logical reason why some
were afflicted in this way but not others: both Industrialists and
Manufacturers were victims, some of them owning just one non-
operating factory, and others running a string of active plants.

So who ya gonna call? Bella, of course. She rushed to the rescue to try
to figure out what had gone wrong.

While she investigated, the stricken CEOs took advantage of their
enforced idleness and a whole bunch of mini parties spontaneously
erupted across the Solar System. Well, actually, they ran around and
panicked, but that was probably as much fun as partying!

Bella discovered that the companies had not completely vanished into a
black hole - they were still in the data file, but they were not being
loaded in to the game because of a problem with the format of the file.
Further investigation found what that problem was: a rogue & character
(an ampersand) in somebody's company name, which the new code
Bella had just put into the game was not dealing with correctly. This
meant that when the game tried to load company data from the file it
got to this one particular company, called Sword & Dagger, and then it
choked and refused to load any more.

Bella fixed the code so it could cope with the & in the company name,
and then reset the game. That worked, and the missing companies all
reappeared. Hooray! But wait - although the companies had come back,
the factories and depots belonging to those companies had all vanished.
Oh no!

Further investigation showed that when the game had failed to load the
missing companies, the Galactic Administration had assumed that the
depots and factories belonging to those companies were orphaned
because the CEOs had died, so it had demolished them. Well, that was
one way to solve the workthing shortage!

Bella fixed this problem by backing out the factory and depot details to
the one for the previous day's reset. So everyone had their property
back, we could all breathe a sigh of relief and get on with working for a
living.

Well, almost... CEOs had lost any new depots or factories bought on
Friday night/Saturday morning, poor things. But then they make so
much money that it shouldn't take them long to recoup their losses, so
that's alright. Sorted!



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