Freezing problem

I've recently upgraded to version 3.00, followed shortly by 3.02 and have noticed a problem when connected to servers. Whenever a large batch of text is coming in, paragraphs, code text, whatnot, the client hangs for an extended amount of time and doesn't respond. After a little while it will unfreeze and continue on normally. When it does this, i cannot switch worlds, or do anything inside the client itself. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is there an easy solution? 3.04 doesn't seem to have fixed this either. BTW, it didn't happen in any of the other versions below.

- Kaeru

You have two wildcards like this:

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I think that your problem is these triggers. The asterisk is a wildcard, and I would say that having three in a row is making the wildcard matching routine go into a bit of a spasm.

If you edit those triggers, you will see that the execution time is listed as 11 seconds, after only a couple of minutes on the MUCK. By comparison, other triggers which don't have consecutive wildcards have only taken 0.001 seconds to execute.

You need to "escape" the asterisks. You can do this with a regular expression, like this:

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The "^" says "match on start of line".
The "\*" is an escaped asterisk (ie. match on the asterisk, don't treat it as a wildcard.
The ".*" is a genuine wildcard - it says match on any number of anything.
The "$" says "match on end of line".

Make sure you check "regular expression".

This should fix it.

Woohoo! Thanks for the info, I had no idea those two small triggers could cause so much lag-time on the program. Once I changed them over to the newly escaped ones it had no problems at all.

- Kaeru

One more point. If you are planning to use the data "captured" by the wildcards as part of your trigger (to echo to the screen, or use in a script) then you should put them in parentheses, like this:

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That way, the first wildcard becomes %1 in your reply, and the second wildcard becomes %2.