Books and sketches inner working has been changed radically in the server side: they won't make a new item any more, like before, in place they will keep the basic book (the item you buy which was then changed in another when bought) as their base and store the book/sketch content in the particular instance of the item (any item in a slot is an instance, a stack of items is an instance too, when you do crafting you destroy and make a lot of instances of items just to make it clear).
In the next days I will proceed to update the servers to the last version starting from ezpcusa, so new fixes and functionalities (mostly to who has a more up to date client than the current binary release) and this big change explained above will go in the production servers.
What does it mean in a practical basis?
Various thing some positive some not so positive.
First of all, as it's obvious, there will be a downtime, which will be higher for zeroping, considered the bigger db, which will have to be backup, and then have a script run in order to convert the old books to the new format.
Second. If a book is missing an instance (due to old code all books would be preserved even lost ones or available only on deleted characters) all it's content will be *lost* from the conversion process. A database from 2 months ago says there are about 6000 of these cases. So, if you have a book you've lost due to selling it to a merchant or for other reasons, it would be better if you took the time before this upgrade to have it recovered by a dev or gm as after this procedure it will be more complex to retrieve them (having to load an old db and extract them by hand while now it just needs an /item "bookname").
Third. As all the books are run through a script and converted to their instances problems might happen: I've tested it carefully on a real db and it worked well but let's say ... better safe than sorry. DO A BACKUP OF YOUR BOOKS and SKETCHES!
Forth: gm and devs won't be able to recover your books any more if lost due to selling them to merchants or any other destructive practice for the item instance, this isn't the case for setting items as they will be created in the old style, being game data and not player data, but will affect the new and old books from the time of the update upon. While it's still possible to load a backup of the db and load the book from there you can't be assured we have such a backup or the time for it. So proceed like if you knew there is no such a backup of your precious book for the future.
Fifth: due to the fact 23929 books and sketches won't be any more in the basic items, they won't be loaded any more on boot up, but only when your character items are loaded. This will mean at least 30/60 seconds less of wait time when the server is restarted and less cpu/ram stress on the server.
sixth: As now books are taking their base from the original item, changes to it will change your book characteristics. Things like weight, size, mesh, icons will change according to the basic item just like any other item in game (excluding random loot for now)
seventh: probably the most visible change to players. Now it's possible to name books in any way as they aren't basic items any more. So you won't get any more those funny names with numbers after the book or have to call your books with an ending number or something similar in order to be able to do copies.
I think that's all enjoy and let me remind me again: BACK THEM UP!
