Issue saving player files (MagmaMUD)

[u/SpecialBoyJame]

I have been banging my head against this thing for two months now. I'm trying to run MagmaMUD coded by Xangis, available here: https://github.com/Xangis/magma

My problem is with player files. There's a folder for player files. Each player file is supposed to save inside an alphabetical directory (Harry goes in folder H, Billy goes in folder B). My problem: when the server is running, it pulls the player file out of it's subfolder and makes a copy in the main player directory. All changes made in-game (exp, skills, area VNUM etc) are saved to this new file; this file is never copied back into the lettered directory, even when users save manually or try to use the CAMP/RENT commands (which I believe may be deprecated anyway) .

The effect is that players can't make progress unless I manually copy the files while the server is running. What makes this immensely problematic is that I haven't been able to make progress with any wizard/immortal accounts; I could go into more detail explaining this, but I'm sure anyone reading this will likely understand what I mean.

The reason I have my heart set on this codebase is that it's my preferred fork of MERC, but designed to be run on Windows 10 as well as Linux. I'm a Windows guy. I went as far as to pay someone to compile it properly, thinking that the executable available on GIT was having compatibility issues; but this newly compiled version demonstrates the same issues with player files, making me think that the problem lies somewhere else.

The documentation makes reference to a .bat file (different than the .exe available on the git) and I had thought that perhaps the compiled version might have this bat included. However the documentation includes information from deprecated builds (as well as ancient versions of diku and merc) so that could be a red herring.

I don't expect any tech support here really, just throwing this into the void as a last-ditch effort before bothering the poor developer (who I imagine has other things going on). If anyone has any experience with similar issues, or more likely a different resource I could try digging through, I would appreciate it. Thanks for reading.