This has happened twice. I've gotten a low, level 2 or so job where I have to either copy a file or delete one from another company's server. When I get there, though, their files are empty! I looked in the logs and it looks like someone else was doing something.

I don't want to abandon the job unless I have to. Anyone know what's going on? This isn't part of the story, for the record. It's happened on completely random companies.

Haha I probably should have looked in there. I should download the PDF version, put it on my eReader and just read the whole thing before I try again haha.

So my older accounts' activity affects the "new world" that my account lives in? that's cool, if a little annoying when I do something that will later screw me up.

Thanks again!

From what I recall of the Introversion own changelogs this has been solved in later versions in that it is checked whether it's technically possible to complete a mission, e.g. files available, before it is issued. If you took several missions at the same time however and they conflicted each other, e.g. delete all vs. copy on the same target system, it's still up to you to execute them in the right order.

The files are generated when the mission is generated (uplink\src\world\generator\missiongenerator.cpp), and there's no check for anything before you accept the mission - the only case where the game will stop you from taking a mission is when it's about tracing a hack you've done.

As far as I can tell from a quick scan of the code, this generation cannot fail, so the files should only be missing if they were deleted by the player or if an AI Uplink agent had a mission to delete all files on that server (it doesn't look like there are any other non-player actions that will delete any files).

Nice catch, Pidgeot! That's source for the latest version, right?

It's from a fully updated checkout of the trunk folder of the SVN, so it should be, yes. I haven't checked the changelogs against the source code, though.