So my OpenRPG suddenly, inexplicably crashed. No big deal, get back on and find that my gametree has been corrupted and subsequently replaced automatically. Alright, why not. Saves me the trouble. But now browsing game servers don't work. I can still open the meta in Firefox and get server IPs to connect to from there (which works), but the servers wont show up on the server list.

This is what the debugger window is saying whenever I try to refresh the server list:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\SleezyStudios\AppData\Roaming\openrpg\orpg\networking\gsclient.py", line 580, in refresh_server_list
etree = meta_server_lib.get_server_list([2]);
File "C:\Users\SleezyStudios\AppData\Roaming\openrpg\orpg\networking\meta_server_lib.py", line 156, in get_server_list
return_list = sorted(etree.getroot().findall('server'), sorter_func)
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'etree' referenced before assignment

So what broke and how do I fix it?

This is a very recent thing, perhaps coinciding with openrpg.com no longer resolving. I had not noticed anything wrong, but my players who had to reinstall their clients (standard or Traipse) could not find any servers. I'm going to guess those like myself who have servers already cached are only able to see because we have a server cache.

set your meta server url to : http://orpgmeta.appspot.com/

There was a guy with 1.7.1 saying his server list wouldn't work at the assembla site but I figured he hadn't played in (quite) a while to still have the 1.7.1 version and hence the old MetaServer url.

"I can still open the meta in Firefox"

Implies he already is pointing at the correct URL I think.

I believe the error message just means that openrpg wasn't able to grab the server xml data which inititalises the etree object at that point. Not that that's much help. What's the usual reason for failure for openrpg to connect when the url is accessible via web browser? It was suggested that there might be a proxy server in the way that openrpg needed to have a system variable set up for (or specifically the Python library urllib needed this variable). This is a networking issue that I don;t know anything about but I can find the old thread. However I don't know if anything was resolved.

See here:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=91

This used to happen all the time to me too (either one: crash or corruption) but hasn't happened now in over a year. Therefore I am wondering if your version is up to date...? Not that that would fix the connection bug you have there but crashing and corruption ought to be very rare these days.

I hope you didn't lose data because of the back up to lastgood?

I thought openrpg.com's metaserver went down ages ago? Like six months or more? Or do you mean that it made a difference that the domain name itself has now gone?

By "server cache" do you mean you have some individual servers bookmarked using the new bookmark feature? or something else?

No, it just forwarded users to the new one.

Last night I installed a new OS and just copied over my Openrpg files.

Today I went in to check and see if they ran properly and I couldn't connect to the meta server. I then installed a new copy from zip and it could connect.

I checked the meta address in both versions and they were both the same.

However when I copied my over myfiles into the new operpg copy and tried to connect to sever it failed again. So somewhere along the line it is the old files that were messing everything up.

Not sure if my problem is the same as everyone else's.

Just thought I would share. I'll mess with it some more later.

OK I figured out a solution to my problem.

It was the metaservers.cache that was screwing everything up.

I deleted the file and restarted openrpg ( it generates a new metaservers.cache to replace the missing one ) and now I can connect.

Like I said this may not be the same problem as everyone else is having but it's worth a shot.

Paul's solution worked for me.

I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that my metaservers.cache file also got corrupted somehow and needed to be manually replaced.

As for previous concerns, I am using version 1.8.0 {090712-00} and my meta servers url was pointed to http://orpgmeta.appspot.com/ (which I also have saved as a bookmark, just in case, since a while back. Glad I did now. xD)

Anyways, thank you all for such swift responses. I appreciate it greatly.