When a script stops receiving messages, what to do?

[Pook Magoo]

I have a game running in another grid for an event. It's my attempt to create Fuzion Frenzy: Sumo (https://youtu.be/Dc6-lCukWpw?si=jiEggjLT18uBivLA ).

One object is the controller. Messages are sent on a unique channel to and from (mostly from) the controlling object, using llRegionSay and chat (I only use chat for a deactivate and activate message. The llListens are filtered.

After the region is restarted (at night), the game works fine.
But after I do some opening and closing of the script files to add a debug line or whatever, a subset of the game objects stop listening or receiving messages.
For example, I'll have the EXACT same code in each of the roll cages, and but half of them stop working over time, even if I take the entire script file from the working object and put it in the broken roll cage.
It's almost as if the region decides those objects are no longer valid listening targets. Like, I'll trace the code, and see that the broken object processes the llListen() call, but it just goes deaf to the message.

I want to know what's causing the problem or how to recover from it. I've tried:
- resetting every script manually.
- dragging the script to my inventory, deleting the script from the object, and then pasting it back in.
- deleting the script, creating a new one using a different name, and pasting the content back in.
- taking the object into my inventory and then putting it back.
- deleting the entire game and putting it back.

I was given the advice to switch to llRegionSayTo(), but... if those messages get put in the same queue, won't the results be the same?

Thanks for any help.

(I've posted this to Discord in the 2 channels that relate to the grid and the event, but I know there are some expert script writers here, so I posted here as well.)

[Pook Magoo]

Does your control script listen to region start events? If so, have you tried checking what it does when it recirves them?

Do other objects in this sim use this channel?

Have you tried stopping all these scripts then restarting the control script before restarting the listeners? (And doing it the other way around as well)?

[Pook Magoo]

There is a timing issue, for sure, which is annoying. I was using one of the states to pass the controlling objects UUID to the other game objects via llRegionSay(). I thought I had the timing of that done well, but if I modify a script in one of the other game objects, it resets the script, and it gets out of synch and doesn't get a new UUID message. I didn't want to hard-code the UUID because I wanted to plan ahead for when I sell/give the game.

After a region restart, things work.

A LARGE part of the problem was that I was using the chat window to send a "deactivate" and "activate" message, but if I was too far away from some of the game objects, they didn't get the message, so they'd be out of synch.

Sigh. Making games is not easy. Especially if objects need to communicate with each other.