Distension Beta Suggestions/Bugfix thread

[hak]

Distension Beta

I found there is no way of resetting your ships when you want to. Maybe you could add a command like "!crash 1" to reset your warbird.

Also: Progress: -5390 / 6198 11374RP needed for next rank
I don't know what's up with this. I'm sure you can explain me what's wrong.

Regards,

Hakkinen B)

[Epic li]

I found there is no way of resetting your ships when you want to. Maybe you could add a command like "!crash 1" to reset your warbird.

1- Why anyone would want to reset their ships=)?
2- Someone new to game game could do the command by mistake, he goes =(

Unless you want to re-add all your points, a !scrapall would be nice, all the stats are scrapped.

[hak]

Distension Beta

1- Why anyone would want to reset their ships=)?
2- Someone new to game game could do the command by mistake, he goes =(

Unless you want to re-add all your points, a !scrapall would be nice, all the stats are scrapped.

I can actually imagine that someone with 50+ in all ships wants to start over. Even if you can't imagine this happening, it's still a desired feature in any role playing game. Second of all, you would obviously make the bot warn you, and ask for a like "!reset YES" command after giving someone a head warning. This is the same with !defect, and it seems to work pretty well.

Also: About Shark repels recharging every 30 seconds, with odds similar to those of a terrier and spider. Did you get to work this out by any chance? If not, this is just a reminder.

Regards,

Hakkinen B)

[Vykromond]

Played a little Terrier today. I like the ship and think it's more or less balanced. I'm fragile so I need sharks just as much as I would in the publics, but the speed and firing rate of my bullets means I'm not at all defenseless, which is nice. The burst/portal mechanism is very clever and seems balanced as well.

Haven't had the chance to check much else out yet. This seems like a terrific subgame so far.

[gdugwyler]

Regarding full ship resets, I'm a little bit afraid of implementing this. Consider if someone hacks your account or the biller goes down and they simply log on as you. We'd have to do regular DB backups to ensure data is saved. I'd like to implement this command, but maybe just as a HighMod+ or SMod+ affair (doing a ?help command sort of thing).

Which brings to mind: the bot needs to recognize when the biller is down, and stop itself when it is. Is there a short, meaningless command it could execute every 60 seconds which would give results indicating the biller being up or down? Been a while for me since I was online during a biller outage...

The negative progress occurs when you !defect, and also when I mess with RP rates (not all that often).

!scrap all will probably eventually be implemented. I'm trying to think of an elegant way to do it, though.

Sharks now do have a repel-regen ability, yes. They have fewer repels available overall as well (takes longer to get them), but they now yield 25% less RP than would another ship of the same upgrade level. This will hopefully encourage more of the calculatingly fearless spirit that makes for great sharking.

[Aquatiq]

i think there should be a !lagout module in the bot, where if you actually do lag out you get a couple chances to return without losing any participation. it'd be really annoying if you were playing a 45-minute long round and lagged out only a few moments just before your team won, haha. the !lagout would put you back in the ship you were in when you lagged out [edit:] and actually it should put you back on the same team you were on, really. or we could take the attitude of "sucks to be you", but even so, even one !lagout with a 30 sec timer would potentially give us time to fix our lag and keep the game fair, no?

[Heroin Bob]

i hardly like basing so i didn't like it to begin with


then it made my dd cancel due to recycle which we lost once replaying


overall i now hate distension

[Maverick]

egarding full ship resets, I'm a little bit afraid of implementing this. Consider if someone hacks your account or the biller goes down and they simply log on as you.

Wouldn't it be the same as the ?scorereset command in the public arenas we have allowed? If someone gets on your account they can do it aswell (but have you ever heard something like that happening).
When the biller is down you can't do this on someone else's account because the scores aren't retrieved when the biller is down. Everyone logging in when the biller is down will get a 0-0 score.

Is there a short, meaningless command it could execute every 60 seconds which would give results indicating the biller being up or down? Been a while for me since I was online during a biller outage...

There is no command for this but you can simply check if players have a ^ in front of their name, which means they logged on while the biller was down (at SSC at least).
This is one of the few things you can do to detect if the biller is down. Other lesser options are doing "?chat" and see if you get a response to the command. You would have to work with timeouts and such but it might also happen that this command gets delayed and makes the bot think the biller is down.

[gdugwyler]

It would be a little different than ?scorereset, as it could mean many months of playing time wiped. HAK was referring to a way to reset all of the progress made in the database on a single ship, or all ships. (At the moment the bot is doing *scorereset on anyone that enters while it's running, anyhow.) Were someone able to use this command on your account, it would result in some extreme frustration.

This is all on report of a Mystic Kingdom developer, who said that whenever a biller outage occurred they had to revert to an older version of the DB. I think that this problem does still affect TW, despite the ^ carat, as I know someone was requesting that TW's alias-watching feature (in pubbot/hubalias) go down at billing outages. Apparently it causes a lot of damage to the accuracy of aliasing, despite the fact that it should be able to tell the difference between DoCk> and ^DoCk>. Maybe there's something we should be checking for that signifies to the client that the name is unreliable (and so to put a carat) that TWCore doesn't pick up on? It's supposedly a real problem, in any case, and one we should investigate with Distension if it comes up any time soon.

I seem to recall that ?find is also -- maybe -- disabled during a biller outage? If the bot were to do a ?find on its Hub every minute with a timestamp, and didn't receive a reply within 10 seconds, it would probably be safe to say the biller is down. The ?find dugwyler for preventing "unauthorized beta testing" seems to work pretty reliably as far as I can tell. If it had 5 or 10 second lag getting a find, chances are it should be down anyway, heh!

[Vykromond]

I seem to recall that ?find is also -- maybe -- disabled during a biller outage?

That's right.

[Maverick]

Were someone able to use this command on your account, it would result in some extreme frustration.

True, agreed

as I know someone was requesting that TW's alias-watching feature (in pubbot/hubalias) go down at billing outages.

Yes, this was Rudy which I fixed by checking if a playername starts with a ^ or not. (http://www.twcore.org/ticket/35) I haven't heard any complaints about this solution and I think it's reliable enough to check if the biller is down or not.
You can make it even more reliable by just shutting down Distensionbot whenever a player enters with a name starting with a ^ (you can't enter with a ^ normally).

If the bot were to do a ?find on its Hub every minute with a timestamp, and didn't receive a reply within 10 seconds, it would probably be safe to say the biller is down.

Yea that would work too, however make sure you don't do more then one ?command every 5 minutes (or even more?) to avoid getting kicked for spamming ?commands.

I had a bot once that did ?chat every 5 minutes for checking who was on a specific chat. When I made it do ?chat every minute it would be kicked for spamming ?commands. Not 100% sure about this though, however I do remember once every 5 minutes was the only way to make it work.

[PjOtTeR]

I can actually imagine that someone with 50+ in all ships wants to start over. Even if you can't imagine this happening, it's still a desired feature in any role playing game. Second of all, you would obviously make the bot warn you, and ask for a like "!reset YES" command after giving someone a head warning. This is the same with !defect, and it seems to work pretty well.

Also: About Shark repels recharging every 30 seconds, with odds similar to those of a terrier and spider. Did you get to work this out by any chance? If not, this is just a reminder.

Regards,

Hakkinen B)

Wouldn't someone with 50+ in all ships just get on another name not to waste all the time he spend to get to this 50+ on all ships?

[gdugwyler]

Good idea with the ^; sounds a lot more solid than a command-based hack. Since you've verified it as a working method I'll just have the bot save and shut down if anyone comes in with a ^ at the start of a name.

[FarScape]

Hey I just wanted to say that this is a cool game. I didn't like it at first, but now its much better (probably because the bot doesn't spam with too much information).

I play spider as my ship, and I enjoy it very much.
thanks for supporting it :-)

[Peace_Maker]

Observations

A couple of things I have noticed, feel free to comment.

- Today there was a weasel, level 12 or so that had rockets and could fire four L2 bullets rapidly. That seems a bit extreme to me since most ships under level 25 die to one L2 bullet. My suggestion is to increase the amount of energy required for a weasel to fire L2 bullets or decrease the firing rate for weasel L2 bullets. I do not play the ship myself but this seems like a reasonable solution.

- I currently play a rank 21 spider and get -10RP any time a rank 10 player kills me and only receive 2 points for killing the same player. I understand rank 1 or 2 being -10 but instead of all ranks that subtract points could rank 10 players only be -1 and a level 9 player -2 and so on. I do not know if the current cap is -10 or if it continues to increase but I played a game today and only increased RP by a net 200 due to players spraying bullets across the flag room. Maybe I should just camp but I prefer to push if I can not be penalized for it.

- When playing on a team with few players that are higher ranks compared to the opposing team the bot spams the team suggesting players play low ranked ships so the enemy can !assist. It asked about once minute a couple of times. Just seems a little spammy. Plus, who would want to change ships? Doesn't a player lose participation when changing ships?