That scorebox thing

[Ephemeral]

Qan,
Cool little feature, thank you. While new stuff is great any chance on fixing the existing stuff like whatever is crashing the server when Distension and Hockey is run at same time?
eph

[qan]

Qan,
Cool little feature, thank you. While new stuff is great any chance on fixing the existing stuff like whatever is crashing the server when Distension and Hockey is run at same time?
eph

Worked on that one for quite literally years, heh. It's an issue between the zone server and billing server having to do with packet flooding. PAP and I have talked about an automatic packet throttle for when reliable packet ACKs are not received on time, but it's a bit involved.

Maybe we will have our own billing server soon, written from scratch, and can handle it where it should be handled -- between serv/billing. Oh, also, if we go ASSS (part of new billing server) I will push all of Dist's upgrading to an ASSS module and it wouldn't be an issue anymore, anyhow, so, heh.

could the twl scorebox be the same as twd pls

Seeing as it's TWL I don't know if everyone would want that, and I'm wary of touching anything there. I guess it could be default off, and require people to turn it on. I think it might still cause a bit of a stir though.


Re: accuracy/assist tracking, Turb, it's fairly possible in base because players are close together, but our player tracking in TWCore is pretty bad. That would be a pretty tough feature to implement, and would be rather intensive. I'd love to see assists. It's a team game at its heart, and assists are basically as important as kills IMO. (I like how TF2 makes this explicit by not showing K/D, but only "score," and an assist counts the same as a kill. Really encourages teamwork.)

Something we could do if we move to ASSS, though.

[Rasaq]

Could just macro !t to MatchBot to see which enemy has the highest death.

[Ephemeral]

Qan,
Well, if you can’t get it done I guess we will just have to find someone who can. :P Just kidding of course!

Thank you for the explanation. I am familiar with your experience and have trust in capabilities; please forgive me if the following comes across poorly.

If the move to a new biller/ASSS is likely, what is the plan? As head of Development you hold all the cards in this transition. Has a project plan/schedule been established? How much work has already been done and if so, what is the current status? What about all the various existing biller features? Things like password reset seems fairly straight forward but will something like this have to be developed from the ground up or will you be able to reuse existing code? Features like the issue tracker/trouble ticket system are also core functionality that needs to be implemented on any new server.

As I am sure you know the list goes on and on; this is not a trivial port in anyone’s book. If I was project manager I think I would be looking for 6-10 good engineers to tackle something like this and expect it to takes several months. Testing alone, done properly, could suck up large amounts of time and resources. There is also the need for discussing how this is going to be funded.

But I am not telling you anything that you don’t already know. I am hoping that this is not going to be done behind closed doors with the majority of the work placed on 1-2 people. This would suck on many levels, the least of which would be to increase the chances of burning out good people like you.

Can you bring us up to speed on this project? Is it still too early to consider putting a hold on adding new features to the mountain of existing code and pour the scant valuable resources we have into planning for the huge looming project on the horizon?
Thanks
eph

[qan]

If the move to a new biller/ASSS is likely, what is the plan? As head of Development you hold all the cards in this transition. Has a project plan/schedule been established? How much work has already been done and if so, what is the current status? What about all the various existing biller features? Things like password reset seems fairly straight forward but will something like this have to be developed from the ground up or will you be able to reuse existing code? Features like the issue tracker/trouble ticket system are also core functionality that needs to be implemented on any new server.

Well, KrynetiX is actually dev head (and ThePAP is head of botdev) -- I'm just "bot guy" or whatever you might want to call it; I know the code pretty well because I've worked on it for many years but I'm not in charge of anything, dev-wise.

From what I understand, the old biller functionality will be essentially replicated, then developed further (IF it goes through). We have a copy the server to biller protocol, and just need to rebuild that so that it sends out the packets that are needed and handles the received ones properly. Not too bad really when it's all mapped out. After that the focus is on feature enrichment.

I'm not sure how many plan to work on this ... mostly it's in the planning stages. I'm sure if you want to lend your advice and experience it would be welcome (PM me in game). I personally don't have much to do with the project, though.

The password issue is going to be the biggest problem, I think, if we are unable to get the old biller database. Having people register names a month before the switch means that people who are inactive when it happens might lose their names and have no way to recover them. Considering our community has "name collectors" I'm not yet sure it's worth the risk. On the other hand, we'll have actually active billing ops who can handle name resets, name disputes, etc. And at least TW has a very large database of who has logged in from where and with what, so we could cross-reference that to possibly verify old names. I dunno, though ... I'm with you on that in many respects: too many uncertainties as of yet. It's a long-term project, to be sure.