Population Counts

[PoLiX]

I updated the installer last may, but so many things have changed server wise in the past year, the zone.dat is out of date. I even posted an updated zone.dat in the downloads for players, but it too has quickly gone out of date.

 

I have decided that only certain zones will be put on the default list now (There are really only 7-8 actively developed, populated, and staffed zones, and they haven't changed anything in quite a few years). Will make sure to let players know they can download other zones though. This may help with the red zones issue.

 

I am planning to push this installer on quite a few websites I control the download on, so hopefully will get a good mass update out there.

[»jabjabjab]

I plan to change the setup of zone recommendations without much technical operation from the user (but still allow for the techies)

[Lone Outlaw]

Well a good feature for any new subspace client, would be ?find someone, last seen in 879 days. Then we will know what more than 10 days actually means. And there will be proof that there are hundreds even thousands of names, that are never used and not even refreshed. And yet still wont be reset for some dumb reason.

 

If someone doesn't login for 1000 days they obviously don't need their name. If anything reseting names that have no logins after 1 year, would encourage people to stick around.

 

I used to play MMPORGS, where you could have a whole house, 20 million in cash, all these items in your home, And if you didn't enter that house for more than 3 months. Then house would decay, and everyone could loot your items. So people who left on hiatus, had friends on the server who would refresh their home, every month or so.

Edited July 25, 2012 by Lone Outlaw

[Resol]

The ?find function isn't a client feature, it's a player database server. So your specific comment is in regards to the SSC Biller. I think on the Biller that Snrrrub runs called Isometry it displayed the exact number of days since a player was on. I'm not even sure if that biller or any of the SSA zones are still online, but that's where it is.

 

I'm working on modifications to Catid's biller and I will keep this in mind when updating it. As to not go off topic, if anyone knows about ASM and converting it from intel to at&t, please send me a private message. I've done most of the work already.

[Cheese]

why waste your time on that when you can simply start a new one and build it from the ground up?

 

the protocol is simple enough

[Resol]

Off Topic:

 

Because it's a nice biller with many nice functions and it's a lot less of a waste of time to use something already well made.

[Lone Outlaw]

Off topic,

 

So where is the feature located where if you type 4 things fast in succession, you get disconnected from the zone? Is that client based, zone, or biller?

 

Because Hockey zone does something different. Where if you type 4 things fast in succession you get gagged for 60 seconds. Why does HZ do this but the default for other zones is a d/c

 

On Topic

 

Today chaos pop display was 41

The in zone count was 27 + 14 bots.

 

So chaos is back to being 'accurate'?

Edited July 26, 2012 by Lone Outlaw

[Stag Shot]

Off topic,

 

So where is the feature located where if you type 4 things fast in succession, you get disconnected from the zone? Is that client based, zone, or biller?

 

Because Hockey zone does something different. Where if you type 4 things fast in succession you get gagged for 60 seconds. Why does HZ do this but the default for other zones is a d/c

 

On Topic

 

Today chaos pop display was 41

The in zone count was 27 + 14 bots.

 

So chaos is back to being 'accurate'?

 

Answer to 1st Q is it's zone based, and since it's asss, you can modify the behavior as you like.

 

As for the 2nd Q, yes player count (even w/o peering) has always been inaccurate. To be TRUE, SG/asss should only be counting Continuum clients. I recall hearing stories of some zones having 30+ bots logged in at a time!

[PoLiX]

I was able to reach Priit on another subject and he responded quickly. Have now passed on this subject, and will keep you guys updated.

[Samapico]

Bots being counted is a whole other matter, and we can't do anything about it (on subgame, anyways)... It's always been like that. As long as a zone doesn't use hundreds of dummy bots just to boost its pop

[spidernl]

Well, back in 'the old days' 30 or so bots weren't that much of an issue because total population was quite a bit higher. However, 30 or so bots nowadays, even in TW, are a significant chunk of their population that "doesn't actually exist".

 

It's not nearly as bad as arena sharing, which shows/showed dead zones as 100+ population, though, I'll give you that.

[Stag Shot]

Bots being counted is a whole other matter, and we can't do anything about it (on subgame, anyways)... It's always been like that. As long as a zone doesn't use hundreds of dummy bots just to boost its pop

 

If we had access to SG binaries, I might be motivated to fix counting bots too.

[Resol]

Now that would be interesting, as well as sad to see.

[Lone Outlaw]

Everyone should move to ASSS as it's better than subgame right? To bad no one is motivated to code modules required to make the movie easier for zones. If i could code i would go to every zone and transition them all to ASSS if i had too =/ I bet none of them would want to switch. I recall hoch's argument IN 2006 that ASSS was unstable. I have it saved somewhere. Edited July 27, 2012 by Lone Outlaw

[JoWie]

Everyone should move to ASSS as it's better than subgame right? To bad no one is motivated to code modules required to make the movie easier for zones. If i could code i would go to every zone and transition them all to ASSS if i had too =/ I bet none of them would want to switch. I recall hoch's argument IN 2006 that ASSS was unstable. I have it saved somewhere.

 

If set up corretly, you can use all the bots that are used on subgame

[spidernl]

ASSS is unstable only if your coders mess up. A 'clean' ASSS server doesn't crash, really.

[Cheese]

as in months of continuous uptime

 

i got over a months uptime with a experimental fake player module running a load test

[Resol]

ASSS is unstable only if your coders mess up. A 'clean' ASSS server doesn't crash, really.

 

If by clean you mean, if you don't change anything at all, than yes.

 

Even if your code is clean, and not messed up in anyway, asss will still crash and it's not easy to diagnose the problems.

 

Asss will deadlock and there is no deadlock log to say why it did so.

 

 

If set up corretly, you can use all the bots that are used on subgame

 

False, even set up correctly, I have run into issues with some merv bot plugins, but most did work.

 

Edit: ALSO

 

i got over a months uptime with a experimental fake player module running a load test

 

Your modifications to fake players causes crashes when the arena needs to close. Not just with your fakes either, with any fakes, and whenever they need to be removed.

Edited July 28, 2012 by Resol

[Lone Outlaw]

So hoch was right back in 2006? Didn't ASSS improve since then? Also for the lame man (layman), what makes ASSS better than subgame? I got that you don't use bots and it won't affect population counts.

 

I understand in some general sense that more is possible. But not sure why.

Edited July 28, 2012 by Lone Outlaw

[Samapico]

I did something to help large zones convert their arenas from subgame to asss: http://www.subspace.co/files/file/21-subgame-to-asss-migration-assistant/

 

It's pretty basic, but it works fine. It creates the proper directory structure for all your *.lvl's and creates *.conf's that include the *.cfg of the arena. Things like flagging, balling and koth might not get converted properly because some of the settings are different, but feel free to contribute and add stuff to this converter, the source is included (C#).

 

If a zone simply moves to ASSS, they can still use bots. Most bots should still work, I think... some *commands obviously don't exist on asss, so it might not work as-is. The sgcompat module allows *commands instead of ?commands. It would be simple for an ASSS server to only count Countinuum clients and not report bots as population (maybe it does already?). But the real gain on ASSS is to create modules that do the same thing as your bots directly on the server. Meaning they get less latency, and can access and manipulate information that is sent to the players. Bots can only do what a player can do by sending *commands.

[Dr Brain]

Even if your code is clean, and not messed up in anyway, asss will still crash and it's not easy to diagnose the problems.

 

Obviously your "clean" code wasn't as clean as you thought.

 

Asss will deadlock and there is no deadlock log to say why it did so.

 

Untrue. Asss logs backtraces for deadlocks just like it logs backtraces for segfaults.

 

Your modifications to fake players causes crashes when the arena needs to close. Not just with your fakes either, with any fakes, and whenever they need to be removed.

 

Hyperspace uses fakes very extensively, and to the best of my knowledge, none of our crashes are related to fakes. It's true that they need to be removed from empty arenas by the module, but this doesn't cause any crashes. For the curious, hyperspace's problems are mostly related to some badly written hyperspace-specific database code that I've never updated.

[Dr Brain]

So hoch was right back in 2006?

 

Could you be more specific? But in general my experience has been that if Hoch said something, then the reverse was usually true.

 

Also for the lame man (layman), what makes ASSS better than subgame? I got that you don't use bots and it won't affect population counts.

 

From the perspective of the staff? Tons of things. The staff chat and extra commands are extremely helpful. Simple things make a huge difference in the day-to-day running of the zone.

 

From the perspective of the players? Not much directly, but of course they benefit from the increased gameplay options. The availability of chat clients is nice. Chaining commands (with |) is useful from time to time too. Checking ?usage on other players is fun too (it's been years since I've used subgame, so forgive me if this was already available). I'm sure there are other things that I've forgotten about in the last 8 years.

 

From the perspective of the developers? It's night and day. With a little bit of effort, you can create gameplay that is simply impossible with a bot.

[Resol]

@ Dr Brain:

 

I was talking about Cheese's experimental fake player module.

 

I haven't had problems with fake players when not using his module.

 

And you're acting as if ASSS is flawless, which it is far from!

[Lone Outlaw]

Ahh specifics

 

DSB population, as I just said, is stable after many years of strong

fluctuations. Whilst we no longer see 200 population, in pub and events

that is (not League), we have levelled off where other zones are still on the

decline. To this end, the SS Council, of which I represent DSB, is very

cognizant of declining populations. There are some initiatives to advertise

SS in general, but until PriitK updates the client there is only so much we

can do. Some zones have switched over to ASSS, but ASSS is still unstable

with high populations like DSB. This is why neither TW, EG or Chaos have

gone over to ASSS. But ASSS is very promising, but we need PriitK to update

the client. So, population is a concern but I take a very pragmatic view on it.

Edited July 28, 2012 by Lone Outlaw

[Dr Brain]

And you're acting as if ASSS is flawless, which it is far from!

 

Of course it's not flawless. If it wasn't for you, just be honest and say so. Don't try to invent reasons why it won't work for other people.

 

Ahh specifics

 

DSB population, as I just said, is stable after many years of strong

fluctuations. Whilst we no longer see 200 population, in pub and events

that is (not League), we have levelled off where other zones are still on the

decline. To this end, the SS Council, of which I represent DSB, is very

cognizant of declining populations. There are some initiatives to advertise

SS in general, but until PriitK updates the client there is only so much we

can do. Some zones have switched over to ASSS, but ASSS is still unstable

with high populations like DSB. This is why neither TW, EG or Chaos have

gone over to ASSS. But ASSS is very promising, but we need PriitK to update

the client. So, population is a concern but I take a very pragmatic view on it.

 

As far as I know, there are no population issues with ASSS. A few years back, Hyperspace was getting peak populations of about 100, and never experienced anything unusual. Hockey zone was getting even higher populations during their leagues, but I was given to understand that most of those were spectators.

 

There were issues, back in the early days of ASSS, when HS was the only real zone running on ASSS. They were actually related to the number of packets being sent, which scales with population. This is like 2004-2005 era. I think that by the time Hoch wrote that (2006, you said?), they had already been fixed. Either way, they've been fixed now, and fixed for years.

 

The reason most zones (TW, EG, DSB) haven't switched is two fold: Firstly, they are getting free subgame hosting from PriitK and would have to pay for ASSS hosting. Secondly, they don't have much in the way of active development that would benefit from ASSS. After all, there's little point switching (and paying) if you're not going to use the expanded features it offers.