The Ultimate Site of Worms Armageddon
Worms: Armageddon => General discussion => Topic started by: CyberShadow on July 28, 2015, 09:48 PM
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Hi,
As of 2015-07-28 21:30 UTC, an updated version of HostingBuddy is now live on WormNET.
This is mostly an internal overhaul (major restructuring plus port to the latest version of the programming language used), which will allow us to improve it at a faster pace and provide better integration with other services.
The update does come with two small improvements:
- HostingBuddy is now on the #PartyTime and #RopersHeaven WormNET channels, as well as #AnythingGoes.
- Proper timeout detection has been added, which should resolve issues with dropped connections stalling games forever.
If you notice anything broken or out of place, please post here. You can also post feature requests to the HostingBuddy forum on our UserVoice site: http://feedback.worms2d.info/forums/78223-hostingbuddy . I'll be going through the suggestions there this week.
Known issues being worked on:
- HostingBuddy has a Netherlands flag.
On Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/app/217200/discussions/0/535151589908960047/
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Awesome stuff as always. Thank you for your dedication, Vladimir.
Since you asked, one feature I have often wished for is a map blacklist for HB's wmdb function. This could be stored locally or more complicatedly with a shared blacklist or map rating system. IMO simple and easy would be better though.
The problem this would address is that HB seems to fetch the same poor quality or bugged Wmdb maps over and over again. Maps that have been skipped are often chosen by HB again. The problem is compounded because there is no method via the Wmdb website itself to blacklist or flag offending maps except indirectly with the "complain/suggest" dialog. The lack of a blacklist is especially an issue with my favourite scheme, mole shopper, in which white background soil is very prevalent in the commonly-fetched maps. (I say commonly-fetched because I don't think the selection is purely random ?). White background soil makes it difficult and annoying to discern what is land and what is not. Fetching a lot of maps also can be painful for users with slow internet connections or who are using expensive cellular data to play.
As an extension, if a player joins a game and the host (or HostingBuddy) is using a map that the player has in his local blacklist, it could also warn the player that the map is bad so he could ask the host to change it.
I recently made another more important suggestion in the 'Disconnects' thread, however, that got buried with spam. Just hoping for any comment on this one, if you'll forgive me for posting a non-HB suggestion :-[ ;D:
Short version: unstable wi-fi internet connections often cause games to drop prematurely. The game does not seem to attempt to reconnect, even if the connection outage is very brief. Some kind of "keep alive" feature, in which the game would persistently and aggressively attempt to reconnect, would prevent many disappointing occasions where a very good game ends unnecessarily. This seems like a much simpler alternative to the proposed "resume from replays" suggestion that has been floating around. In my opinion this "keep games alive" feature would be the single greatest possible improvement for WA at this time.
Thanks so much for everything you've done for this game! Everyone appreciates it a lot... just not everyone can speak English or Russian to tell you that :)
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Thanks for the feedback, j0e.
I can't really think of a way to have customized settings without some sort of user registration system, or tying preferences to a nickname (which are impersistent and spoofable).
Are the map problems something we can address directly? HostingBuddy does have a bunch of map preprocessing code, perhaps we can take advantage of that. Can you describe the problem in more detail, and provide some examples of bad and good maps?
As for the disconnects, yes, I'm aware of the gravity of that problem. It was the reason I started the disconnects thread. Unfortunately, even the simplest solution (attempt to reconnect on a dropped connection) is difficult to execute, because of how complicated and intertwined W:A's network code is (listening for and establishing new connections is something heavily tied to the frontend). It remains very high on our list.
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The map pre-processing code should be able to fix the problem. The "bad" maps I'm talking about are:
- Maps that display the "this map does not have black at position 0, please wait" error. These maps end up loading but with ugly white background soil. I found several examples of these. Eg: http://wmdb.org/16374
- Maps that have more than 64 colors and destructible terrain. Sometimes HB says "WMDB map requires some processing to fix (Map colour palette is too large (256) but could be reduced to 112.), please wait". Hostingbuddy should check to see if destructible terrain is enabled, and in those cases dither down to a maximum of 64 colors. Eg: http://wmdb.org/6247 In some instances, I noticed that HB does in fact dither the map down from 256 to 64 colors successfully though – eg. http://wmdb.org/23092 (even though I distinctly remember playing this one with white soil before and thus have habitually skipped it since)
- Maps that are simply uploaded with the wrong (or unconventional) settings for the scheme. For example, roper maps without "water drops", or mole shopper maps with borders or without holes automatically placed. I found many examples of these. Some pre-processing checks could possibly look for some of these things and alert the host. For example: "This roper map does not have water drops. Type !wd to enable them". I can come up with a more comprehensive list if you want. Eg: http://wmdb.org/5068 (no holes), http://wmdb.org/13173 (has a border)
- Maps which (less importantly) simply don't conform to my personal preferences. For example, I don't much care for ultra-long Rope Race maps that take hours to complete. And some maps are objectively just plain bad, eg: http://wmdb.org/586. But I can live with skipping these maps manually.
As I was searching for examples, I found two things interesting. First, I was not able to find any instances where the map being glitched was HB's fault, without displaying some kind of warning message. Assuming that not giving warnings for maps saved with the wrong/unconventional settings isn’t HB’s fault. Secondly, I realized there are a huge number of maps that I habitually skip every time just due to paranoia of it being glitched.
Would it be possible/feasible to store a personal blacklist locally on each user's PC? That way you don't have to tie nicknames to IPs or anything like that. And with a local blacklist, my personal preferences in maps wouldn’t affect others' ability to play unglitched maps. The only downside seems to be that messing with local files would probably require users to download an update. Perhaps automatic map caching might also then be possible ?.
Anyways, thank you for the response. I’m always happy to provide feedback. Also very glad to know that the disconnects issue is a priority!
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good, but now please update websnooper, so we are able to host by this, not only join and chat ;] that would be cool
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- Maps that display the "this map does not have black at position 0, please wait" error. These maps end up loading but with ugly white background soil. I found several examples of these. Eg: http://wmdb.org/16374
OK, there's definitely something going wrong there, since when that map is loaded in W:A, it looks fine. Something to do with how HostingBuddy generates the waLV chunk. I've asked Deadcode so we're investigating.
- Maps that have more than 64 colors and destructible terrain. Sometimes HB says "WMDB map requires some processing to fix (Map colour palette is too large (256) but could be reduced to 112.), please wait". Hostingbuddy should check to see if destructible terrain is enabled, and in those cases dither down to a maximum of 64 colors. Eg: http://wmdb.org/6247 In some instances, I noticed that HB does in fact dither the map down from 256 to 64 colors successfully though – eg. http://wmdb.org/23092 (even though I distinctly remember playing this one with white soil before and thus have habitually skipped it since)
I suspect this is closely related to the above issue.
One thing to note, though, HostingBuddy does not dither down the map - it simply removes unused colors. W:A expects the host to send them a map with no more than 113 colors, even if some are never used, so HB simply reshuffles and compacts the palette to accommodate W:A's requirements.
- Maps that are simply uploaded with the wrong (or unconventional) settings for the scheme. For example, roper maps without "water drops", or mole shopper maps with borders or without holes automatically placed. I found many examples of these. Some pre-processing checks could possibly look for some of these things and alert the host. For example: "This roper map does not have water drops. Type !wd to enable them". I can come up with a more comprehensive list if you want. Eg: http://wmdb.org/5068 (no holes), http://wmdb.org/13173 (has a border)
I've pushed out a change that prints such map settings up-front when you load a map, as well as make more settings customizable for both PNG and random maps. We could also enforce map settings in the scheme configuration, e.g. enforce that maps have no borders in mole shopper games (i.e. the default overrides the map setting, but a user setting can override the default). Something like that is already done for Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
- Maps which (less importantly) simply don't conform to my personal preferences. For example, I don't much care for ultra-long Rope Race maps that take hours to complete. And some maps are objectively just plain bad, eg: http://wmdb.org/586. But I can live with skipping these maps manually.
http://wmdb.org/586 seems to be rated low, so HostingBuddy should never pick it. Does it?
Would it be possible/feasible to store a personal blacklist locally on each user's PC? That way you don't have to tie nicknames to IPs or anything like that. And with a local blacklist, my personal preferences in maps wouldn’t affect others' ability to play unglitched maps. The only downside seems to be that messing with local files would probably require users to download an update. Perhaps automatic map caching might also then be possible ?.
It would require protocol changes, which are always a complicated and messy affair. This is basically Internet cookies, but for W:A. If we were to go into that direction, the most beneficial course would probably be to get rid of the chat interface and integrate HB into W:A's interface, (which all is ever so non-trivial of course). For now, I think we should approach the problem from other angles.
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Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
Bad idea imo
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What about giving us a skeleton of HB so we can implement our own one that would report league game and so on?
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what about to implement some helpful informations aabout TUS in HB games??
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OK, there's definitely something going wrong there, since when that map is loaded in W:A, it looks fine. Something to do with how HostingBuddy generates the waLV chunk. I've asked Deadcode so we're investigating.
Awesome! That explains why some of my own maps, which I’ve tested offline, end up with white soil when played via Hostingbuddy. I never figured out why this happened, but felt like a hypocrite for all the times I’ve complained about map authors not testing their maps. :-[
One thing to note, though, HostingBuddy does not dither down the map - it simply removes unused colors. W:A expects the host to send them a map with no more than 113 colors, even if some are never used, so HB simply reshuffles and compacts the palette to accommodate W:A's requirements.
How about an error message, in red, if destructible soil is present and the palette reshuffling fails to get the map to 64 or fewer colors?
It would require protocol changes, which are always a complicated and messy affair. This is basically Internet cookies, but for W:A. If we were to go into that direction, the most beneficial course would probably be to get rid of the chat interface and integrate HB into W:A's interface, (which all is ever so non-trivial of course). For now, I think we should approach the problem from other angles.
Instead of a local blacklist, would it be possible for players to downvote or report bad maps through a HostingBuddy command?
We could also enforce map settings in the scheme configuration, e.g. enforce that maps have no borders in mole shopper games (i.e. the default overrides the map setting, but a user setting can override the default). Something like that is already done for Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
Enforcing water drops and borders on for roper maps would be a great idea. Likewise borders off for mole shopper maps. Not all schemes are as simple as roper and mole shopper though. For example, some capture the flag maps are played with a border, but most of them without. The ‘attached scheme’ function helps a lot for the weird outlying cases. Being able to easily downvote maps via Hostingbuddy would be a further improvement.
I've pushed out a change that prints such map settings up-front when you load a map, as well as make more settings customizable for both PNG and random maps.
Is this a recent improvement? Having the map settings up-front is very nice. But it can be hard to notice (due to complacency) when something’s wrong, because most of the maps are saved correctly. It might be easier when previewing several maps if, for example, “with borders” was written with a different color than “no borders”. You’d notice without reading that 4 of the 5 maps you previewed have the same colors for all the options, but one stands out because, ah, it has a border.
All schemes should also display a warning if automatic worm placement is selected but manual placement is forced due to too many worms. This would help for maps saved with the wrong settings like http://wmdb.org/9191 (mole shopper with no holes). Unwanted manual placement is also common in schemes played with a lot of worms such as Holy War and Bow And Arrows.
http://wmdb.org/586 seems to be rated low, so HostingBuddy should never pick it. Does it?
No, I can’t remember seeing it. I didn’t realize HB chose maps based on rating. Guess this was a bad example!
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Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
Bad idea imo
IIRC I got that from the rules of whatever league was running at that time. Nothing is in stone, so we can discuss changing the defaults if there is consensus.
What about giving us a skeleton of HB so we can implement our own one that would report league game and so on?
I can't make the code public. One reason is that it makes some evil things very easy to do, and I've been burned by releasing my code in the past. If you can put together a detailed document of your idea, I could look into implementing it, hopefully wouldn't be too hard. One thing you should keep in mind is that HB can't record replay files, because the on-wire and on-disk formats are quite different.
An alternative idea would be to expose an API which league authors can consume, but we'd need to discuss the exact feature set.
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Hi!
Not sure if it's update related, or you guys were updating something again, but today (like 3 hours ago) HB started disconnecting periodically.
Not sure what caused it, it started responding very slowly, asking me for allowsnooper all over again for a couple of times.
Sorry if it was server problem, just wanted to point out something may be breaking it. :)
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OK, there's definitely something going wrong there, since when that map is loaded in W:A, it looks fine. Something to do with how HostingBuddy generates the waLV chunk. I've asked Deadcode so we're investigating.
Awesome! That explains why some of my own maps, which I’ve tested offline, end up with white soil when played via Hostingbuddy. I never figured out why this happened, but felt like a hypocrite for all the times I’ve complained about map authors not testing their maps. :-[
Still looking into this.
One thing to note, though, HostingBuddy does not dither down the map - it simply removes unused colors. W:A expects the host to send them a map with no more than 113 colors, even if some are never used, so HB simply reshuffles and compacts the palette to accommodate W:A's requirements.
How about an error message, in red, if destructible soil is present and the palette reshuffling fails to get the map to 64 or fewer colors?
Hopefully this won't be necessary after the graphics issue is fixed. I've added the map color count to the map description displayed when loading a map (not yet deployed). Note that HostingBuddy has no control over the text color in the game lobby.
It would require protocol changes, which are always a complicated and messy affair. This is basically Internet cookies, but for W:A. If we were to go into that direction, the most beneficial course would probably be to get rid of the chat interface and integrate HB into W:A's interface, (which all is ever so non-trivial of course). For now, I think we should approach the problem from other angles.
Instead of a local blacklist, would it be possible for players to downvote or report bad maps through a HostingBuddy command?
Yeah, we can look at anonymous flagging if other approaches aren't satisfactory. Will need to coordinate this with WMDB probably.
We could also enforce map settings in the scheme configuration, e.g. enforce that maps have no borders in mole shopper games (i.e. the default overrides the map setting, but a user setting can override the default). Something like that is already done for Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
Enforcing water drops and borders on for roper maps would be a great idea. Likewise borders off for mole shopper maps. Not all schemes are as simple as roper and mole shopper though. For example, some capture the flag maps are played with a border, but most of them without. The ‘attached scheme’ function helps a lot for the weird outlying cases. Being able to easily downvote maps via Hostingbuddy would be a further improvement.
Can we make a list of some sensible defaults that will apply to the great majority of maps?
I've pushed out a change that prints such map settings up-front when you load a map, as well as make more settings customizable for both PNG and random maps.
Is this a recent improvement? Having the map settings up-front is very nice. But it can be hard to notice (due to complacency) when something’s wrong, because most of the maps are saved correctly. It might be easier when previewing several maps if, for example, “with borders” was written with a different color than “no borders”. You’d notice without reading that 4 of the 5 maps you previewed have the same colors for all the options, but one stands out because, ah, it has a border.
Yes, I implemented displaying the settings yesterday. Can't do much about the color.
All schemes should also display a warning if automatic worm placement is selected but manual placement is forced due to too many worms. This would help for maps saved with the wrong settings like http://wmdb.org/9191 (mole shopper with no holes). Unwanted manual placement is also common in schemes played with a lot of worms such as Holy War and Bow And Arrows.
Unfortunately HostingBuddy can't predict if the game can successfully arrange all worms on the map, because that requires knowledge of the respective algorithm. Maybe this can be improved from the game's side, such as warning users ahead client-side, or being able to surrender during the worm-placing stage.
I'll add display/control of automatic placement holes to HostingBuddy soon.
http://wmdb.org/586 seems to be rated low, so HostingBuddy should never pick it. Does it?
No, I can’t remember seeing it. I didn’t realize HB chose maps based on rating. Guess this was a bad example!
Sorry, I meant not user rating, but moderator appraisal (good graphics / etc.)
Hi!
Not sure if it's update related, or you guys were updating something again, but today (like 3 hours ago) HB started disconnecting periodically.
Not sure what caused it, it started responding very slowly, asking me for allowsnooper all over again for a couple of times.
Sorry if it was server problem, just wanted to point out something may be breaking it. :)
Yeah, a few crasher bugs as part of the porting. I've been fixing these as the automatic crash reports come in.
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what about to implement some helpful informations aabout TUS in HB games??
What information specifically?
TUS and HB are rather distinct entities, hosting doesn't have much directly in common with leagues. Though we've discussed e.g. making !map load maps from TUS as well.
Maybe you mean the Help bot in #Help?
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what about to implement some helpful informations aabout TUS in HB games??
What information specifically?
TUS and HB are rather distinct entities, hosting doesn't have much directly in common with leagues. Though we've discussed e.g. making !map load maps from TUS as well.
Maybe you mean the Help bot in #Help?
I think he might mean adding another way to distinguish HB-hosted TUS games from open public games? The hoster can of course use the !phost (private host) command, but people are sometimes lazy and don’t bother PMing everyone the password. I guess you could write “!thost roper” or !host tus roper” and the game would show up as “TUS Roper for j0e” or maybe better “League Roper for j0e”.
Can we make a list of some sensible defaults that will apply to the great majority of maps?
I’ll try. Feel free to add anything, anyone:
Roper/proper:
-Borders on
-Water drop on
Mole shopper, Shopper, Fly shopper, Fort, Holy war, Burning girders, Bazooka and grenades, Supersheeper, Darts:
-Borders off
All schemes with destructible terrain (Mole shopper, Fort, Holy war, Burning girders, Bazooka and grenades, Capture the flag, Bow and arrows, Sheep fort, ‘Other’):
-Disable “Snow” background soil texture if using a png map. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be hard to distinguish between the foreground and background. Snow background can be almost as annoying as the dreaded white background.
I've pushed out a change that prints such map settings up-front when you load a map, as well as make more settings customizable for both PNG and random maps.
Is this a recent improvement?
Yes, I implemented displaying the settings yesterday. Can't do much about the color.
Wow, very quick work! I see that it now displays whether a given setting is due to enforced defaults or saved in the map. Is the water level info new too?
Really great work Cybershadow :). Thanks for all the detailed replies.
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I've added the map color count to the map description displayed when loading a map (not yet deployed).
I'll add display/control of automatic placement holes to HostingBuddy soon.
These are now live.
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All schemes with destructible terrain (Mole shopper, Fort, Holy war, Burning girders, Bazooka and grenades, Capture the flag, Bow and arrows, Sheep fort, ‘Other’):
-Disable “Snow” background soil texture if using a png map. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be hard to distinguish between the foreground and background. Snow background can be almost as annoying as the dreaded white background.
HostingBuddy will no longer pick a random texture for PNG maps. Now, if the map and user don't set one, it will always default to -Beach, which is also what the game does.
Wow, very quick work! I see that it now displays whether a given setting is due to enforced defaults or saved in the map. Is the water level info new too?
It was settable before, the display might be new.
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These are now live.
Forgot to mention that the background fix for http://wmdb.org/16374 etc. is now live too, please give it a go.
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Roper/proper:
-Borders on
-Water drop on
Mole shopper, Shopper, Fly shopper, Fort, Holy war, Burning girders, Bazooka and grenades, Supersheeper, Darts:
-Borders off
Done (roper already had borders on, and HB doesn't have a proper scheme)
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Going to look into fixing preprocessing http://wmdb.org/15338 as well as why http://wmdb.org/24528 doesn't work at all.
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Hi! I don't really use hostingbuddy, so i don't know if this feature is already added or not, but I think that it would be cool to load at least tus league schemes and maybe the onl scheme by name and not by number. I mean something like this: if somebody hosts a shopper for examle and types the command !tusscheme then the tus shopper scheme would be loaded. What do you think about this?
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Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
Bad idea imo
IIRC I got that from the rules of whatever league was running at that time. Nothing is in stone, so we can discuss changing the defaults if there is consensus.
Here's quote from KRD from the thread about elite maps (https://www.tus-wa.com/forums/maps/elite-maps-random-or-elaborated-22000/)
Eight years ago, sure, the vast majority of Elite players was able to do it tastefully so that all aspects of the scheme remained relevant despite minor modifications being done to random maps. Though even then already, some people refused to play the scheme on anything but the fruit texture, so it wasn't that hard to predict the direction in which things would go...
I think only fruit is bad and limiting too. Variety is always good. Basicly any random elite map (https://www.tus-wa.com/groups/REM/) is good. The important thing here is that it's two islands, texture doesn't matter much. Even textures like Hell get some love lol (Peja).
Also one can enjoy other map patterns, even caves. But I'm afraid ppl would bitch about it now lol.
Hi! I don't really use hostingbuddy, so i don't know if this feature is already added or not, but I think that it would be cool to load at least tus league schemes and maybe the onl scheme by name and not by number. I mean something like this: if somebody hosts a shopper for examle and types the command !tusscheme then the tus shopper scheme would be loaded. What do you think about this?
Good idea here
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Going to look into fixing preprocessing http://wmdb.org/15338 as well as why http://wmdb.org/24528 doesn't work at all.
Done
Hi! I don't really use hostingbuddy, so i don't know if this feature is already added or not, but I think that it would be cool to load at least tus league schemes and maybe the onl scheme by name and not by number. I mean something like this: if somebody hosts a shopper for examle and types the command !tusscheme then the tus shopper scheme would be loaded. What do you think about this?
I'm not against the idea, but it would require cooperation from the respective websites' admins.
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Elite rules by KRD https://www.tus-wa.com/forums/worms-armageddon/standard-scheme-variants-(part-1-competitive-ground-schemes)-25170/msg205371/#msg205371
Maps
Unedited random maps (any island or cavern preset is generally fine, but highly complex maps are almost a must, so using the double island (top right) and closed cave (bottom left) presets with carefully reseeded objects is the most common; example1 (http://krd.clansfx.co.uk/dump/967cdc186ad28947e09f1831e822a362/screen0202.png), example2 (http://krd.clansfx.co.uk/dump/3d809d5414485c06df4694196b1808b5/screen0206.png)).
*Any terrain texture is fine. No, really. Only playing on Fruit and sometimes Cheese is lame and boring for spectators. Bridges are fine too.
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Basicly any random elite map (https://www.tus-wa.com/groups/REM/) is good. The important thing here is that it's two islands, texture doesn't matter much. Even textures like Hell get some love lol (Peja).
Hmm, the current setting is single island. Can someone else confirm (to make sure there's consensus)?
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Elite rules by KRD https://www.tus-wa.com/forums/worms-armageddon/standard-scheme-variants-(part-1-competitive-ground-schemes)-25170/msg205371/#msg205371
OK, that'll go in with the next batch of updates. We could also set the objects/bridges density here if desired (by default it's chosen randomly between none and 100%).
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Elite rules by KRD https://www.tus-wa.com/forums/worms-armageddon/standard-scheme-variants-(part-1-competitive-ground-schemes)-25170/msg205371/#msg205371
OK, that'll go in with the next batch of updates. We could also set the objects/bridges density here if desired (by default it's chosen randomly between none and 100%).
Yeah, I'd definitely set objects density to 100% (bridges 0 or I dunno). Yesterday we played TEL with stepz, he hosted with HB and had to reset map all over again.
[2015-07-29 13.08.41] • Welcome to sCa`stepz's game, Korydex-che.
[2015-07-29 13.08.53] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 31% objects (random), 68% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.54] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 86% objects (random), 85% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.55] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 20% objects (random), 11% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.56] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 15% objects (random), 14% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.57] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 47% objects (random), 68% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.58] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 40% objects (random), 8% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.59] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 4% objects (random), 74% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.08.59] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 96% objects (random), 61% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.00] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 39% objects (random), 45% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.01] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 80% objects (random), 47% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.02] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 0% objects (random), 2% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.06] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 73% objects (random), 93% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.06] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 0% objects (random), 1% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.08] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 93% objects (random), 84% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.10] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 87% objects (random), 49% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.11] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 11% objects (random), 1% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.13] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 64% objects (random), 49% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.14] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 55% objects (random), 87% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.15] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 91% objects (random), 53% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.15] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 9% objects (random), 65% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.16] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 54% objects (random), 89% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.17] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 5% objects (random), 73% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.19] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 53% objects (random), 59% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.20] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 34% objects (random), 77% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.21] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 7% objects (random), 84% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.22] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 29% objects (random), 77% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.23] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 74% objects (random), 23% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.23] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 76% objects (random), 62% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.24] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 95% objects (random), 8% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.25] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 18% objects (random), 69% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.26] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 54% objects (random), 35% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.26] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 36% objects (random), 28% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.27] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 76% objects (random), 73% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.28] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 15% objects (random), 67% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.29] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 78% objects (random), 49% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.30] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 85% objects (random), 30% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.31] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 76% objects (random), 43% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.32] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 62% objects (random), 34% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.34] [sCa`stepz] -.-
[2015-07-29 13.09.35] [sCa`stepz] -.-
[2015-07-29 13.09.36] [sCa`stepz] -.-
[2015-07-29 13.09.37] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 59% objects (random), 11% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.38] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 36% objects (random), 61% bridges (random)]
[2015-07-29 13.09.40] • Sending random map [island (scheme), Fruit (scheme), no borders (default), 0% water level (default), 48% objects (random), 74% bridges (random)]
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Is it possible to change the complexity level of a map too? I think Elite and T17 maps should have a high complexity level by default.
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Yeah I meant complexity lol! It should be 100%. But objects too. (Its fine in every scheme)
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First, let me tell you that seeing you interacting with us that much on this forum and really listening and answering everyone post is really nice of you. This is greatly appreciated and I feel like no one said so before :-).
What about giving us a skeleton of HB so we can implement our own one that would report league game and so on?
I can't make the code public. One reason is that it makes some evil things very easy to do, and I've been burned by releasing my code in the past. If you can put together a detailed document of your idea, I could look into implementing it, hopefully wouldn't be too hard. One thing you should keep in mind is that HB can't record replay files, because the on-wire and on-disk formats are quite different.
An alternative idea would be to expose an API which league authors can consume, but we'd need to discuss the exact feature set.
We had a discussion about it months ago where you said you could maybe could give us a kind of skeleton with less functionality for us to work on it.
One of the thing is missing and that "we (the community)" could implement is a better IA for having league game chat about rules during the game. (I have other ideas as well such as auto reporting to TUS (even if you don't have a replay)/ auto creating a complaint/streaming..)
An API could be really nice but I fear it will miss the ability to actually add modules to HB. Having public endpoint to HB and allowing us to "host" our own HB with our customized module could be beneficial for the open source community.
Let's say I would like someone to be able to interact / read the chat in real time through HB. I am sure it might requires ton of work but I might be willing to do this work. However an API would not allow me to do that. Nevertheless, if I had a basic skeleton I might be willing to loose some core functionality of HB in order to be able to do that.
Honestly, right now I am too busy to do anything related to WA but last time I spoke with some other dev from worms, some of them were very interested as well.
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OK, I set objects to 100%. Complexity is fixed at 100% (as in W:A before v3.6.31.0) and not configurable (not sure we need this unless we want to lower map complexity for some schemes, BnG maybe?).
We had a discussion about it months ago where you said you could maybe could give us a kind of skeleton with less functionality for us to work on it.
One of the thing is missing and that "we (the community)" could implement is a better IA for having league game chat about rules during the game. (I have other ideas as well such as auto reporting to TUS (even if you don't have a replay)/ auto creating a complaint/streaming..)
An API could be really nice but I fear it will miss the ability to actually add modules to HB. Having public endpoint to HB and allowing us to "host" our own HB with our customized module could be beneficial for the open source community.
Let's say I would like someone to be able to interact / read the chat in real time through HB. I am sure it might requires ton of work but I might be willing to do this work. However an API would not allow me to do that. Nevertheless, if I had a basic skeleton I might be willing to loose some core functionality of HB in order to be able to do that.
Honestly, right now I am too busy to do anything related to WA but last time I spoke with some other dev from worms, some of them were very interested as well.
In-game chat is tricky and HB can't do it at the moment. The problem is that the in-game message length (for any in-game action, not just chat) is implicit, which means that HB would need to understand and know how to decode ALL of the in-game network packets.
Generally, a realtime API is not an obstacle, e.g. one way to do that is over IRC.
The more I think about it, the less I am convinced that I should be releasing HB code. I've presented one argument, here are some more:
2 - Just yesterday, Deadcode and I discovered that HB was doing something wrong on the protocol side with regards to maps with many colors and the hole count. Generally speaking, when protocol incompatibilities arise, fixing such protocol issues is much easier in HB, because the fix can be deployed instantly and we don't have to worry about preserving compatibility with older versions of HB. This changes if we no longer have control over all instances of HB's codebase on WormNET or elsewhere, and game updates need to mind compatibility with these older versions.
3 - Where will the bot be hosted? You will need a hoster that supports running native programs and does not block IRC ports.
I've seen people try to bring their bots to WormNET, but none of them have been around for more than a year. The person just got bored of the game and tired of maintaining the bot. The only bots that have been around for longer are Team17's (ChanServ), Byte's (FullWormage) and mine.
I used to offer hosting for Worms projects, but these days I'm hesitant as people have abused this in the past (use the free hosting I provided them to attack other servers on the Internet, host copyrighted files, or host programs containing my code used in a way I asked them not to).
4 - HostingBuddy is written in the D programming language, a language I'm sure not many of you are familiar with.
So, it's not completely off the table, but I think I'd like to see a display of good faith, long-standing activity in the community, and familiarity with D or generally programming proficiency, at which point you might as well apply to be an alpha tester (which gets you HB source code access). Otherwise, I've suggested some alternatives.
One thing I'd like to add is a reminder that HostingBuddy and related technologies are all just a stepping stone until we can integrate them all into the game itself. So although things like HB scheme settings may make their way as the defaults for 4.0 or whatever the respective version will be, many other aspects will be obsolete, so we shouldn't spend a disproportional amount of effort on such things.
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OK, I set objects to 100%. Complexity is fixed at 100% (as in W:A before v3.6.31.0) and not configurable (not sure we need this unless we want to lower map complexity for some schemes, BnG maybe?).
Nop, I think it's impo to generate a good BnG map in HB.
https://www.tus-wa.com/forums/worms-armageddon/standard-scheme-variants-(part-1-competitive-ground-schemes)-25170/msg205369/#msg205369
Maps
Edited random maps (double layer cavern preset with just the top removed to make it into a full width island map; example (http://krd.clansfx.co.uk/dump/35da71d7237b001202ef9cce4380cc20/screen0198.png)).
*Ideally, terrain objects are reseeded until there's at least 3 usable hides on each half of the map.
*Unless agreed on beforehand, avoid terrain textures with extremely jagged grass such as -Farm, Jungle, Medieval, Sports and Tribal.
So I guess the best solution is using WMDB BnGs.
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I was once thinking of making a sort of extended WebSnoop website with TUS authentification and using HB ability to host game and report them to TUS but also help during the game (with real time interaction as a bot or with a TUS mod) and allow someone through socket to speak with their friend that are playing through HB. It would also be able to have an extended version of existing snooper showing the status (in game, out game) if you are playing through HB.
It would also allow private channel for clan and would be seamlessly integrated with the general channel such as you wouldn't see the difference between AG and a private channel you would have made for your clan/group.
The idea on the paper seems good in my opinion. However, you did bring good point and I do not have the time to do it anyways. Until WA 4.0 it can wait I am sure.
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HostingBuddy is currently in a crash loop since 20:05 UTC, I'm investigating
Edit: Fixed.
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These are now live.
Forgot to mention that the background fix for http://wmdb.org/16374 etc. is now live too, please give it a go.
Going to look into fixing preprocessing http://wmdb.org/15338 as well as why http://wmdb.org/24528 doesn't work at all.
Done
Sorry for the slow response – was at work all day. You’ve been busy! After some testing, all the maps you posted load. Maps with more than 65 colors after palette reshuffling now have normal background soil, as long as they don’t have automatically placed holes. This is a definite improvement. However if holes are added to maps with more than ~91 colors using the !holes command, they will have white background. I gather that the automatic holes need certain dedicated colors in the palette, requiring more colors to display properly. Here are the complete results of my tests:
Maps 16374, 15338, and 6247, all have >112 colors (after palette reshuffling) and either pre-placed holes or no holes. All of them now work great – unless automatically placed holes are added.
Map 13192 has only 65 colors and looks fine with any number of holes added. The new forced scheme border setting is working great! The map setting of Snow background also successfully overrode the new Beach default as planned.
Map 11155 (91 colors after reshuffle) does not have holes by default and looks fine with automatic holes added; only the background islands (from pressing Insert) have color problems.
Map 24528 (97 colors) has automatically placed holes by default and has white soil.
So it appears that if the palette can be reliably shrunk to <~91 colors, white soil will be a thing of the past. And if it can somehow produce maps with 65 or fewer colors reliably, there’ll be no visual errors at all. It is very nice to have the color counter now. Even if the palette shrinker can’t be improved, there will be no more paranoid guessing about which maps will work or not. If the palette shrinker can’t be improved though, you might consider adding an explicit warning about white soil in the green map info text.
Fantastic work! Thanks again.. I hope this was at least a bit useful. :)
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Hi! I don't really use hostingbuddy, so i don't know if this feature is already added or not, but I think that it would be cool to load at least tus league schemes and maybe the onl scheme by name and not by number. I mean something like this: if somebody hosts a shopper for examle and types the command !tusscheme then the tus shopper scheme would be loaded. What do you think about this?
I'm not against the idea, but it would require cooperation from the respective websites' admins.
What do you need to be done regarding that?
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Well, that would depend on what features are to be added. For example, for a !tusmap command or such, there needs to be an API endpoint which takes the parameters to !tusmap and returns a PNG map. If TUS maps are classified by scheme, we can add implicit mapping depending on the scheme used to host the game. If the request supports Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers, then HB can cache the result too.
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Or just download the current scheme files from tus/onl and upload them to your server. Most league schemes haven't changed for years. The same for maps (tus -> wmdb). Actually I could upload some popular maps that are missing from wmdb.
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Btw i talked about !tuscheme command, because it seems to me like a 10 minutes job. I was thinking about the way senator said (static way), but if MI would be up for making a little service to retrieve the current league wsc file of a scheme that would be just awesome.
!tusmaps would be also vn feature.
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Well, that would depend on what features are to be added. For example, for a !tusmap command or such, there needs to be an API endpoint which takes the parameters to !tusmap and returns a PNG map. If TUS maps are classified by scheme, we can add implicit mapping depending on the scheme used to host the game. If the request supports Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers, then HB can cache the result too.
Isn't it better for TUS to return downloadable content like application/octet-stream? Because some maps are BIT and can't be send as PNG map. (They could, but TUS had to convert them first which would be redundant since HB should get the BIT to load)
Moreover, how does HB send the request to TUS? I mean are there any preferable methods? (simple GET? or POST?)
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Isn't it better for TUS to return downloadable content like application/octet-stream? Because some maps are BIT and can't be send as PNG map. (They could, but TUS had to convert them first which would be redundant since HB should get the BIT to load)
Err, yes, PNG for color maps and BIT for monochrome ones. I was still thinking of it from WMDB's perspective, which only supports PNG. Content type doesn't really matter.
Moreover, how does HB send the request to TUS? I mean are there any preferable methods? (simple GET? or POST?)
It doesn't really matter, but if it makes things easier, the way HostingBuddy currently integrates with WMDB is: for getting specific maps (known number), it requests http://wmdb.org/maps/{number}-download, and for selecting a random map it requests http://wmdb.org/random_map_for/{scheme}, which returns an HTTP redirect to a link in the former format.
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I really like how this thread is going. Big thanks to CyberShadow and all the others. Thats how we should talk in a forum.
Keep it. :)
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It doesn't really matter, but if it makes things easier, the way HostingBuddy currently integrates with WMDB is: for getting specific maps (known number), it requests http://wmdb.org/maps/{number}-download, and for selecting a random map it requests http://wmdb.org/random_map_for/{scheme}, which returns an HTTP redirect to a link in the former format.
Just a thought, is it possible to pass the command to TUS server entirely? For example if the command starts with !tusmap, HB would send the command to TUS server and expect a map response from TUS? That would make it extremely easy on your side. You just send a command to TUS's server and wait for a response/map. That way you wouldn't have to worry about a map ID or is it random whatsoever. TUS server would handle that. Do you see any flaws with this idea?
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No, that sounds good. Caching can still be done by redirecting to a cacheable URL. We'll need to decide how to send error messages for invalid !tusmap parameters. Maybe a text/plain content type?
We'll also have to think about what to put in "!help !tusmap" - maybe translate that to "!tusmap help".
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HostingBuddy: v3.6.31.0
`UC`Zexorz`DOS`: v3.7.2.1
Why still 3.6.31.0 :(
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!tusmap and !tusscheme are working now.
The intermittent (~daily) crashes should be fixed as well. Still working on this :)
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Thanks a lot!
I'll prepare the !tushelp containing the list of commands and then announce it.
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I've closed off a mechanism of abuse (players joining a channel, hosting a game with an inflammatory title, leaving, changing nicks, repeat). HostingBuddy will now close games if their owner leaves the channel or WormNET. Let me know if something goes wrong (e.g. HostingBuddy closing a game while you are joining it).
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I've added a new !url command, which works similarly to W:A's built-it /url command. This command is accessible to all players, and will print the wa:// URL needed to join the game. The game has to be open for it to work, of course. Unlike /url, you will need to select and copy (with Ctrl+C) the URL manually.
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I have two suggestions for HB improvements:
-Holes on mole shopper maps hosted with HB do not seem to be randomized correctly. Without testing exhaustively I think they are always the same.
-If possible please display map dimensions in green text along with the other info (# colors, holes etc).
Thanks!!!!
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-Holes on mole shopper maps hosted with HB do not seem to be randomized correctly. Without testing exhaustively I think they are always the same.
Isn't that the case if you host w/o hostingbuddy, too? I think it's a worms issue, not hostingbuddy…
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That's because those maps have a predefined seed in them, in their waLV chunk. So that's normal, unless you change the seed yourself.
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I have two suggestions for HB improvements:
-Holes on mole shopper maps hosted with HB do not seem to be randomized correctly. Without testing exhaustively I think they are always the same.
-If possible please display map dimensions in green text along with the other info (# colors, holes etc).
Thanks!!!!
Added, please try it. You can change the hole seed with "!seed hole random" followed by a "!reload".
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f@#! hosting buddies and snoopers, please instead make http://snoop.wormnet.net/ available to host by. Ppl get lazy and lazy, and this thing could help and even make more activity, believe me
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I have two suggestions for HB improvements:
-Holes on mole shopper maps hosted with HB do not seem to be randomized correctly. Without testing exhaustively I think they are always the same.
-If possible please display map dimensions in green text along with the other info (# colors, holes etc).
Thanks!!!!
Added, please try it. You can change the hole seed with "!seed hole random" followed by a "!reload".
Works beautifully. This removes the guesswork out of hosting "bigger than regular but not unplayably huge" maps. The seed hole command works great too. Very nice work. Thank you CyberShadow!
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I have two suggestions for HB improvements:
-Holes on mole shopper maps hosted with HB do not seem to be randomized correctly. Without testing exhaustively I think they are always the same.
-If possible please display map dimensions in green text along with the other info (# colors, holes etc).
Thanks!!!!
Added, please try it. You can change the hole seed with "!seed hole random" followed by a "!reload".
Works beautifully. This removes the guesswork out of hosting "bigger than regular but not unplayably huge" maps. The seed hole command works great too. Very nice work. Thank you CyberShadow!
Hey Cybershadow, could you possibly create a "!holes" command which combines the "!seed hole random" and "!reload" commands?
All mole shoppers, burning girders, and holy wars hosted with HB should by default force a random seed even when the map is changed. Even if this has unforeseen negative effects on certain maps, the benefits would outweigh those problems.
And the commands should be added to http://worms2d.info/HostingBuddy. Currently nobody knows about "!seed hole random" command because it's too long, it's not in the wiki, and because it requires a !reload.
I for one greatly appreciate the work you've done already upgrading HB. Adding the ability to see things like number of colors and holes was huge. And creating it/hosting it in general. I am one of the people blocked at ISP level who cannot host without HB or WormNAT.