Forums
March 28, 2024, 08:54 AM

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - CyberShadow

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 12
16
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: July 30, 2020, 04:42 AM »
A new implementation of PNG map processing, used by HostingBuddy and friends, is now live. This fixes incorrect loading and crashes of some unusual maps (mostly 1-bit or 4-bit, maps without a black colour in the palette, etc.).

I tested with all maps on WMDB so far with good results. For a few (rare) cases, HB now correctly rejects maps that it previously accepted but could not be loaded by the game (maps with missing black but 113 used colours in the palette, i.e. with no room to add black).

Report any problems here.

17
Hi Alby87,

That's awesome! Do you mind if we include your translation with the game itself?

18
Announcements / Re: Worms Armageddon v3.8 Released
« on: July 17, 2020, 06:26 PM »
i had immediate desynch when using 3.8 while other ppl using lower versions, playing online, while 3.8 game version working fine, alone. did i miss to use some stuff? or is it under construction?
Was this a RubberWorm game? If so, that's not expected to work - there is no network compatibility between the RW features built into 3.8 and the old WormKit module.

If it wasn't a RubberWorm game, please post your replay file. It would also help a lot if you could get the other parties' (who desynchronized) replay files and post them as well.

19
Announcements / Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8.0 changelog sneak peek
« on: May 07, 2020, 04:19 PM »
I really wonder what the requirements could be, sounds like T17 is just being boring,
These requirements were not set by Team17.

I know ETAs mean nothing but since it seems the requirements have been met, do you think it'll take long for the public to see the update?
We still have some non-code bureaucracy to take care of (translations, documentation, final testing), maybe a few weeks (as far as our side goes)?

20
Announcements / Re: Worms Armageddon 3.8.0 changelog sneak peek
« on: May 06, 2020, 04:46 PM »
I suppose things like that could be postponed so 3.8 would be released a lot earlier? I'm (and practically every Linux/Mac user) really looking forward to this patch, because WA is unplayable under Wine (tiny frontend window, buggy renderers, no private message/turn notifications and a few other annoying bugs on top of that).
These days I use Linux almost exclusively, and honestly I'm not sure what you're looking forward to:
  • windowed mode is nice, but Wine virtual desktop mode is almost the same thing, in any case the frontend remains 640x480
  • 3.8 adds an OpenGL renderer which ironically doesn't work in Wine (on many GPUs, because of a bug in Mesa), I don't think other renderers are going to be very different in 3.8
  • taskbar highlights on PMs / your turn should work, if they don't the problem is with Wine or your desktop environment
Sorry to disappoint :) But maybe make a new thread and we could try to figure out the cause of the problems you're seeing.

Get Windows or any other proper OS.
Hey, be nice :)
I don't even care about a big 3.8 release per se... just release incremental updates, like a 3.7.xxx whatever. Add little fixes and features whenever they are ready. There's no need to stockpile it all and make a huge update. At this point ANY update would re-ignite my faith that something can and will happen, even if it was to address minor bugs or backend stuff. I feel like a donkey who has had a carrot dangled in front of them to goad it into working until it died. Metaphorically speaking. I mean yeah, the game is perfectly playable as it is and it wouldn't be the end of the world if no update ever came out, but as I said before, I'd rather just know for sure that nothing is going to happen so I stop thinking about it and wishing for it.
Yes, this has been at least as frustrating for me as it has been for you. The reason this is not what happened is that it has been decided that the next public update must satisfy certain requirements, or otherwise we and the community will forevermore pay the price of not doing so. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that these requirements have been overcome, so we can now finally move forward for the final stretch.

It also really pisses me off that there's a relatively small circle of people who are 'in the know' regarding all of this stuff and everyone else is kept in the dark. This game is old and has a small, tight, yet fairly inactive community so absolutely NOTHING should be 'hush-hush.' Everything should be transparent and up-to-date because otherwise why bother working to enhance / maintain a dying game?
I'm sorry that this is frustrating for you. Unfortunately, some things do need to be limited to a set number of people:
  • Alpha builds, which we neither may make public nor can sufficiently test by ourselves.
  • WormNET moderation, which again we neither can do by ourselves nor just let anyone kick/ban anyone else.
  • Access to the server hosting and source code of community websites, such as worms2d.info or wmdb.org.
However, the "hush-hush" aspect of that is very definitely not intentional. I've said it before, and I'm saying it again that anyone can contact me any time (TUS PM, #Help on WormNET, #worms...) and ask anything that's on your mind. Just beware that sometimes the answer to your questions may be rather pedestrian or glum (lack of progress due to lack of time, or every-day strife, or health problems...)

If a changelog was posted earlier in time, what kind of NDA would disallow it to keep constant enough?
I don't think anything prevents us from keeping the changelog updated other than that we'd rather be working on something more useful :)

21
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: April 16, 2020, 06:00 PM »
Other updates since March 22:
  • Lower the width threshold to activate the narrow layout in WebSnooper
  • Fix the WormNAT2 server running out of ports
  • Fix bots not rejoining WormNET channels when they are temporarily locked by ChanServ
  • Make WebSnooper use the same restart mechanism as HostingBuddy, so that hosted games continue in the background
  • Fix WebSnooper's hosting feature generating bad wa:// URLs in some cases
  • Disable some confusing syntax in the Help bot
  • Fix a very rare crash in games hosted by HostingBuddy and friends

22
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: April 16, 2020, 05:01 PM »
Hi,

Yesterday during testing WormNET flood detection we discovered a serious limitation. The WormNET IRC server has an upper limit for the number of simultaneous connections (a little lower than 180). When this limit is reached, users who try to join will see this:



Unfortunately this limit is hard-coded deep in the software, and we can't easily raise it.

I have observed this limit to be reached (and the above error message generated) during the past few weekends, which is unfortunate as it prevents players from connecting to WormNET. For this reason, I added a new module to SheriffBot which attempts to ensure that our very limited number of connection slots is used fairly. During times of very high activity (more than 120 simultaneous users), SheriffBot will kick out users who are idle (just sitting in a channel with no activity), starting with the users who have been idle the longest.

I understand that getting forcibly kicked off WormNET can be unpleasant, especially if you are used to being online all or a lot of the time. However, I count on your understanding that by staying online, you are occupying a slot which can't be used by someone who just wants to connect, join or host a game, and free up the slot for the next person, within the span of usually under a minute.

  • Who is affected by this change? - Mostly, snooper / IRC users, or third-party bots. Users who have been online for less than two minutes, or made any public activity less than two minutes ago, are never affected.
  • When will this occur? - The change is already live, but this behavior activates only when there are over 120 users in channels simultaneously. This is pretty rare. For comparison, at the time of writing there are 67 users in total.
  • What exactly happens when an idle user is detected during high activity? - The user is kicked from WormNET. However, if the user rejoins WormNET and continues being idle, they will be banned for a short duration (1 minute). If this keeps happening, the duration increases (2 minutes, then 3 minutes, then 4 minutes etc.). This is so that AFK users whose clients are set to automatically reconnect do not wastefully take up a connection slot.
  • What should I do if I want to stay online and chat in channels, or keep an eye on WormNET? - I invite you to use the Web Snooper, which uses only one WormNET connection slot no matter how many users are using Web Snooper at the moment.
  • What should I do if I want to stay online and chat with people by PM? - I invite you to join #worms on GameSurge, which does not have the drastic user limitations that WormNET has.
  • Why is SheriffBot's limit (120) much lower than the WormNET limit (180)? - A typical WormNET IRC connection needs to go through these stages: 1) TCP handshake 2) Authentication 3) Identification 4) Initialization (MOTD, server capabilities, channel list) 5) Joining a channel. SheriffBot can only count users which have reached stage 5, but the WormNET limit takes effect all the way at stage 1. Additionally, the WormNET server reserves some connection slots internally, which is why in /users you will see a maximum of 174, not 180. This is why we reserve a buffer to ensure that there are enough slots for connecting users, users who are currently switching channels, as well as to account for connections which never join a channel (such as some bots).
I have also reduced the number of HostingBuddy PM sender proxies from 8 to 3 connections, which frees up connection slots while hopefully still being enough to avoid WormNET PM limits.

23
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: April 11, 2020, 04:44 PM »
On older browsers page snoop.wormnet.net looks like in attached picture. There could be somewhere for this issue "SOS" button for redirect to page http://snoop.wormnet.net/snooper/legacy.html, which work normal. If somebody have old browser and dont know about working legacy snooper, have just bad luck? Simple hypertext "if it not work, click here", or "older version is >here<" could help they.

Sorry I haven't replied to this in so long. I didn't like anything that I could say.
W:A is a 90's game, so retro computing and maintaining support for old technology is close to our heart. The game was even backported to Windows 95.
However, such endeavors are not free and they take an ever increasing amount of effort to maintain.
In case of the Web Snooper, it was originally written to support Internet Explorer 6, because it was still widely used at the time.
But, adding new features while maintaining such compatibility gets very messy, so I hope you will forgive me if I say that I think it would benefit the Worms community more if we spent our time on new features that benefit everyone instead of compatibility with old systems that only benefit some very rare use cases.
So, I would rather not add a link, because I don't want people to think that the old version is being maintained. In fact, it could stop working at any moment, and I'm surprised it works at all currently, due to the recent changes in the XHR API used between the JS and the server.

24
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: March 24, 2020, 02:13 PM »
Only few estetic ideas:
1. On regular websnoop could be link/button to redirect at legacy websnoop (for those which dont know about it, and regular websnoop dont work for they).
What is this circumstance?
2. When will HB server restart and all HB hosted games goes crash, it can inform in lobby or in game chat little time ahead about it. Something like "HB server need restart, this game will end in 1 min".
That's not how we restart HB. All games continue in the background until all games are done, only then the old HB exits. Today HB crashes are very rare (less than 1 per month).

25
Announcements / Re: WormNET Service Updates
« on: March 23, 2020, 10:44 PM »
Sorry, I keep forgetting that you need 3.8 to connect to the staging server with the game itself. But hosting and joining games on the WebSnooper instance there should work.

26
Announcements / WormNET Service Updates
« on: March 22, 2020, 08:41 PM »
Some updates due to the recent jump in activity:
  • HostingBuddy now sends replies from a rotation of nicks to avoid server flood limits
  • Fixed a crash in the WormNAT2 server
  • Changed how the rank/flag is obtained from WormNET, to better work during very high WormNET activity
  • GOG versions are no longer detected as a snooper
  • Fixed being able to reopen games after HostingBuddy is restarted, which would lead to erratic behavior (games randomly closing and "wrong game ID" errors)
  • HostingBuddy and friends will occasionally remind people about some alternatives to !kick (!close and !phost)
  • Allow old URLs (as obtained with /url) to work after a !reopen
  • Fix WebSnooper history getting erased due to the new rank/flag query mechanism
  • Fix encoding of non-English characters in some places
  • Add Host button on WebSnooper
  • Many internal fixes
The new host button is a little experimental. (If you want to mess around with it, I recommend using the staging server.)

As usual, post here if you notice any problems.

27
Other worms games / Re: Worms World Party deathmatch team names?
« on: March 19, 2020, 06:37 PM »
That's a nice module, added to https://worms2d.info/WormKit

28
Other worms games / Re: Worms World Party deathmatch team names?
« on: March 19, 2020, 06:03 PM »
Thanks! I copied this to the wiki page.
Quote
Okay so, unfortunately WWP:Remastered doesn't use the WWP names, but rather it uses the WA team names.
Heh, that is bizarre. They probably copied over those strings together with the localization system.

29
Other worms games / Re: Worms World Party deathmatch team names?
« on: March 19, 2020, 10:06 AM »
WWP:R uses the localization system I wrote for W:A, so perhaps you could check its localization files.

30
does wmdb have any terms of service? if not, there should be and it should include a clause that says something like "you agree that any maps that you set on public can be used for online games including hosting bots like HostingBuddy"
This does not permit other users to download and use maps in their games. An agreement between WMDB and the uploader is insufficient - the content must be licensed to allow it to be used in any applicable way by anyone.
Also maybe something about that once submitting a map to wmdb you agree to giving up your IP and the property becoming WMDBs?
We definitely do not want to assume copyright of uploaded works. Usually that requires the previous owner to sign a document which passes ownership. See e.g. https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html

Cybershadow - alot of this stuff usually becomes an issue if someone does sue and complain about maps being shared, is this really likely to happen as they would have uplaoded the map in the first place?
Whether it's likely or not, and whether it goes as far as legal action or just vague threats to take it, having our ducks in a row will help avoid trouble later.

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 12