Intention to introduce a Replay & Recording System

[notjarvis]

QUOTE (fuzzylunkin1 @ Jun 18 2010, 10:13 AM) Would someone please move this to CB&S?

Done

[badpazzword]

No, do not allow observers.

Multiple reasons. Here's two you might not have considered.

We are all playing squad games at the same time. Unlike other "esports" competitions where there is one server and players cycle on it, we all start at the same time. Since most of the intended viewership is not available to watch the games as they are played, there is very little point in making it so you can watch as they play. NOAT Whoring. There is no need to subject players to public ridicule from people lazily sitting in NOAT watching newbies fly in circles waiting for the TF team to get adv ints online or something.


What you could do is "record" the packets the server receives, then play the recording back. That's approximately the way it works with the id engines, at any rate.

[spxza]

QUOTE (notjarvis @ Jun 18 2010, 02:46 AM) Done

Thanks, but I'm working on FAZ5, so I didn't think this was Beta-related.

FYI, I've added some code to do some dumping in FedSrvSiteBase::OnAppMessage(). I believe (if the comment is to be trusted) that all client messages pass through this function. I'm dumping the contents of pfm. I'm creating a very rudimentary reader that uses AGC.dll (to know what the data structures look like) to read the dumps.

I may want to do the dump inside each case statement in the main switch of that function to do some filtering or munging. Not sure, though. Does anyone have any idea how much data is exchanged between all the clients and server during a typical game?

Next steps:
Create a few games locally to test the dumper. (With me playing against myself. Woohoo!) Complete reader. Host a few games publically for multiple peoples to help me generate some data. Spend a couple of hours with my reader verifying that everything makes sense. Modify the server so that it reads from a recording, plays a game, and verify that nothing bad happens and that the exact same recording is generated. (Will probably start this off as a bunch of processes reading from the recording and communicating with the server).

Hopefully I won't break anything along the way.

P.S. Thank you for the comments. Especially on the observer system side. You've given me some food for thought. I'm not concerned with this right now. Will value your feedback later on.

P.P.S. Damnit, compiling is perfect, but AllSrv.exe is bitching that it can't find bgrnd50.cvh. Any tips? I've set my regkey properly, registered my dll and server, checked out artwork from http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/branch...rib/artwork/dev and http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/branch...Dev/artwork/dev and moved them to the artwork dir. VS2010 + checkout from http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/tag/FAZ_R5/ I do have it in the dir specified by the registry key, but still no luck running it.

P.P.P.S. Meh, it seems it wants it to be in a sub directory of where the exe is called artwork.

[Bard]

QUOTE (spxza @ Jun 18 2010, 07:54 AM) P.P.S. Damnit, compiling is perfect, but AllSrv.exe is bitching that it can't find bgrnd50.cvh. Any tips? I've set my regkey properly, registered my dll and server, checked out artwork from http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/branch...rib/artwork/dev and http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/branch...Dev/artwork/dev and moved them to the artwork dir. VS2010 + checkout from http://svn.alleg.net/svn/Allegiance/tag/FAZ_R5/ I do have it in the dir specified by the registry key, but still no luck running it.

P.P.P.S. Meh, it seems it wants it to be in a sub directory of where the exe is called artwork.

I take back everything bad I ever said about you (wait, did I say anything bad about you? I don't think so. If I did, I take it back.)
Congratulations. You have gotten farther than most when it comes to compiles from the SVN.

This marks you as a rockstar for the sole reason that the Allegiance source is *messy*.

Please join one of our IRC channels on quakenet at your earliest convenience. /server irc.quakenet.org

#RollingThunder has the highest ratio of allegiance geeks, but #FreeAllegiance is where the development discussion goes on. There's even a (Trac)Bot!

(edit -- The IRC channels aren't super-sekrit or anything, they're just the fastest most efficient way to talk to someone who has the source, has VS installed, and is potentially bored or feeling helpful until we get a more accurate wiki article written.)

[CharlieTester]

Imago cleaned up the VS2010 solution so it's pretty much, install DX SDK, build, debug...

[Bard]

QUOTE (CharlieTester @ Jun 18 2010, 10:06 AM) Imago cleaned up the VS2010 solution so it's pretty much, install DX SDK, build, debug...

Jesus Christ, when does he take time to eat?

[Bard]

QUOTE (notjarvis @ Jun 18 2010, 05:46 AM) Done

You rock, sir.

QUOTE (spxza @ Jun 18 2010, 07:54 AM) Thanks, but I'm working on FAZ5, so I didn't think this was Beta-related.

Everything untested is beta-related.

QUOTE (badp @ Jun 18 2010, 07:25 AM) [*] NOAT Whoring. There is no need to subject players to public ridicule from people lazily sitting in NOAT

Man, what a spoilsport you are. I was looking forward to enacting my secret plan of Broodivational Posters.

[finnbryant]

QUOTE (Bard @ Jun 18 2010, 05:44 AM) Who is "we"? If you're talking about the Allegiance community, Gandalf knows ASGS's security capabilities as well as any other vet.
He's been around longer than I have and he's very technologically savvy. See: World Cup Predictions Website complete with input sanitization.
I'd put dollars to donuts that he understands more about application security than you do. (

I wasn't suggesting otherwise, just pointing out that our security system makes cheating easier to deal with than many other games

QUOTE (Bard @ Jun 18 2010, 05:44 AM) I have an old acquaintance who took contracts coordinating tournaments like that locally for various sponsors along with providing hardware for things like software training seminars and "we're a group that does stuff" conferences.
A great deal of effort goes into monitoring and recording actions on a per-machine basis during any decently ruled tournament/event and ALL of the ones that are done properly are set up as 100% controlled environments. Someone would have to be wearing an earpiece and on the phone with a friend in order to cheat and cell jammers are cheap and in fairly consistent demand (often required by the client for some sorts of events. Getting measured for a jammer license is a *$&%@, but once you have the ability to file temporary papers the RFP's fly in.) so cheating is often more difficult to arrange due to area security obfuscation that it is beneficial once it's pulled off.

To wit and tl;dr: Your example of how effective most gaming tournaments involving viewing are is only applicable if we all play squad games inside the same convention center on a monitored LAN with no access to other internet sources or outside information.


(edit -- not only is it bad that I left a leading ( there out of bracketing habit, I used the wrong one and I didn't put in a closing bracket. Syntax Fail.)

Fair enough, I've had little experience with such events, I do know that the HDH Invitational (starcraft 2) was worth a few thousand in total and was played on battle.net, with ustream casts. I admit the participants were hand picked leading players, so had a lot more at stake than most.

Also, as suggested earlier, there is little* difference between "spectating" the game and passing info and playing for the enemy and passing info.

*infiltrating a squad might be troublesome I guess, wouldn't know.

Everyone agreeing with spectating is suggesting it should be optional, and if we make joining the "spectator team" require acceptance of both comms (would probably be hard to join as spectator once the game has started of course, probably best to allow auto-refuse as well as auto-accept in that situation) then for squad games it could be a general rule that only people both squads trust can spectate, I wouldn't expect any noob to be accepted as a spectatpr to the squad finals.

As for pugs, there's literally no difference to spying on a team by joining it or spectating, so I can't see a good reason against spectating in pugs.




As for the compiling, its gotten easier since vc2010, never tried using the server though (except maybe bugtesting for fuzz on linux, but that might have been the lobby), sounds painful.

[fuzzylunkin1]

QUOTE (scratchee @ Jun 18 2010, 10:49 AM) As for the compiling, its gotten easier since vc2010, never tried using the server though (except maybe bugtesting for fuzz on linux, but that might have been the lobby), sounds painful.

Lobby and Server both run on linux .

[spxza]

QUOTE (Bard @ Jun 18 2010, 06:59 AM) I take back everything bad I ever said about you (wait, did I say anything bad about you? I don't think so. If I did, I take it back.)
Congratulations. You have gotten farther than most when it comes to compiles from the SVN.

I'm a code monkey, so I spend all day fixing (and making) stupid.

I was so happy that I got things working and running. And then....(dramatic music)....my machine decided to have some disk errors. Chkdsk didn't do its job properly. It corrupted many files, and I had to re-checkout. Only problem is now that I can't compile, since my cscript is corrupted (needed for GUIDs and possibly others). I don't know what else is bad. Am doing a recovery. Yah!