ZK lobby server split is a disaster? - Page 6

ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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smoth
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by smoth »

People are not code knorke.
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PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by PicassoCT »

8611 wrote:
If there is an error in code then that it is bad. If something does not work then that is bad. That happens because someone made mistakes. There is nothing subjective about that. Unless you want to start a hobby-philosophy debatte about re-defining what is "good" or "bad."
Thats it, you ve gone to far. That is not philosophy there, that is black and white thinkering.
We ve grown past that, boolean logic and morality, we now have 64bits shades of grey supported on every pc-U.

Touching code that is wrong is now a felony.
That was the meanest typeof(hatespeech) right there.
Just because you feel a revulsion to null-pointer-errors, doesen't mean its not perfectly natural to have null pointers in code.
Freedom of peach grants me the right to be a vegetable.
Deal with it.
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PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by PicassoCT »

8611 wrote: What if zero-K really attracts thousands of players (and keeps them)?
Then they will need a new protocoll. The new one is better, but its not having multi-server support or listening-for-event-registration.
Don't know how far licho went with testing- there are mockups, but the old protocoll allready got into troubles once it reached 500 players and was as far as i heard better in the tests.
So less chat, more profiling logs.
Orfelius
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by Orfelius »

Current protocol seems to handle at least 2k people. That is a number of nubs it has been tested with.
Image
(screenshot is from Licho's tests obviously)
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PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by PicassoCT »

Well that sounds like something..

Is the bandwith of the server guaranteed to be constant?
Meaning, does the IP provider not cut it when there is some other event raising the load?
luckywaldo7
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by luckywaldo7 »

8611 wrote:Code, math, logic,.. you see room for "opinions" where there is none.
19,700 kg does not convert to 1.938839285714286 tons and a code either works a certain way or it does not.
But everything between 19,650 and 19,749 kg rounds to 19,700 kg. We use significant figures because we can only know the weight of something to a finite precision.

And code can and does execute differently on different machines. Otherwise there would be no such thing as desync, eh?
8611 wrote:If there is an error in code then that it is bad. If something does not work then that is bad. That happens because someone made mistakes. There is nothing subjective about that. Unless you want to start a hobby-philosophy debatte about re-defining what is "good" or "bad."
Your homework is to read this: http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relati ... wrong.html
8611
XTA Developer
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by 8611 »

So you DO want to start a hobby-philosophy debatte!
That is all interessting but unrelated to spring modding.
It is not helpful to pretend that there is anything to debatte about "Does the unitDef tag "bla-blub" exist in the engine?" or "Does this cause div-by-zero errors?"

To make it superclear: If you are "debatting" such superbasic things then that is not clever, it does not warrant comperasions to Socrates or "The Relativity of Wrong", you are not inventing a new of thinking, it is simply pants on head.
Reading Asimov is nice but sometimes it is better to read a basic tutorial or whatever else helps with the problem.

Hmm an inifinite loop...But is it really infinite? The computer might run out of power in a couple years...
Compared to the age of the universe that is a very short time...That is not infinite at all..! Does 'time' even exist?
:regret:
luckywaldo7
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by luckywaldo7 »

Well, to actually tie it back to the topic, the split of ZK to it's own lobby is neither "bad" nor "a mistake". There are positives and negatives for zk community (as discussed), and positives and negatives for the spring community (as discussed). The zk devs made their decision when they decided that the positives outweighed the negatives for their community. Admittedly without full regard for the spring community, but there isn't anything particularly wrong about that either.

The least helpful thing is to discuss the split itself. The most helpful thing is to figure out just moving on past that, which shouldn't really be a big deal either. (There was no critical dependance of the spring community on zk)
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smoth
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by smoth »

I agreed up until the last point. Zk was a test bed for Lua uses by many projects.
8611z
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by 8611z »

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:By what criteria is the server split a disaster? ZK still works. Main spring server still works. Disaster therefore is?
because http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/20609
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1v0ry_k1ng
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by 1v0ry_k1ng »

That is a separate issue.
8611z
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by 8611z »

Imo is linked, zero-K had this poll once.. I had voted:
If Zero-K lobby only starts through steam with steam account...
I would stop playing
and so did 31% of players. Plus 16% players voted they "would play less."
Whether it is steam-client or something else, I did not like idea of having to use an extra client just for one spring-mod. So when zK split to seperate server and become playable only through zK-lobby, I stopped playing.
That does not seem so unusual, likely other players did similiar.

(Actually I kind of gave it a second chance, I already had zeroK-lobby installed for testing. So for a while I used two lobbies and played on two servers. But that was stupid hassle, and I did it mainly out of curiosity how new zK-lobby would function.)

Also in this thread you had (rightly so) made fun of the BADSD clusterfucks. Now in zero-K forum you write about zK:
it is difficult to get the game size and game type you want to play, unless you constantly want to play 20v20 clusterfuck or 1v1.
Because actually both games are in similiar state. In BA the clusterfuck happens mainly on DSD/Tabula/Falsom etc. In zero-K it is bit more diverse with clusterfuck games on way too small maps like IcyRun. (Or even lol-maps like Trololo, FinnishFlags and so on) To me that is equally unattractive.
I liked that I could just join whichever mod was at the moment running a non-clusterfuck-game. Once that become impossible the options to find a good match were halved.
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AF
AI Developer
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by AF »

Communities here are focused inwards internally, that's the root of the problem. That's why the problem here is too small a community, or splitting the community, rather than growing the community, or attracting new people
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code_man
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by code_man »

I would say the problem is we dont reach out more.

I do hang around in some communities where i hear stuff and spring games are almost never mentioned.
I have never really seen any of the spring games advertised, the closest good thing was maybe spring 1944 and the cursed, which dont show much.
That's why the problem here is too small a community, or splitting the community, rather than growing the community, or attracting new people
I dont agree with this, gamedevs dont split the community and i would say we all pull at the same rope here and we all know that.
Even tough each gamedev has their own ambitions and projects, its not that we make exclusive sub-communities.

What i guess you want to say is that we strech ourselfs too far out, we have too much work and too few hands.

I know some people are probably of the opinion that we need to get spring and its games in good shape first before advertising, but i think we need to draw in more people consistently.

As for zk: they really split and have no connection to other games, so their lack of players is their problem and i see no reason it be discussed on this forum.
8611z
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by 8611z »

code_man wrote:I would say the problem is we dont reach out more.
There are two spring mods on steam now. Is that still not enough advertisement?
We saw several times now that even if a spring-game got some exposure it did not not nessecarily help. And each time it causes strain on community and people leave. None of those attempts has had any positive results.
I dont agree with this, gamedevs dont split the community and i would say we all pull at the same rope here and we all know that.
That would have been nice but in past years (and now) Ive seen exactly that: People splitting community or attacking players of other games. The only thing that changes is which mod they currently consider the biggest "cancer" and so on:
"The ZK crowd was on it's way to becoming worse than the BA crowd and the AA crowd, so in some ways it's kinda nice now."
Seems more like making knots into rope.
As for zk: they really split and have no connection to other games, so their lack of players is their problem and i see no reason it be discussed on this forum.
Hm, that sounds very different from your previous "pulling at the same rope" now. Did the idea not even survive the length of your own post?
OF COURSE what happens to zK is a problem of spring too. Maybe you did not play zK, but others did. About 50% of the oppurtunies to play spring are "gone" and people even celebrated what a great move that was.
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code_man
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by code_man »

8611z wrote:There are two spring mods on steam now. Is that still not enough advertisement?
We saw several times now that even if a spring-game got some exposure it did not not nessecarily help. And each time it causes strain on community and people leave. None of those attempts has had any positive results.
One is zk that doesnt tie to the spring community and the other is evo, that turned out a fiasko (evo is a good game in itself).
Besides i think there are better places to advertise than steam, given its mostly a commercial environment with a high a high amount of concurence.
I think we might gain significant better attention among opensource communities and such.
That would have been nice but in past years (and now) Ive seen exactly that: People splitting community or attacking players of other games. The only thing that changes is which mod they currently consider the biggest "cancer" and so on:
"The ZK crowd was on it's way to becoming worse than the BA crowd and the AA crowd, so in some ways it's kinda nice now."
Seems more like making knots into rope.
I havent seen this being the case here.
Sure there is the occasional BADSD ridicule, but its hardly anything close to how fanboys of other communities fight.
All in all its fairly supportive from my experience.
Hm, that sounds very different from your previous "pulling at the same rope" now. Did the idea not even survive the length of your own post?
OF COURSE what happens to zK is a problem of spring too. Maybe you did not play zK, but others did. About 50% of the oppurtunies to play spring are "gone" and people even celebrated what a great move that was.
Nothing stops these people from playing both spring games and zk, the people who only want to play zk will likely not stray from that path, its their own choice.
Sure its a loss for potential players for other games, but its hardly relevant, if they take an interest in spring games other than zk, then they might come here otherwise they will stick to zk.
Its unlikely a loss except for those who jump on whatever game that has the most players.

As for me not caring about zk: the good thing about spring is you have all sorts of games in one package, sure its not what most people want, but on the whole its a advantage, even if severly misrepresented.
All games except zk share the same infrastructure hence why i dont consider zk part of the spring community.
The good thing about spring is its all in one hub, we can communicate about common issues all in one place, they have their own lobby, forums and whatnot, zk could be in a different galaxy for all i care.
To zk spring is only the engine, good ridence to them, if they want to be their own community, let them.
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AF
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by AF »

Appearing on steam isn't advertising, it makes acquiring the game a little easier, but it's not really a marketing or advertisement boon by itself, and any bonuses it gives are not lasting
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PicassoCT
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by PicassoCT »

all the advertising on spring from spring comunity 70 people to 130 people
one day steam frontpage 700 to 1300 people
server collapses.
at the size of steam, breathing becomes advertising, normal operation becomes advertising.
a release on steam is a one time pad.

You botch it (put it in a fast moving release period) and you vannish from the site that brings you people to nothing in a half day.
knorke is partially right on this one.

problem is: Its a chick egg dilema. Without a big, eventfull comunity you dont capture players and have big infra tested,
without players you dont roll a big comunity.
Sollution A: You fake a big comunity. (Bots, SingleplayerPeons hanging around etc.)
Sollution B: You bring in enough in a burst big enough to keep the flame hot selfsubstaining.
Sollution C: You focus the few people you got, via events (have a lobby that autostarts on tourneday and hour) into some nice entertaiment.
Solution D: Get the Microcomunitys to overcome there bias, and have one day per week (rotating) so there are enough people to play the game. There are enough people waiting on games, just never enough for one type.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by Forboding Angel »

There are a significant portion of people around that wanted Evo to not do well.

I would say that what happened with Evo and the subsequent time has highlighted everything that is wrong with spring.

The game itself is fine. Evo has always been relatively bug free. Although there was one persistent one that only showed up once or twice in a lifetime (As I'm sure Archivist Knorke will happily tell you about at great length, whether you want him to or not) for users coming from other spring games... turns out the handler I borrowed from zerok eons ago had virtually zero error handling. Alas.

The point is that Evo itself as a game was fine. A few imbas and the like, but absolutely playable. What caused it to collapse is everything around it.

Lobby mainly being to blame. Without a good, robust, reliable, more or less bulletproof lobby, any game will fail. Period.

You can argue about it all you like, but the fact is just that, a fact. It would be great if all the good lua people around here got together and worked with Gajop on lualobby. People such as myself who aren't any real use as far as lua goes can do other things, like layout and graphic design, UI/UX. I'm good at that stuff.

Unfortunately, there are a disturbingly large group of people here that have this knorkish idea that if you don't lua, then you have nothing useful to contribute. As a result, they are also incapable of admitting that they are awful when it comes to UI/UX. It's weird, but it is also the unfortunate reality.
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Usaga
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Re: ZK lobby server split is a disaster?

Post by Usaga »

Without a good, robust, reliable, more or less bulletproof lobby, any game will fail. Period.
I think this is no more than half of things lobby should have. The other one is a plenty of graphics in its UI. Without well designed, nice UI, lobby itself is defacing impression about Spring. Players could bear some minor bugs, but thay dislike ugly inrerfaces...
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