Headless put in main installer

[AF]

It would be most useful to bundle headless spring when ready into the main installer. Im not simply talking about AI botrunnners for the AI ladder, ( although it would make access to AI dev a lot easier )

There are various other things that can be gained form running a headless spring, for example, pre-generation of pathfinding using a headless spring would be far far faster and convenient than normal spring. It would also be useful for authosts, reducing springs footprint on our machines running autohosts, and not interfering with other OGL/directx apps under XP, nm running full autohosts on web servers (although theres the dedicated host app for that).

[hoijui]

why would a normal user need to pregenerate paths?
the dedicated server has a much smaller footprint/less dependencies then spring-headless, i did not get your argument there.
It do not see a good argument pro this yet. I guess your main motivation is that you want to use it, but do not want to compile it yourself. that would be solveable by allowing buildbot to upload spring-headless binary.

[Auswaschbar]

Afaik dedicated is neither part of the installer. The main reason for it is that it is not usefull alone, as it should rather come with the autohost-program. Some imho for headless.

PS: gg for generating paths over half an hour after every spring or mod update.

[AF]

Because you can pregen the paths while waiting for a game to start. Some people already do this manually.

Eitherway it should be bundled if only for the purposes of aiding development.

[aegis]

spring-headless doesn't appear to have any dependencies more than normal spring... I think it'd be worth including if it compresses well with normal spring.

[AF]

Say I wanted to develop my own autohost in java. Which list of steps would be the most encouraging to me as a new developer:

List 1:

• Run netbeans installer
• Launch Netbeans
• Start coding my autohost

List 2:

• Install and configure mingw32/Visual studio
• Install git
• Do a git checkout of spring trunk
• Build dedicated host
• Run netbeans installer
• Launch netbeans
• Start coding my autohost

Now we can see that the bar is raised significantly higher for list 2 than list 1.

[hoijui]

I guess your main motivation is that you want to use it, but do not want to compile it yourself. that would be solveable by allowing buildbot to upload spring-headless binary.

[AF]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

My point still stands

[Peet]

How the hell is that ad hominem? Rather than package another few megabytes of what will be deadweight for the vast majority of downloading users, he's proposing we simply provide a link to the headless binary to the few developers who will require it. No compiling required, no bandwidth wasted, win-win for every party.

[aegis]

another few megabytes of what will be deadweight

I'm not sure that'd be the case. I'll check.

[AF]

For now headless spring & dedicated host among others on the download page as an add-on pack might be a good idea even if they're just links to buildbot

[aegis]

another few megabytes

about half a mb when lzma-compressed alongside the normal spring binary
edit: about another 1/3mb to add libspringserver

[imbaczek]

a few megs is not important; what's important is that it's completely useless for 99% of the people who download the installer. i'm not completely against it, but i really don't see the point.

[casperjeff]

Not sure which side I land on here...but I would like headless binaries in order to do some mutation/GA tests on my bots.......

I've never had luck compiling spring engine at all from source....

[aegis]

headless spring and accompanying spring to watch replays (headless spring will currently break your viewradius and treeviewradius, you'll need to turn these back up when using normal spring)

lua widget to set speed to 120x and disable interface (only when headless is running) - note, you might need to enable this (HeadlessSetup) manually in normal spring.