Messages

121

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.1

« on: July 25, 2017, 05:18:39 PM »

There's an option to keep direct message logs, we don't have one for public chatrooms but it can be added when there's time. Sending messages offline isn't practical the way Glass is set up currently, but it could potentially be done in the future.

If there's connectivity issues, that's news to me. I haven't experience any connectivity issues since the launch of Glass Live, other than when it's offline of course. The server stays up for months at a time.

I believe there's a mod that's been released to keep room chat logs. We keep them server-sided for moderation, of course.

122

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.1

« on: July 25, 2017, 01:21:34 PM »

4.1.1 is out.

All variable names are now screened so that a non-exportable variable name is no longer allowed. I determined the issue was due to a transition in various file formats and saving techniques that have changed through different updates.

All previous server preferences from before 4.1 will likely not persist. Your Blockland settings will not change.

This was caused by the lengthy development time of 4.1. This is a change that was likely made several months ago that I forgot about. It is alarming that this wasn't caught during the beta phase, and I will be revisiting our (my) testing practices as well as putting together a release readiness checklist so that we can have a comprehensive list of features that need to be verified before every release. The project has grown to the size where that is beyond necessary.

I apologize for any inconvenience and my oversight. A release focused on stability and continuity has caused the exact opposite, and I hope that the genuinely working preferences make up for this update error.

I was unable to replicate Conan's blank string issue and will be working to uncover the bug. A 4.1.2 is likely. I wanted to try to minimize the number of bug fix updates, but 4.1.1 was a pressing issue.


edit: Also double checked some networking stuff (users were complaining of connectivity issues but there's really no reason Glass should impact this) and added the @here and @room tags for moderators/admins.

123

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.1

« on: July 25, 2017, 12:27:50 PM »

Curiously there's not a single line I can find that interacts with client preferences or would manually write to that file. My only conclusion is that somehow the variable and the value is being set as a blank variable.

$P["ref::Something = 1;"] = "";

The preference system uses a method setGlobalByName which could potentially cause this (will be adding safeguards) however theres no reason it should. Adding a safeguard will prevent the issue from repeating, however how I am still trying to find the source of the problem.

My leading theory is that it was caused by an alteration in file format for preferences, although I don't recall that being changed. It could be that, as preferences have never fully worked before, old changes and incompatibilities are now being exposed as it's working properly with data that was written by previous, buggy versions.

This would be surprising because it means every beta user had their preferences wiped and said/noticed nothing.

i just dont get how bugs like this just filter through testing. i should probably be a beta tester so i would be less frustrated with these things and help you guys more instead of release it through annoying posts

I'm really curious how this was never uncovered. My settings were never reset and I did a whole bunch of testing, more than ever before. Multiple servers per run, resets between servers, clean installs, dedicated, dedicated clean installs, upgrade tests, read-only tests. We had a decent number of beta users and I tried to interact with them often.

Edit: 4.0.2 download. I don't have a copy of 4.0.3 and a fix should be out soon for 4.1.

124

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.1

« on: July 25, 2017, 11:37:29 AM »

Across 7 betas over the course of two weeks I never caught a report of this issue nor did I ever encounter it.

probably should have turned that effort into adding new features towards making this have less bugs/earlier release so you could fix bugs promptly :(

Pretty much this entire update was one giant bug fix, the added features are very minor. The main ticket item here was improved preferences.

I’ll likely release an update sometime this afternoon.

125

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.1

« on: July 24, 2017, 02:36:56 PM »

Version 4.1 has been released.

The most important part of this update is the revamped preference system, which I'm proud to say is incredibly stable and reliable. Preferences now have been integration with Glass and with old RTB preferences, improved saving/loading, more reliable execution, and integration with third-party variable changes. Preferences also allow for more types of preferences than RTB did, and I will be releasing documentation on preference creation and usage soon.

Changes:

• Preferences v2, much more stable
• Server Control Gui design changes
• Added a "Graphs" section to the server control gui
• Manual is now synced online
• Added a share button to the mod manager
• Added a few forms of notification spam protection - rate limiting, compression of DMs
• Added buttons to GUIs that expected users to press enter
• Custom loading screens can now hide the Glass window
• Unread Message icon
• A TON of small changes and bug fixes

This update was a long time coming and some of these changes were made as soon as the day after 4.0 was released. Due to a busy semester, development was slow and there are some features that were not properly documented, so there may be some other tweaks dispersed through-out.

We hope you enjoy the new features and vastly improved stability!

126

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 23, 2017, 04:16:45 PM »

I've been exposed.

Beta 7

• Tweaked RTB import title format
• Manual fileCopy method, as copying out of a zip does not work

This is a problem I fixed with colorsets but never realized it also impacts preloader. We were using fileCopy to copy the preloader to config/main.cs, but that only work on unzipped installations of Glass. This would explain our long standing issues with preferences loading properly as preloader was never properly installed.

127

Games / Re: Blockland-Inspired Project (Minor Update - pg. 14)

« on: July 21, 2017, 02:02:50 PM »

Haven't read through the entire topic so I'm not sure if these have been brought up, but some nice things to see:

• World-based design as opposed to "saves". Gives a lot more continuity to maps, works well with a terrain generation system. Somewhat ripped from Minecraft, but it works very well for sandbox games. Loading/Saving maps could still work but I feel like it somewhat breaks immersion and shows a lot of barebone elements of how the game works.
• Chunk saving and dynamic loading. Blockland's octree is technically chunk based I suppose, but this is a much better design system overall optimizing rendering, netcode, and real-time saving.
• Asset based building. Being able to place pre-built multi-brick components. This is what I want to pursue in Blockland still, but support for something like this from the start would be amazing. Instead of downloading brick packs, you can download someone's "City Pack" and suddenly be able to place benchs, lamp posts, etc. as pre-constructed elements. It makes large builds much more attainable.
• Scratch-like eventing system. Eventing is important in Blockland but does have a bit of a learning curve to it. Making something more visual and similar to scratch has a much softer learning curve and you can do some neat stuff with it that is complicated with events, like inherit variable support, conditionals, loops, etc.

128

General Discussion / Re: Blockland Confederations Cup 2017 - [OFFICIAL SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED! Pg.7]

« on: July 19, 2017, 03:15:45 PM »

During the last game, players were really vocal about their performance issues and specifically on their latency. Every game, I am online watching the latency between the server and every individual player. Combined with the Lag Detector name changing, I watch every players' latency and their change in latency to validate any claims of lag. I bring up any issues to the refs and administration as they happen and as they resolve, and it's not a surprise that the players with notoriously bad latency are benched.

Players' names will show [LAG] if their latency has surpassed what we have defined acceptable and [DEL] if their change in latency (delta) is above what we consider acceptable. The prior is merely a slow connection, which can typically be compensated for, while the latter can cause instability and warping.

The past few games there's been plenty of players blaming their loss on bad latency. While there are a few bad eggs on each team, latency is undeniably stable and low (in terms of Blockland) for the vast majority. Many of the more vocal players surprisingly have the lowest latency, hovering around 40ms with only ~10ms variation. Some players hover around the 20s, the average is 50-60s, and a few international players are in the 100-200ms range.

You may consider me biased as it is on my hosting platform, so the tool is open for any other spectator or administrator to use. Others have confirmed the same situation.

The way Blockland operates, there is a difference between lag and latency. Latency is the speed of your network connection (not related to bandwidth, by the way. Your 3Gbps connection could still have horrible latency). Lag can also occur due to your machines' performance actually rendering the map and running the physics simulation. This is why we have a ghosting system for players so that unneeded bricks are not present.


Basically what I'm trying to get across is 1) we are aware of the latency situation for every active player, there's no need to inform us mid-game and 2) there's more to lag than latency. We do everything we can on the latency side and the performance of a player's device is their business alone. Turn off shaders, close out other programs, lower texture quality. FPS is not the responsibility of the server.

129

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 17, 2017, 08:05:11 PM »

How exactly do you catch a global variable changing? We have direct callbacks in the same way RTB does but they still need to be triggered in addition to the objective callbacks. To detect changes outside of the preference system, you have to do check the variable for a change at some point. Doing checks upon opening the GUI adds delay to the user and can cause things to become out-of-sync if the value is updated while the GUI is open. Doing it periodically allows it to be caught and there's no more than a second delay.

Also, changing a variable alone with the RTB system doesn't trigger it's callback. The callback is only called when changed via the GUI.

While re-transmitting the values every time the GUI is opened is a simple solution, it's prohibitive and has a lot of network traffic and therefore lag, especially when there's many many add-ons installed.

130

General Discussion / Re: Blockland Glass Hosting Service

« on: July 17, 2017, 07:49:57 PM »

There seems to be huge performance issues between vehicles and static shapes and occasionally modter.

The server was using ~65% of its available CPU and ~50% of its available memory. Add-Ons and poor optimization can impact server performance despite having more resources available.

131

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 17, 2017, 05:33:22 PM »

Yes, it will. It checks once every second to detect changes in the variable and updates them accordingly.

There's a cached copy of the value because Support_Preferences is designed to operate objectively while RTB preferences were primarily global variables. Directly registering a preference instead of using RTB adds a bunch of callbacks in flexibility to how the pref operates, however I don't think a single add-on uses default preference registration.

A default registered pref has the following callbacks available:

Preference::onUpdate
Preference::onLoad
Preference::onDefault

Where a custom namespace can be set similar to how TCPClient works. Since these are objective, it makes sense to keep the value as such, Preference.value. Support for global variables is integrated throughout, but it's not the primary design.

132

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 17, 2017, 04:49:17 PM »

It doesn't save non $Pref::* variables in prefs.cs, it keeps them in their own file and sets global variables when they're loaded. I believe RTB did the same. It should be updating the cached copy of the variable and sending it to clients when it's changed directly now too.

133

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 17, 2017, 04:35:37 PM »

Beta 5

• Fixed preferences not working (again, for real)
• Fixed preferences not defaulting
• Removed console spam
• Tweaked graphs

Hopefully getting close to release. I'm feeling fairly confident about preferences, a lot of bugs have been ironed out.

134

Add-Ons / Admin Chat

« on: July 17, 2017, 02:45:45 PM »

Admin Chat v2.0.0

It's been around for nearly eight years now, my original admin chat. I revisited the old code and decided it could use a little tweaking. The old topic is certainly locked, so I've made a new one.
 

Features

Admin Chat allows admins to communicate directly. You can use /ac or a delimiter (@ by default) to talk with other Admins and /sac to talk to other Super Admins.


Change-Log

Original v2 (2010) -> 2.0.0

• Added support for URLs
• Added delimiters (changeable via prefs)
• Changed "AdminChat(name)" to "AC(name)" (toggle via prefs)
• Added super admin chat via /sac
• ML control characters are now stripped from text

Download on Blockland Glass

135

Add-Ons / Re: Blockland Glass 4.0

« on: July 16, 2017, 03:09:26 PM »

Beta 4 is out.

• Fixed preference dropdowns
• Reorganized server control administration tab
• Fixed preferences not working on restart
• Fixed checkboxes printing 1 and 0 instead of true and false
• "No Preferences" text instead of a blank screen when there are no preferences

Thanks to those who have reported bugs, you've been extremely helpful in tracking down issues.