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Lobby server maintainer https://github.com/FAForever/server
People keep asking for an ETA for Team Matchmaking, and until now our response has always been "we don't know." Well, I'm happy to say that I believe enough progress has been made to release an initial version in the near future!
My plan as of writing this is to have a working TMM "beta" version released to the FAF community by the end of the year. That is, if everything goes well, you should be able to play 2v2 matchmaker games with your friends in late December or early January.
WARNING: Do not expect everything to work perfectly! If you've been around for a while, you will be familiar with the usual chaos that ensues after a server update or game patch, and I expect this to be no different. While I hope it won't be the case, I will not be at all surprised if everything burns to the ground and we have to shut it off shortly after release in order to resolve critical issues.
That being said, here are some things you should know in the unlikely event of a successful deployment:
If you are so anxious about playing TMM that you can't wait until the end of December, there will be a few opportunities to help with pre-release testing which I will announce in the FAF Discord (invite link in the client and on faforever.com). Just make sure you're subscribed to the Tester role by writing !subscribe Tester in the #bot-commands channel and you will receive a ping from me personally when we need you.
!subscribe Tester
About a month ago I posted about our plans to release the Team Matchmaker towards the end of December or early January. I wanted to follow up on that post to say that we are still on schedule with that timeline.
At the end of this week, we will be entering an "opt-in beta" phase of the matchmaker release. This means sometime around the 25th of December we will make another forum post with a download link to a special version of the FAF client that you can use to start playing TMM. The matchmaker will remain in this "opt-in" state for an as yet undefined amount of time until we have had a chance to evaluate the matchmaker's performance and squash any remaining critical bugs.
The more people opt-in, the shorter the wait times will be, so please help me spread the news!
The matchmaker is now playable on FAF using the client build linked here, but before you download it please read over these important notes:
Now that you have read the important notes above, you can download the client installer from here: https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases/tag/v1.4.0-RC2
After some 2 odd years of working on the team matchmaker I'm really happy to see it released to the community in a mostly playable capacity. Of course there is still a way to go until it becomes stable enough to be merged into the official client branch, but we are making progress.
The main feature that Team Matchmaking adds is a 2v2 queue which works similar to the current ladder queue. You can join this queue by yourself and be matched with a teammate automatically, or you can use the new party system to queue together with a teammate of your choosing. The 2v2 queue uses its own rating which is completely separate from global and ladder 1v1 ratings, however this third rating is currently only visible in the replay vault. Your 2v2 rating will be initialized based on your global rating (trueskill mean remains the same but deviation is increased) so it's likely that you will match with people who have similar global rating as you.
As I said in my previous post, for the time being the matchmaker will only be available by downloading the pre-release version of the client linked above. If you have any feedback or find any bugs, you can leave your reports in discord (#faf-testing), the forum, or GitHub.
There are a few known bugs that you may want to be aware of (please don't make bug reports for these).
Special thanks to everyone who has volunteered their time and effort to make Team Matchmaking happen! @biass @BlackYps @Brutus5000 @FtXCommando @Geosearchef @umbrasolis
And shout out to our amazing testers who helped us find countless bugs already!
Happy FAFfing and happy holidays!
One thing I want to say is that I think the candidates are severely over estimating the influence that the PC has over development. The dev team are all volunteers, we will work on the things that are fun/interesting for us and some PC coming in and telling people they need to rewrite xzy system "because I said so" is simply not going to happen.
The PC may request/suggest certain features from time to time (as may anyone) but there is no guarantee that it will be fulfilled.
For the web app written by @PattogoTehen see https://fafafaf.github.io
Some time ago I started working on a replay parser library for FAF/SCFA replays, and now it's gotten to the point where I think it deserves a forum post.
This project started as my own rewrite of a Parser library written by @dragonite and quickly evolved to include a more versatile replay inspection tool. I think this tool can be useful for many people in the FAF community who want to understand the replay format and what information is/isn't available in a replay. I hope that by sharing it, we can figure out the last few unknowns about the replay format, and that people will be empowered to explore new ways of extracting useful data from FAF replays. I have been impressed by the work that @teolicy has done on this front so far (hopefully he will make a post about his work soon).
So what the heck does this tool do? Read on to find out...
The tool currently has 3 functions:
fafreplay
scfareplay
I expect this to be the most widely useful feature of the tool, as a lot of other software that can parse replays only knows about the scfareplay format. The tool can handle the newest version of the fafreplay format as of release 0.5.0. Unpacking is very simple:
$ fafreplay unpack 9000556.fafreplay Extracting... Done Writing 9000556.scfareplay Wrote 12314246 bytes
Note that you do not need to unpack replays before using them with the other features of this tool. Files ending in .fafreplay will be converted in memory automatically.
.fafreplay
The info subcommand displays the sort of stuff you would expect to see for instance on the vault page. Stuff like the name of the map, the name of the players and what mods were used. It can also be configured to go into more detail with certain flags enabled.
$ fafreplay info 14210327.fafreplay processing replay: 14210327.fafreplay 14210327.fafreplay Supreme Commander v1.50.3719 Replay v1.9 Operation Trident (00:25:40) Operation Trident Mods Resource Rich v1 Team 1 Civilians (AI) UEF Melanol (0) Cybran
With additional info enabled:
$ fafreplay info --mods --options 14210327.fafreplay processing replay: 14210327.fafreplay 14210327.fafreplay Supreme Commander v1.50.3719 Replay v1.9 Operation Trident (00:25:40) Operation Trident Options Victory: sandbox Unit Cap: 1000 Share: FullShare CheatsEnabled: false Mods Resource Rich v1 Increases resource production. (X2) Author: Gas Powered Games Copyright: Copyright � 2006, Gas Powered Games UID: 74A9EAB2-E851-11DB-A1F1-F2C755D89593 URL: http://www.gaspoweredgames.com Location: /mods/resourcerich Team 1 Civilians (AI) UEF Melanol (0) Cybran
Note that this subcommand doesn't show every bit of information available in the replay header. It aims to provide more of a summary of the most relevant information.
Here is where things get really interesting, although it requires a lot more work to extract useful information. The commands subcommand lets you explore the meat of the replay file.
By default only a small subset of commands are parsed as these are the most useful:
$ fafreplay commands 9000556.scfareplay --limit 10 processing replay: 9000556.scfareplay Supreme Commander v1.50.3701 Replay v1.9 ├── SetCommandSource { id: 0 } ├── VerifyChecksum { digest: a8377a57463c1191e0ae3447028f6d02, tick: 0 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } ├── Advance { ticks: 1 } Total commands parsed: 10
However, you can select exactly the command types you are interested in with the --commands flag. For a list of all available commands run:
--commands
$ fafreplay commands --help
There are also a few options for printing additional information such as the offset of the command in the file (useful when paired with a hex editor) and the in game time at which the command happened.
For example to select only two specific commands and print additional info:
$ fafreplay commands 9000556.scfareplay --time --offset --commands IssueCommand ProcessInfoPair --limit 1000 processing replay: 9000556.scfareplay Supreme Commander v1.50.3701 Replay v1.9 Time option used without including Advance commands, Advance will be parsed implicitly 0x000042c0 00:00:00 ├── ProcessInfoPair { unit: 0, arg1: "CustomName", arg2: "king_shrike" } 0x0000cc6a 00:00:06 ├── ProcessInfoPair { unit: 1, arg1: "SetFireState", arg2: "HoldGround" } 0x0000cc89 00:00:06 ├── ProcessInfoPair { unit: 0, arg1: "SetFireState", arg2: "HoldGround" } 0x0005e804 00:00:47 ├── IssueCommand(GameCommand { entity_ids: [0], id: 0, coordinated_attack_cmd_id: -1, type: BuildMobile, arg2: -1, target: Position { x: 667.5, y: 18.679688, z: 357.5 }, arg3: 0, formation: None, blueprint: "urb1103", arg4: 0, arg5: 1, arg6: 1, upgrades: Nil, clear_queue: None }) 0x00062acb 00:00:49 ├── ProcessInfoPair { unit: 2, arg1: "SetFireState", arg2: "HoldGround" } Total commands parsed: 1000
Keep in mind that determining the in game time requires parsing Advance commands and using the time option will force these to be included (but not displayed).
Some commands will have a number of fields called arg1, arg2, arg3, etc. This usually means I haven't figured out what they do or don't know a better name for them.
arg1
arg2
arg3
If anyone finds a replay containing a SetCommandCells command please send it my way as thus far I have been unable to locate any occurrences of this command.
SetCommandCells
I have compiled some binaries for Linux and Windows and hosted them on my server. If you don't feel comfortable downloading random exe's from the internet you can install pretty easily from source.
a612360d15d5590987e9505ab6b3068181dd33024d0ef3edcc6ec13e0b8a7acf
5906646bc8c5796599747826797434713fceb56136e76f21178ebac781331f12
There are also Linux binaries built on each tagged release, but they are a little hard to track down in GitLab CI. Version 0.5.1 for Linux can be downloaded here.
The parser is written in Rust so you will need to use cargo to compile it. If you have cargo installed, you can run:
$ cargo install --git https://gitlab.com/Askaholic/faf-replay-parser.git --features=cli
You can also install the latest version published on crates.io with
$ cargo install faf-replay-parser --features=cli
but it may be less up to date than installing directly from git. I would recommend starting with the first command, and if something turns out to be broken, try the second command.
Note that you need to make sure that the ~/.cargo/bin directory is in your path to be able to run the tool once it's compiled.
~/.cargo/bin
The parser is available as a python package for convenience. The bindings are written in Rust using pyo3.
Here's an example of using the bindings, copied over from the README with comments removed for brevety:
from datetime import timedelta from fafreplay import Parser, commands parser = Parser( commands=[ commands.Advance, # For the tick counter commands.VerifyChecksum, # For desync detection ], save_commands=False, ) with open("12345.scfareplay", "rb") as f: data = f.read() replay = parser.parse(data) print("Game time:", timedelta(milliseconds=replay["body"]["sim"]["tick"]*100)) if replay["body"]["sim"]["desync_ticks"]: print("Replay desynced!")
Note that the bindings themselves don't currently provide a function for converting from the fafreplay format to the scfareplay format because I didn't want to redistribute the needed dependencies. However, you can achieve this with the following bit of code (shoutout to @teolicy for porting this over from my Rust code):
import base64 import json import zlib import zstd with open("somefile.fafreplay", "rb") as f: header = json.loads(f.readline().decode()) buf = f.read() version = header.get("version", 1) if version == 1: decoded = base64.decodebytes(buf) decoded = decoded[4:] # skip the decoded size extracted = zlib.decompress(decoded) elif version == 2: extracted = zstd.decompress(buf)
For more information see the project page at https://pypi.org/project/faf-replay-parser/.
Thanks to cibuildwheel and the fact that GitHub Actions can run Linux, Windows, and even MacOS instances, binary wheels for the latest version (0.5.1.post0) are available on pretty much all major platforms, and all cpython versions from 3.6 to 3.9, as well as pypy 3.6 and 3.7. Install with pip:
cibuildwheel
$ pip install faf-replay-parser
A source distribution is also available in case you are running something really exotic (or old). You will need to have rustc installed to build the package.
This is actually the OG project, but it gets mentioned last because I'm guessing the overlap between people who are interested in extracting information from SCFA replays, and people who would rather do so in Rust than Python is quite small. If you happen to be such a person, let me buy you a beer sometime. Also check out this project's crates.io page for documentation.
I would be interested to hear what cool things people find in their replays, especially if they are things that seem to cause any errors with the parser. If you run into a panic (other than Broken pipe), let me know how you caused it.
Broken pipe
I would also be curious about which commands people can find in their replays, as there are some commands which should theoretically exist, but I haven't found in any replays that I've parsed. There are also some arguments/bytes which seem to always be the same for a given command.
Furthermore, I wonder if the replay format for Forged Alliance is similar to that of the original SupCom, and if anyone has any vanilla SupCom replays that they could throw at the parser.
Of course I would also be open to some suggestions for improving the parser, ALTHOUGH please only make suggestions once you have a good grasp of the replay format. There is a lot of information that we all wish we could read straight from the replay file, but is actually impossible to obtain without fully simulating the game (which this tool cannot do because I have not re-implemented SupCom).
Binary and Rust crate: https://gitlab.com/Askaholic/faf-replay-parser Python Bindings: https://github.com/Askaholic/faf-replay-parser-python
Just some dev updates. We (as in mostly @Sheikah) have worked out the basics of how we need to change the database schema and have some code in the works.
Remember that TMM was created primarily in the spirit of facilitating casual play and enticing new players to stick around, so it is my hope that once we have the code changes in place, we can throw up a casual/unrated/global rating queue that incorporates some random maps. Regardless of where the discussion on competitive play goes, I think this is a valuable addition to the matchmaker.
Btw the random maps are supported in map pools now. Y’all can put them in if/when ever you please.
Note: As a result of the server update you must update your client to version 1.2.0 for it to properly display the game list.
The next server downtime is scheduled for the 24th of September 2020 at 06:00 UTC. During the downtime the following updates will be applied:
This release consists mostly of bugfixes courtesy of our first time contributors (see below) as well as server enforcement of lobby rating ranges. With future client support, the rating ranges you select for your lobbies will mean that players who don't fall into the desired range will not be shown your lobby. So make sure you check those min and max rating fields before hosting a game!
There are also some internal generalizations of the matchmaking system which are working toward team matchmaker support. So stay tuned, team matchmaking may only be a few releases away!
Other noteworthy changes:
Contributors:
Roughly ordered by amount of contribution. Special thanks to our first time FAF contributors lirael, mapi5032, and 0x647262!
For further details check the github release notes: https://github.com/FAForever/server/releases
Due to a configuration issue, the lobby server was unable to authenticate with the API, and therefore was not able to post achievement progress updates. This will be fixed.
Thanks to the work of the FAF Council and Paul Wayper, we will be enabling the use of a secondary coturn server located in Australia. The coturn server is responsible for relaying game data between players which allows you to connect and play with people across the globe. However, it can also be responsible for high latency if you are located physically far away from Europe (such as in Austrailia or New Zealand). Our hope is that the addition of this new server will reduce the latency between players in Oceania and players in the rest of the world. So let us know if you notice a difference!
See the github release notes: https://github.com/FAForever/faf-stack/releases
I agree entirely that there needs to be a casual matchmaker, or at the very least a matchmaker that uses global rating. In fact THE MAIN REASON that motivated Geo and myself to even start building the TMM in the first place was to provide a way for new players to get into the game in a casual way. Sadly we have the ladder gods in charge of the matchmaker queues so what we got is yet another competitive rating to obsess about.
I have already proposed a number of interesting ways in which the matchmaker could be used in a casual way. The central idea which also solves the problem of having a small player base that is unable to fill more than 1 or 2 queues is to have a “Mode if the Week” queue that automatically changes to a new set of rules every week. These rule sets could include stuff like:
Really anything interesting that people have played in custom could go into such a rotating "Mode of the Week" queue that would encourage casual play where rating is not the focus. Yes, automating a rotating queue would need some additional coding work, as would some of the modded game modes, but I would be interested in working on it if the community desire is there. In the mean time some of these ideas could easily be implemented manually. The matchmaker should be a place where people can queue up, relax and have fun, and where new players can learn different game mechanics and discover all that FAF has to offer.
@tatsu Looks cool but I think just changing the size makes it pretty hard to tell between the sub tiers. Like if you just see one of them you won't be sure if it's tier 2 or 3 because they both look too similar.
Here's my idea, although I'm not particularly good at the graphics so maybe someone wants to take inspiration from it and come up with their own version, or just use this as a base and make it better. Go for it, you have full permission!
Divisions are differentiated by color, sub-divisions are differentiated by the number of stripes or stars and the final tier gets its own special icon. I tried to go for the commander mask, but it could be anything so long as it strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies.
I guess you need to be careful with colors because of colorblindness, so maybe the border should get progressively more fancy as you go up divisions. Something like
Bronze -> no border Silver -> Top and bottom Gold -> Full border plain Diamond -> Full border embellished Master -> Even more embellished
Anyway, I've spent too much time making this already
Edit: I worked on polishing it up and heres what I came up with. I kindof made the mistake of assuming the rank numbers increase as you gain rank, but it's supposed to be the opposite. These icons make more sense if subdivision 5 is the top and 1 is the bottom.
We’re gonna have to figure out some way to opt out of the longer games since not everyone is gonna be down for a 1.5 hour phantom.
I liked the idea of FFA on asymmetric map gen which Sheikah demonstrated a while ago. It would be awesome if LabWars worked too. Afaik it’s kinda busted.
Maybe something with unit restrictions or resource income mods. Like "navy only and everyone gets 2x resources". Or maybe infinite resources. Some game modes like that which simplify the game could be casual fun while also maybe helping people learn certain other aspects of the game I.e. how to spend mass other than clicking next upgrades.
@valki
shouldn't there be a "level 2 gap" map that is maybe slightly bigger or slightly more challenging technically?
Doesn’t "Canis River" fit that Description? Or "Wonder".
Well I posted this in zulip months ago, but I suppose it got buried and I started working on other stuff.
FFA matchmaking isn’t implemented but I think it’s pretty trivial (sort by rating then take first X people for your game). Adding that would probably give the best value for dev time investment.
Coming up with some concrete ideas for maps and game settings would be a good start cuz then we can make sure to implement everything that’s needed.
@biass
An unranked matchmaker would be a pit people would never escape from, as not gaining rating would never eventually force them out of the top of the skill ceiling
I would implement an "unranked matchmaker" simply as a matchmaker with a hidden rating. It would still technically be rated just that you don’t get to see your rating so you can’t obsess about it. This is how I would expect casual queues (for example csgo casual) to be implemented.
Open client > hamburger menu > reveal log folder
I think you’re missing the point. The point isn’t to change the balance to accommodate the tournament, it’s to host a tournament to facilitate getting some decent playtesting on upcoming balance changes so we can avoid the usual patch day shitstorm.
The source of the game files doesn’t matter, what matters is verifying proof of purchase so that FAF will let you log in. This is currently only supported through linking your faf account to a steam account that owns a copy of supcom.
Shouldn't the spawns 4 and 6 be swapped in your example to be proper odd vs even?