Hi all,

I'm the guy that's responsible for FAF replay server, here to talk about stuff. Tl; dr if you have issues watching live replays and want to help out, scroll down to the bottom.

A long time ago there was the original replay server. That thing had a bunch of issues and had to be restarted every once in a while. Some time back I rewrote it and the new version has been running ever since. The replay server does two things: it streams live replays and it saves them to FAF vault. Right now saving replays works perfectly fine, but streaming doesn't quite work.

Many of you know that there's a bug with live replays where if you're behind on replays and the game ends, the replay ends abruptly. I know about this bug, but never managed to fix it. I can't reproduce it myself and I have absolutely no clue what causes the bug. Maybe it has something to do with how Python deals with TCP connections, maybe it's the FA executable acting up, or maybe there is some bug in the server I missed. I don't know. Here's a possible way to fix it.

Not long ago I rewrote the replay server again. This version is IMO simpler, more tidy and it's done in Rust rather than Python, meaning it's faster, multithreaded and easier to maintain. I spent some time polishing it, making tests and so on, the last bit that's left is testing it with a bunch of real games, then deploying it. Now, we held off for a while on that last step. From our (dev) perspective, current server has been working fine, in a sense that replays were saved properly and nothing crashed. Here's where you come in.

• First, I need to hear your opinion on live replays so us devs can gauge how serious of an issue this is.
• Second, I need a bunch of people for a testing session on the test server, maybe a mini-tourney of sorts, with some people playing and other people watching. This way I can verify that the server works fine, and with a little luck the live replay issue will be fixed as well.

I don't have any timeframe for the testing session, but we'll figure something out, maybe on some weekend. Come help out pls!

I wish Discord stopped taking over community everything like this, it's horrible for retaining or searching for any information

@ftxcommando said in Nuke Sub Rework:

2. Just spamming TMD on the water. Late game navy combat already involves SACUs being dropped to get reclaim and build SAMs. It will not be difficult to just use them to build a few TMD as well. I'm unsure how to feel about this issue and it's the main reason I decided to stop theorycrafting about the idea and just make a post because I can't tell if this makes it a deadend or if it's viable if we tinker with values like cost, hp of the missle, and so on.

How about long range nuclear torpedoes?

You'll end up with people flaming about kill stealing and accusing one another of stealing rating.

Jesus Christ people what are you even talking about

I know I don't do much dev work, but please, please listen to my heartfelt plea. I know it's hard to do when we're 100 posts deep into accusation and hurt feelings, but it's just a videogame. There's no reason for any of this drama to exist.

I'm not the kind of person that likes the "toxicity + inclusiveness + CoC" HR nonsense, but maybe we can accept some provisional rules to get this thing under control. I don't want another ZeP episode over nothing.

• Assume good faith, even when first impression tells you not to. We're all adults here, we should assume by default that we're not driven by pettiness, even if we sometimes lash out.
• Get angry in proportion. Being direct and sometimes offensive is fine, if the thing at hand warrants this approach. If something is bullshit about a thing, call it bullshit. If we ban getting angry, people will vent through underhanded office politics bullshit. OTOH no one is obliged to respond to every rant and people who rant all the time start being ignored, so save them for things that really matter.
• When in doubt, deescalate. If things get too heated, deescalate first. Get someone else to arbitrate. If you're a bystander, support the person that chose not to escalate, not in what they're arguing about, but in their stance. An argument is a dollar auction game and beyond some point betting higher should be made not worth it.

Can we all agree to this? I hate to see people who contributed this much more to FAF than me lose it over petty nonsense.

@hoschmosch said in Connection issues never been this bad:

Engaging the Russians could be a solution. Whoever finds irony can keep it.

Surely appeasing people with delusions of persecution willing to destroy a community with no remorse will lead to nothing but good things

This thing is good, it parses tick count real fast, it's thanks to this thing that we get to preview in-game time for replays, you should adore it

Following recent balance forum rule changes, I decided to check how often beetles are actually built. So, I did the following:

• I grabbed 2000 replays from id 13370143 downwards, skipping IDs that gave me a 404.
• I ran the replay parser on replays with the following script:

  #!/usr/bin/fish
  for file in scfa/* 
   ./fafreplay commands $file -c IssueCommand 2>/dev/null | grep -q xrl0302
   if [ $status -eq 0 ]
   	echo $file
   end
  end | wc -l
  

  This basically counts the number of replays in which commands were given to a unit type "xrl0302" (or fire beetles).
• Finally, I counted replays in a similar fashion for a bunch of other gimmicky/niche units.

Here are the results:

• Beetles: 18
• Sparkies: 100
• Mercies: 79
• Janus: 187
• Continental: 99
• Spearhead: 42
• Shard: 76

We all think it's hard. If reworking netcode is a piece of cake for you, then do it. You'll be a FAF hero.

Jesus @Askaholic relax. I don't care about complaints or people being annoyed, I just want to get something done.

Could be a graphics driver issue maybe, given that message?

This looks like a GPG employee's file path baked into FA binary for logging during compilation. Definitely not something sent by a malicious player.

It used to be that beetles had a higher engagement range so they could actually explode after catching up, but someone set that range to their explosion radius making them next to useless when not microed. Then I guess it was reverted to the tiny range under the assumption that they'll be shot at and killed anyway, again making them useless when not microed.

@hoschmosch said in Connection issues never been this bad:

an admin who invests more time in constantly giving us long-winded statements instead of addressing the problem? And again, this is about a core issue, not the design."

From my perspective that's far from the truth. There's multiple people with sysadmin experience investing enough time into FAF for it to be a part-time job, all for free. FAF's infrastructure is non-trivial and takes much more effort to maintain and develop than say, a Minecraft or CS server, even without a few vindictive people hammering its services.

To give an exaggerated example, doomsaying of your sort is about as reasonable as saying that people running the economy are idiots and if they just printed and gave everyone a ton of money then everyone would be rich. It just doesn't work that way.

Dumb opinions lead to sarcastic responses and there's nothing you can do to prevent it

@hoschmosch said in Connection issues never been this bad:

Engaging the Russians could be a solution. Whoever finds irony can keep it.

Surely appeasing people with delusions of persecution willing to destroy a community with no remorse will lead to nothing but good things

Not the first time this threat was used against FAF either, also with delusions of persecution, also by a Russian

Seeing how Cybran are the only land without shields so Billy is bit more effective against them, reenabling redirect would be a nice deterrent.

Why not just make a subforum here? I feel like forums are naturally a much less convenient conduit for shitposters than discord is.

This. As evidenced, Discord is an abhorrent environment for any kind of discussion and everyone would be better off with it gone.