Technical issues

[venmade]

Good afternoon, my name is Venmade. I am the administrator of the gaming platform "Garena" and the Creator of the game platform "WarCIS" which is based on PVPGN.

I have been looking at your project for a long time, and I would like to clarify: 1. Is it possible to add support Mysql? "Mariadb" The fact is that our gaming client is integrated with the forum. "Xenforo" And further, it will be inter- naled with the chat messenger, all this is not supported in the sqlite.

2. Is it possible to restore a record of replays? Although we also have an anti-cheat system that does not miss the use of map hacks, speed hacks and tricky programs giving advantage to the player. But, at times, players behave very inadequately or violate the rules of the game. Replays are very important in this case.

3. Multithreading? https://github.com/Josko/aura-bot/issues/35 (Not a priority, since we run 4-5 copies of the bot on 1 account.)

4. W3MMD support We would like the host bot to be able to read the game data from the maps, where the statistics system is built-in. This is also important.

By modifications, there are no more questions. Everything else is perfect for us.

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If you do not have enough time to develop, we could discuss with you the possibility of paying for the restoration of the features I wrote about above. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to hearing from you!

Venmade.

[Frotty]

Hi, I'm not affiliated with this project but all these features are listed under "removed from ghost" in the readme - and this was intentional by josko iirc.

[venmade]

@Frotty hello, I think for the developer will not be difficult, it's all back. I'll wait for a comment from him, maybe we can come to some option.

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By the way, your Forest Defense project Quite interesting.

[Frotty]

This isn't about difficulty, it's about intention 🌴

[Josko]

Hey!

Thanks for your offer @venmade but I don't have time outside of work to program all that much so I do it just for fun and learning. I don't see War3 coming back anytime soon and these features are pretty much just what big bot users want, leaving me highly unmotivated in doing it myself. Thanks but I cannot accept it.

@Karaulov: Well @Frotty is right you know, but here is a short explanation why and how: GHost++ at its peak was nothing short of revolutionary, but it was always pretty much C with some STL mixed in since the get go. New features were added and added without too much thought on how to scale them nicely which led to a lot of QQ on the forum by users when the games lagged when the replay was being saved to disk, etc. When 2013 came along with C++11 release it became apparent that a different design was necessary and I wanted to play with these new features - so that is how Aura came to be. Sadly War3 was "dead" by that point so things that I want, like unit and integration tests, multithreading and an async replay mechanism, were never even started.

Today Aura has way less dependencies, has 64-bit builds, built on all 3 major platforms, static analysis as an indicator of code quality and a way simpler promise of plug'n'play then GHost++ ever had... It should be pretty trivial to copy-paste back the features one misses if he/she so desires.

Right now I'm planning on bugfixes, code evolution to C++17 and some "internal" features that are not visible to users within the game as my time and nostalgia are limited.

[ZachHandley]

@Josko Hey, commenting here to agree with @Karaulov, while the features might not be the best, currently there's no good repository for Ghost++, especially on Linux (Closest I could find was https://github.com/Shiox/ghostpp and I can't get it to compile completely).

I'm the current editor for Island Defense and Warcraft 3 is actually making a bit of a comeback, especially since it seems that Warcraft 3 Remastered is in the works according to Gamemasters I've talked to, and what with Starcraft Remastered

To be quite frank you could even charge for this if you were to develop the additional features (Maybe this is the free version?) I don't know enough code to update your version to include the missing features, otherwise I'd do it myself

Currently ENT Gaming is the biggest host, and I know they alone would pay a decent sum of money for access to a license to run on all of their bots, but the MySQL support is integral to retrieve a list of games currently in progress, check how full they are, save stats, etc.

I only post this because I think that Warcraft 3 will make a comeback, and right now your bot that you've created is the best of the best due to https://codelain.com dropping off the face of the earth out of nowhere, as well as https://ghostpp.com

Regardless, I appreciate the work you've put in here and I'll tinker with it and see if I can modify it

[venmade]

@IAmDragon Good afternoon, thank you for your reply. I will write here a little information! @uakfdotb "uakf" My technical administrator and developer of my gaming hosts bots. We worked with him since 2013. Our host bots with the project "ENT" have a common code. Well, naturally, our control panels are written together.

"uakf" He could not support the project (Codelain), he did not have proper access. Later the domain was overbought. ghostpp.com is currently thrown, and is no longer supported. (And at the moment, he stopped bots, refused his hosting and everything else.)

In general, I am the last owner of his developments. And the last administrator of a large platform, "Garena"

Nothing really is left, and everything is supported only by me. We are developing a new platform and are interested in good game bots.

I could have returned everything myself, but I would like to make it AUTHOR.

[uakfdotb]

ghostpp.com is currently thrown, and is no longer supported.

I could restore it if you think it would be useful. But there was very low activity already so it didn't seem worth maintaining (I had to cancel the server that it was hosted on but I have the VM disk image). Could alternatively transfer the domain to you if you want it.

Our host bots with the project "ENT" have a common code. Well, naturally, our control panels are written together.

Hm not sure what you mean about that, I don't believe you contributed to GHost++ or uxpanel. Also the control panel on ENT is not uxpanel, it's an even worse mess of scripts :P

Currently ENT Gaming is the biggest host, and I know they alone would pay a decent sum of money for access to a license to run on all of their bots, but the MySQL support is integral to retrieve a list of games currently in progress, check how full they are, save stats, etc.

I no longer administer ENT Gaming, but I don't believe they would pay for a license to run something like this. I mean, the project sounds pretty interesting, and it definitely looks like the architecture is significantly improved. But as far as usefulness to ENT Gaming, hosting Warcraft III games at scale has not been difficult for the last decade (I don't think there are more than 10K games in progress worldwide at any time, and not more than 500 or so on entgaming.net), and even new features aren't too important these days, mostly people just want to maintain the status quo.

Even if they did want to pay, though, it's not like it makes hundreds of dollars, at most they can afford $100/mo, which probably isn't much motivation for the author.

Hey, commenting here to agree with Karaulov, while the features might not be the best, currently there's no good repository for Ghost++, especially on Linux (Closest I could find was https://github.com/Shiox/ghostpp and I can't get it to compile completely).

Hmm that is odd as GHost++ was mostly developed on Linux AFAIK. I mean there are probably some issues with incompatibility with newer versions of libraries but I thought it would be harder to get it working on Mac OS X / Windows now. Definitely is hard to find the code after Google Code went down though. If you open an issue with the compile errors and tag me I might be able to help.

[venmade]

@uakfdotb Hello, it's difficult to get in touch with you. If you want, we can work together as before, I am a partner of the company "OVH" at my disposal a huge number of equipment of any level. (link) It is not difficult for me to support a project on support bots, but I would like to make a forum with 0. Update and support I can do myself. (smf is very easy to transfer to the familiar xenforo engine, where it's easier to make the community familiar to everyone.)

At us with you in due time there was a work on a commercial basis, last versions uxpanel and the modified bots ENT, only at me. I did not make public contributions, and I never laid out anything in general, it was part of the conditions. All innovations and new functions were made only for personal projects. (By the way, if I'm not mistaken, the ENT project uses the built-in control panel in PHPBB forum.)

At the moment, all the projects on the bots are scattered and there are no more centralized resources. While we are conducting an active development of a new gaming platform, it will be interesting to post additional workings of certain functions. (at the moment the war 3 on the patch 1.26a) opens a lot of opportunities.

work @Josko , at the moment the most modern and interesting. (Everything else is very outdated), or it is heavily modified, as is the case with onsystem projects.

[ZachHandley]

@uakfdotb I'd love to take over moderating the ghostpp site if you'd like me to, happy to pay for it and monitor it, as well as release updates

My main concern was with the most recent version of Ghost++ that I could build, the libraries it uses are outdated and hard to find on Ubuntu, I couldn't even get Boost to register in the make path, even though it was installed through the correct means. The only guide I have was written for CentOS, which is most definitely not the most common Linux distro for servers

Please shoot me an email @ zachhandley@gmail.com to continue this conversation and I'd greatly appreciate it.

[venmade]

@IAmDragon There are no problems with libraries for compilation and other, all this can be cut. And the bot almost any version is collected without any problems. (On our platform Warcis we did so)

[venmade]

@uakfdotb By the way, I remember that you closed the project lunagnost, the project was interesting and worthy. What are you doing now, how is your free time? (You can contact me through: admin@venmade.ru)

[Frotty]

Guys, please keep your off topic discussions out of github issue tickets...

[Argon-]

@Karaulov SQLite is significantly faster. When you don't need a dedicated database server, then MySQL is unnecessary overhead. Aura was not intended for large bot server farms but was rather designed to be incredibly efficient and fast. For local users or a single server hosting bots, SQLite is absolutely sufficient.

[Argon-]

Sorry, but just because it doesn't correspond to your specific use-case does not make it useless. GHost originally was used by people on their private computer to increase functionality and especially decrease delay (similar to other locally active hosting tools at that time). People offering hosting services came only way later. Autohosting was dropped for the same reason: Aura does not cater to the handful of people interested in hosting services but to the thousands of people that (used to) run GHost on their private computer or on a single cheap VPS. And for neither of those do you need MySQL. In fact, MySQL is a drag for this audience, an unnecessary and useless dependency.

[ZachHandley]

@Argon- Any chance you can bring a few commands back that are simple? Like !slap, !end (ingame command to end game), and possibly !dlmap if you're able to?

[Josko]

As far as MySQL is concerned, I tried to explain above: only mass-botters care about that (huge minority back then). Take any normal user and he'd dread the day he would have to set it all up to host a few WC3 games. Besides that, the "config option" mentioned was not "free" regarding performance if you chose sqlite - the whole features needs a new and better design (along with threading).

Ok, this discussion has went a bit too much off-topic so I'll close this particular ticket - if anyone has a particular wish, etc. one can open a ticket specific for that. Or even better - open a pull request and then we can real talk.

[Argon-]

now this aura-bot is useless for many users...

We are talking about 2-5 users here... I don't share your enthusiasm. Also, you are repeating yourself and I don't intend to to that. Josko already responded to the points you made. Reiterating them nonreflective won't change anything.

@IAmDragon Sorry but I don't see any value in doing that. But it's actually not hard so it should be easy to find an external coder willing to (re)implement these features. I also don't see any future for WC3. It's currently only a thing in China and China is in complete and absolute control of their own clients similar to Garena, just "a little bit" more successful. You will never get your foot in the door there. Also, I wouldn't hold my breath for a speculated surge of activity due to WC3 Remastered, as there was no such thing with regard to online activity for SC Remastered either (people usually just play the campaign). In case WC3 really does see such a mysterious revival in its custom game department you can still let someone patch MySQL into Aura as it's -- as said before -- not a really difficult feat and should be completed fast enough.