Messages

151

Suggestions / Re: FIRS?

« on: July 29, 2012, 09:22:35 pm »

maybe it would make sense if we use the same as BTPro then. we could benefit both - players that have all necessary sets for n-ice servers can also play on BTPro FIRS and vice-versa.

152

Suggestions / [Implemented] FIRS?

« on: July 29, 2012, 06:06:56 pm »

in the past we have tried to put some NewGRFs onto the servers but the effect always was that it stayed empty. reason is most probably that the servers with NewGRF mismatch are sorted down in the server list, so players don't see or don't care for them.
however, FIRS has become quite popular so chances are high that players already have that NewGRF and see a server running it, with a nice green dot 

so i think we should give it a try and run a FIRS server. now as you all know we can't just create a new server, resources are limited, we got to make one of the existing server a FIRS server.

questions:
1. should we try FIRS? pro? contra?
2. which of the servers should become a FIRS server.
3. what additional (setting) changes should be made to that server so it's running properly with FIRS?

input please 

153

Introduction / Re: Just started out

« on: July 29, 2012, 04:43:03 pm »

always good to hear that players enjoy the game on our servers and especially feel that the player base is creating a friendly environment where it's really fun to play in.

154

Introduction / Re: Geert

« on: July 29, 2012, 04:41:03 pm »

aw...too bad...i wanted some action:D like u running and the dogs chasing and finally jumping all over u and ripping ur clothes and ur letters and some more...but well...

what's that, some sort of naughty fantasies of yours?   

155

Changelog / New !progress trigger

« on: July 29, 2012, 12:57:33 pm »

with a small plug-in update we have just added the new !progress trigger. It is meant to show the current goal progress on one single line, expressed as percent of goal achievement of the first company and additionally visualized with a bar drawn with characters.
While the command can be used from in-game and for a single server it is mostly meant to be used as master trigger on IRC to get a quick overview of the server status, see attached picture.

156

Offtopic / Re: Other games I play...

« on: July 29, 2012, 12:41:16 am »

oh yes, ST2 does, and he's being annoying us with it on IRC 

157

Suggestions / Re: More info on recent games

« on: July 29, 2012, 12:38:06 am »

because such services are annoying with their ads and waiting times and it's unnecessary in this case. i am quite sure we will be able to keep them for up to a year or so if we use our own space. this really should be sufficient, it's just a savegame after all 

158

Complaints / Re: Points system in general

« on: July 26, 2012, 07:52:36 pm »

No one stops the service or converts rails right before the end, since you can't win when you're not delivering cargo

it was rather about "right before someone else wins". maybe you missed the last goal announcements because you're focused on the game and you didn't notice how close another player came to winning the game when starting your conversion.

it only needs to happen once and we will have just the same thread like this one, where someone does not understand what has happened and complains about wrong/unfair score calculation.

Income is like the perf. score, that goes up and down.

it might go up and down but not as much as income in some certain situations.

another thing is that i think the income idea misses the task you want to accomplish. the income has the same problem as all other values: you can raise it faster when you join later and start with better trains.
furthermore it would be redundant. we already measure the income indirectly by taking the time you needed to win the game into account. if you get 50 million in 10 years and someone else needed 5 years for 50 million apparently he had twice your income (average over time) - which makes later-joiners benefit who naturally need less time to get the same income, as they can start right away with better trains, hence get a better score. now if you additionally consider the income you increase the advantage of the late-joiner even more.

let alone the fact that i still don't agree with the idea to penalize late-joiners in general. Geert has only shown one special case where apparently he wasn't being competed during his AFK time. ofc this can happen but special situations will lead to special scores, nothing unusual about that. he just got lucky i guess.
what Geert has shown is that you get a better score when
- you're in luck that the server just started (and/or is empty) the moment where you still got some time to set up some good lines for 1 our 2 hours before you need to go AFK (school, work, sleep...)
- you're in luck again that when your AFK time ends the game is near the end and you just need to do one last big coup like conversion to mono or maglev
- you're in luck once more that nobody has been competing you during AFK time
- you play on long run servers (it really doesn't make a big difference on shorter servers)

there is so many things that just have to match by good fortune that i still don't see why i should change a formula that has calculated thousands of games in a way that complaints are relatively low. actually the fact that issues are only found on such special cases confirms me that the current formula is good (there exists no such thing as a perfect algorithm that has some disadvantages in specific situations).
whatever change i make to this formula has a big chance of breaking fairness in hundreds of other games - only for fixing this one thing Geert encountered. i have yet to see a good reason to take that risk.

159

Complaints / Re: Points system in general

« on: July 26, 2012, 03:38:47 pm »

it seems you haven't read my text. read again 

160

Complaints / Re: Points system in general

« on: July 26, 2012, 02:54:10 pm »

2. As for the initial question, my suggestion is to take quarterly pure income (it's possible to extract this, right?) into account together with vehicle count.
I think it's a great sign of the overall efficiency. E.g. 250 mil income / 400 trains vs 75 mil income / 80 trains. It will be 0,65mil vs 0,93mil factor, the difference is not that mad if comparing to only 400 trains vs 80 trains.

taking the income at time X has some problems. what if you do a monorail conversion and have all your services stopped while another player wins the game? your income would be really bad at this time and your score would suck.
so we would need to maintain an average value of all quarterly incomes over time. the problem is that you cannot query historic data from the OpenTTD server, only the current value. xShunter would have to query the current value every quarter and track it. i didn't implement such things in xShunter for a simple reason: when we got a crash of xShunter and it is restarted e.g. 1 game year later you got absolutely no data of that year anymore (and even the historic data needed to be saved and restored after the crash, not an easy task). so score calculations could get affected by operational/infrastructural problems on the server - something that we don't have now and i'd also like to avoid in the future.

as for the vehicle count: that is already considered (and the reason why Geert got more points for his "lazy" game). it also works as penalty, because before we had this some players cheated the score system by buying lots of unused vehicles at the end of the game to boost their company values.

161

Suggestions / Re: More info on recent games

« on: July 26, 2012, 02:11:00 pm »

don't worry, every suggestion is always seriously considered and checked. and except the screenshot thing we will most probably do all of the other things you mentioned (though it will take time and come step by step) 

162

Suggestions / Re: More info on recent games

« on: July 26, 2012, 11:32:45 am »

PNG is already compressed. i created such a screenshot as a test, it has 282 MB. my computer got 16 gigs of RAM but that doesn't help when graphics programs don't utilize it. also the graphics program loads it in a way that makes it a LOT bigger in memory, it cannot keep the data compressed as long as it is working with it.
irfanview: "Too low memory to open image".
Paint.NET: "An unknown error has occured while trying to open the image".
Windows 7 embedded viewer: kept on saying "Loading" but never finished
GIMP: never finished, showed up as "not responding after it ate all available RAM:

a command line tool like pngcrush doesn't have to load the full file into memory for its job, so it would probably work. but what would it help to compress it down to a really poor level? you wouldn't even be able to recognize anything, it would just be a mash of pixels.

and this when on the other side i ain't programming anything else for weeks. a lot of things would be needed to be done: create the savegame, start external openttd to load it, let it write the PNG file (either putting the server under high load or if prioritized down running for 15 minutes), script a pngcrush job (that again puts load and memory usage on the server or takes another 15 minutes), name the file in a way it can be linked with the game (so get some sort of unique ID from the database first), publish it on the website...
this process only for one screenshot would probably cause more load on the server than all 8 OpenTTD servers together. even if running as low priority processes the long runtime will lead to several of such processes adding up (because it just happens that servers reach the goal within the same 30 minutes, more often than you might think)...

to sum it up:
1. a lot of effort needed for new programming logics
2. high resource cost on the machine
3. low benefit
4. no 

163

Suggestions / Re: More info on recent games

« on: July 26, 2012, 08:24:26 am »

if i'd let the server do a full screenshot on server 5 or 8 it will stop responding for 2 minutes, creating a 500 MB png file while all players lose connection -> bad idea 

about savegame: should be doable. we already have a mechanism where every !admin request automatically creates a savegame (admins can later see the list of all savegames created this way and use them for review). so doing a savegame on game end (one second before all companies are reset) shouldn't be much effort. offering it for download on the website shouldn't be a problem either, though we'd need a limit for how long we keep the files, disk space is not infinite 

showing the statistics you have mentioned definitely will be possible but needs preparations. right now we don't save the long-term data that could be used to make a graph with a time X axis. but we can do this and i think it would be cool to show e.g. the full company value graph on the website.

what can be done solely on website without preparations is to show some hard numbers that were valid at the end of the game: the number of vehicles (per type), number of stations (per type), and the performance rating. but for the website part Myhorta has to comment on it.

p.s.: you can show more than the last 10 games, just click the "LAST 10" link in brackets to see your full list.

164

Complaints / Re: Points system in general

« on: July 25, 2012, 10:25:43 pm »

have you seen my above explanations? as i have pointed out scoring is much about efficiency. and yes, we all know that the newer trains are more efficient. so you're right about your observations, that's just a logical consequence.

i could counter that in the algorithm by making it so that a later start date gets you some penalty. but you should keep in mind: the longer the game is running already the lower the chance a player will still start a company and join the game. it's a general problem with OpenTTD that servers are often getting empty at the end, because they don't attract any more players. so lowering the score for them would even be an additional penalty.

it is of absolutely no use if a player joining late would know "oh well, if i had started earlier i would get an advantage". he is here to play NOW and he cannot travel back in time anyway. the question is only whether he is attracted to still join this advanced game (maybe even completely without winning chances) and fill the server for some more competition or he leaves again. an extra score penalty for him is the wrong thing here.

also you can't rely on situations as you had them before: you can join and be afk most of the time but another player who is playing more actively might come and win the game when you only reached 40%. no winner bonus for you and only 40% - gone is your theory about making big scores the lazy way all the time.

165

Complaints / Re: Points system in general

« on: July 25, 2012, 09:26:53 pm »

just wanted to start investigating but Myhorta was faster, good 

i don't see that he played with batt, both games were only with 1 member. but the ratio of vehicles to the time you needed to win is the important factor here, because taking "only a bit longer" with "significantly less material" means more efficiency and efficiency is what gets you better scores.

imagine there would be a noob plastering the map with 2000 stations that are working really bad while you are placing only 200 but with a very good design. you both make the same income. if we weren't looking for efficiency that would mean the noob would get a 10 times better score than you. he was "working harder", right? not being lazy.
but that's not what it is about. we care for results, not how much you were sweating on the way to the result