MP Server Ilor

Updated on April 5th or 4th depending on your timezone (around midnight GMT) with

• info about what my opinion on the design considerations is
• server-side RNG info
• updated timeline

About me

My name is Tomasz Śniatowski, ilor on irc/gna/forums/wiki, I'm a third year software engineering student in the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland. My preferred e-mail adress is kailoran(at]gmail.com

I chose to participate again to allow myself to focus on Wesnoth development during the summer i.e. earn summer money while doing something fun. Wesnoth was my default choice for an organization as I feel that being already familiar with the code will allow me to be much more productive.

Experience

Wesnoth

Last year I successfully participated in Summer of Code, completing the Editor2 project. I am currently maintaining the new map editor and sometimes doing some small random fixes or features around the code.

General

A few years back I wrote a (now defunct, but useful for a long time) helper utility for a browser based strategy game ([1]) that automated some tedious tasks. Some time later I got involved for a while in another browser based game, a local text MMORPG under construction ([2]). I wrote several helpful Greasemonkey scripts, such as a simple ajax-ification of part of the game, that I hope will be integrated into that game someday. I also had some chats with the game developer and helped him with some PHP and database stuff. I'm not more involved there because the developer wants to keep it a one man job for now, and it's a closed project which makes it appeal to me less and less.

I also have some intermediate-level database knowledge, mostly MySQL for webapps and MSSQL for a proprietary accounting application I helped deploy and maintain in a small company. Right now I'm in the middle of a database design course at my uni but I'd rather not talk about it. It's in MS Access and that should be enough.

I have also coded some websites as a kind of part-time job. This included using an established framework (Zend) and adapting and maintainng open-source software installations (oscommerce).

I have mostly worked on my own, though once or twice I coded something with 2 or 3 friends. A notable example from this school year was writing a simple raytracer from scratch (in C++), which later became the basis for a distributed systems project. This was a very interesting experience, especially since eventually it all worked fine. The raytracer I wrote on my own, the distributed bit was in cooperation with a friend. We ended up modularizing the project which allowed us to work efficiently, and the project was well-received by the profs.

Gaming

I played lots of various games, from strategies both real-time and turn-based to shooters and RPGs. I tend to play mostly singleplayer, and like a good story in a game, though some games, like racing sims, don't really need one. I also think that bad gameplay can kill a game regardless of story. I also really prefer solid gameplay to stunning visuals, possibly because I could never justify buying a high-end gaming rig. I have played some Wesnoth campaigns, enjoyed them, but generally find myself not having time for a lot of games lately, including Wesnoth.

Communication skills

English is my second language -- my first is Polish. I have no trouble communicating in English in any way. I consider myself fairly good at interacting with other players and developers. I try to give advice when I can and when I am fairly confident it will be correct. I don't really like people who keep giving "advice" despite not knowing much. I'm perfectly fine with receiving advice, I generally prefer having someone look over my ideas especially when starting on something new. Sometimes I ask for help, sometimes I make it a point to figure out stuff by myself.

Project

The project is to extend the wesnoth multiplayer server and the client-side lobby interface, as outlined in SoC_Ideas_Multiplayer_server. There are essentially two parts to the project, an UI ovarhaul in the client and some modifications to the server, with choices to be made in both cases.

Design considerations

Lobby channels/rooms/filters

Channels are probably the most common way of handling larger audiences, but there are concerns that it'd split the community, and make moderation more difficult. One other idea was a "chat filters" thing, but I'm not entirely convinced it'd work well. Regardless of the choice, I think all users should start in the general lobby by default and only move elsewhere if they really need to. Assuming channels, I'd make it so everyone's in the lobby always, but can join a different room if they want to. A tab-like interface would allow switching rooms, as is common in chat apps, irc etc.

Wesnoth-less wesnothd chat / moderation

In general starting up Wesnoth takes a while and keeping it on is a bit of a hassle. An irc-server-like interface to allow moderation would be very welcome, but I think might be too difficult. If we'd want to mirror the room structure into a server, I think the best approach would be to extend an existing modular ircd with a wesnoth interface.

Extending the lobby bot would be another option esp. if we don't do channels. The bot is in perl which I don't know well but I probably could manage if the scope of the canges required there would be small enough.

Ranking

It seems well established that ranking should not be a part of the server. If anything, a method of veryfing that a game has been played (by e.g. the server publishing replays) could be desirable to help ladder efforts, but this has been determined to be fairly low priority. Also Soliton seems to have taken matters into his own hands and worked on that. Ditto for a surrender feature (as opposed to quit), which is possibly complicated and not really in the scope of the project.

Server-side RNG

It came up that it would be useful to delegate the random number generation to wesnothd to alleviate some potential cheating (predicting next RNG rolls since the client knows the seed). It would involve the client asking the server for a bunch of random numbers to be used as a seed whenever it needs to do some dice-rolling. This can potentially bring some unwanted lag, but the added security might just make it bearable.

After some discussion it seems that a reasonable idea would be to have a new delegating RNG in the game that would have a special state variable (validity). The RNG would become invalid after every action that involves user interaction (like unit movement, attack selection, deciding to recruit, answering a WML dialog question, etc). When a random number is required and the generator is invalid, it will ask the server for a new random seed. If the RNG is valid, it'll just generate another number. This way there are no changes to be done in WML and the random numbers become safe.

The WML side of this is a bit tricky, it might be required to add another method of RNG generaation to split "private" and "shared" random numbers. This will also require in-depth investigation of how the data about what's happening ingame is sent around. It is much simpler in the (crucial) case of combat -- when the final decision to attack is made (attack type is selected) the game will ask the server for a seed to be usd in this combat only, making combats unpredictable and cheat-proof.

Server-side details

Maintenance work

The server looks like it needs some maintenance. Having the lobby be a special game works, but isn't really logical and leads to hacks and workarounds. I'd extract the common actions for games and the lobby into a superclass and derive Lobby (or Room) and Game from that class. Documenting along the way would be helpul, too.

Options are not necessarily bad

I think that regardless of what we decide to implement, there should be a way of disabling it (other than reverting all the changes). For instance, if we implement rooms, there should be a simple "one_lobby=yes" value to set in order to revert to a behavior similar to the old one. Even if we decide not to do a feature, I'd rather have the code written in a way that would allow adding it later without having to redesign half the server (or client).

Server-side RNG

The server bit of the server RNG looks rather simple. The server just needs to maintain a RNG and send random numbers to clients when asked to.

Client details

Redo the interface in gui2

There's little point in trying to expand the old widgets lobby when there's a new toolkit around. Some new widgets will have to be created first, notably the minimap and a tab control. Tabs could be simulated by buttons though.

Concept sketch

I can code better than I can sketch, but anyway: [3]

More games shown at a time

The current UI shows only 4 or 5 games and wastes a lot of screen space. My idea would be to collapse all games except for the selected one into much smaller bars with a smaller minimap and less information, possibly by using icons and/or skipping some redundant text. The selected game would have a similar look to what's there now, with the notable addtion of the join and observe buttons which I think would work better near the game as opposed to somewhere on top. This would also help save some vertical space which is usually at a premium.

Powerful game filters

There should be a method of filtering to search for games with a particular era, games that allow obervers or not, game names, creator names etc. I think this should be accomplished by a combination of filtering and sorting the game list. To avoid confusion, I think the game list should display "Games: showing NNN of MMM" to indicate that a filter is active.

More chat space

A button to expand the chat window so more text fits, at the expense of the game list. The userlist could also be hidden, but I'm not sure what could reasonably be done with that space as there's usually enough space horizontally.

Private chat tab

We already allow private messaging via the /whisper command, but it's not very convenient. I think a query-like separate window for private chats could be useful, similar to what irc clients do. I also think that such windows should display a reminder on how to use the ignore list and how to restrict private messages to friends only to make it easy for people to avoid abusers.

Player list improvements

The colors and fonts used to signify players in the current gamel, nick registered status etc are not immediatelly obvious to me. I'd add small textual info to separate the groups, and avatar-like status icons to indicate different types of users (unregistered, registered, moderator etc.). If we consider adding a ranking system, the "rank" could also be indicated by a different icon. I'd rather not allow custom icons. Since there will be no ranking in the project, this bit is moot.

Server-side RNG

Implementing that in the client might require some engine changes but mostly will need lots of engine *understanding*. This is quite orthogonal to the rest of the project and also it's not yet certain how much of an impact the added delay would have. Therefore I think it'd be good to implement a prototype of this early (e.g. with combat only, disregarding WML random numbers) just to see how it works in practice. Then it should be decided whether or not to proceed and whether or not this feature should be optional so players can disable it if they can't stand the lag.

Milestones

The idea page indicates that the first milestone should be a summary of studies and proposed interface changes, but disucssion revealed that a concrete list of features and milestones would be preferable now, and this is the approach I'm taking.

Decisions

As for the design decisions, my take is:

• Ranking is out, as a conscious design choice that I understand and kind of agree with.

• I think that in general rooms are the way to go, but if another idea solidifies before the project begins, I can imagine adjusting the design and milestones accordingly if it is generally agreed to be better. Right now I think a flexible room system is the best option.

• In particular, I think the room system should be flexible enough to allow limiting users to a predefined set of rooms, for example consisting of the main lobby and language-based channels only. (note that *allow limiting* is not the same as just *limit*)

• regarding wesnoth-less moderation, after some thought I think that upgrading the lobby bot to accept mod commands is the most reasonable choice. It should be fairly simple to implement, unlike the irc server module idea, and just as useful unless we'd want to moderate dozens of channels which probably wouldn't work anyway.

Feature short list

1. A gui2 lobby
   1. New gamelist
   2. New userlist
   3. "More chat" and "more games" modes
   4. Private messages tabs
2. Game filters
3. Configurable room system
4. Server-side RNG
5. Some method of wesnoth-less moderation

Things to do before the program starts

• preliminary wesnothd refactoring (e.g. split lobby and game classes)
• writing missing gui2 widgets (minimap, tabs)
• investigate bug Mordante about gui2 tooltips
• understand the current client-server protocol

Timeline

• May 26 (official program start) - have most of the initial stuff above done
• June 28 have the server-side rooms in a working state, a protocol update with (possibly interface-less) support in the client, plus a (non-functional) prototype of the new lobby gui
• July 5 have a prototype of the server-side RNG done, test how it works
• July 12 (midterm evaluations deadline - 1 day) - have a working "new lobby" with basic room support, simple filters, user list. Possibly without mode switching (1.3). Decide on what to do with the server-side RNG.
• July 26 - have the planned features roughly done. Start polishing and work on the wesnoth-less moderation. Have a decision on whether it's a lobby bot upgrade or something more.
• August 3 - have the server-side RNG working (if it's decided worthy of more work after the prototype
• August 15 (before final evaluations) - have a polished new lobby plus the game-less moderation feature.

Practical considerations

I have good knowledge of C++ (and STL), I'm moderately familiar with the Wesnoth codebase and I started to look into wesnothd sources. I learned C++ pretty much on my own, first by coding small problems for some local programming/algorithm contests. I even got to the country finals once, though I'm not a huge fan of 5-hour "reimplement the appropriate algorithm in each of the problems" events. At least this made me pay attention to computational etc. complexity issues. Later I got some more useful knowledge from various books and experimenting. I'm comfortable with Subversion and intent on finally trying git-svn. I develop mainly on windows on MSVC but can switch to linux if it turns out toying with wesnothd is problematic on windows.

I use MSVC mainly because it's a powerful and helpful tool, though not without defects. I also use a lightweight smart text editor (notepad++) for general editing. Cygwin, putty, wireshark are some useful tools I use quite often. I am awake between around 0900 UTC and 0100 UTC, and online for an hour or two in the mornings and for most of the evening/night. I can sometimes be reached during the day on IRC if the campus wifi works good enough and I have my laptop with me. No objections towards talking on thephone, voip on whatnot, in English or Polish.

As I'm a student in Europe, I will have a lot of exams at the end of May and in the first half of June, and will not be able to do much work during that time. I will be generally available, just busy. I plan to offset this by doing some work during the "community bonding" period and, well, working hard in general :). This is also why I give myself quite a lot of time between the program start and the first item on the timeline.