Some of you may know about VCAA. It is a tool for the Vietcong dedicated server that I originally developed to auto administer coop games. After much development in 2009, it has become a functional tool for all game modes. Recently, Silent Bob motivated me into updating and polishing it for a public release.
I'm hoping to release this in late March or early April. However, I'm not making any promises. Until then, It's currently in use on the ! " VET #7 TIGER FORCE - FA " ! server.
Current Status: Unreleased
Main Features:
- External ban list. Supports regex names and ranged ip address.
- External player database. Logs anyone that has joined your server as well as their ip address.
- Next map (with specific map index) and restart voting. Any player can initiate a vote that will require > 50% agreement of the players to pass.
- Crash detection (not prevention) with restarting and logging.
- Ability to set password on server start using dedicated settings file.
- Enable up to 2 server messages to be displayed at designated intervals.
- Configurable welcome messages for old and/or new-ip players.
- Auto map changing. VCAA will automatically change the map after a maximum of 10 minutes of inactivity. If the map had less than 10 minutes remaining the remainder of time will be used.
Coop Features: *note: VCAA will force basic "team respawn" rules in coop games. The way coop should be played.
- Enables "team respawn" using a dedicated settings file.
- Configurable mission attempts. The mission attempt starts after the first kill is made. If the mission fails, VCAA will restart the map. After all mission attempts are exausted, the next map will load.
- Dead player rejoin detection with warning and kick/ban.
- Configurable "Percent Rule". This rule enforces that players joining after a specific percentage of the team has died will not be able play until the next mission attempt.
- External map change and restart detection. This ensures that in-game admins can fully function without messing up VCAA.
- Successful mission logging. This will allow the admin to upload their mission results if needed.
- Auto time extension. If mission time drops below 2 minutes, VCAA will automatically extend the time to 10 minutes as long as there are players in the server.
Changes since Silent Bob's motivation: *note: all developing changes will be listed here with the most recent at the top until initial release.
- Added map change detection needed for stat recording on non-coop maps.
- Changed all of the GUI icons to a nicer (imo) looking set.
- Added help tooltips to the add and modify ban GUI.
- Fixed voting crash and other potential crashes relating to text overflow in the vcded console.
- Restart and next map voting have been increased to 80 seconds. This is not configurable for various reasons.
- Enter key will now modify the selected ban if the banlist area is focused.
- Up arrow, down arrow, mouse wheel up, mouse wheel down will now cycle forward and backward through a 50 command history of the console when the input (edit) box is focused.
- Fixed console not auto-scrolling when adding a new item.
- Fixed flickering on all ListView controls.
- Column sorting now saves when exiting VCAA.
- Adding and modifying bans using the Gui is now working.
- Player list now refreshes every 1.5 seconds instead of on each parse.
- Player and Ban lists now refresh into your previous sorting.
- Player list now sorts integer columns (player id, kills, deaths, ping) correctly.
- Deaths occurring before the mission starts will no longer count against the percent rule in coop mode.
- Fixed coop mission attempts not reading the config file properly.
- Bans are now parsed from the internal ban list to be added to the external ban list. This allows in-game admins to add bans to the external list.
- Added function to increase maximum map players limit on map load.
- Added auto-scrolling to console. Will auto scroll when new data is added only if bottom row is visible.
- Added sorting arrows to listview column headers.
- Added option to hide console timestamp on console's context menu.
- Added option to copy selected text from console to clipboard. Also supports multiple selection.
- Gui console now uses a listview control instead of listbox.
- Removed \kia command. Old coop feature that didn't serve much purpose.
- Changed banlist from using "in string" to regex name matching.
- Fixed IP Address control font in the add/modify ban GUI.
- Fixed all functions to support unicode and 64-bit builds that I may compile in the future.
- Fixed "not responding" crash detection.
- Added support for Windows 2008 (Vista, 7)
Feel free to post any comments or questions. I'm not currently taking feature requests as I'm focused on getting it released ASAP.
Good news, Solar. Good work. I have one question. Our dedicated server runs on some P3 1,2GHz with 256MB RAM (extension to 512MB is planned) with processor ocupancy about 70-80%. How exacting is your AA on processor load? Is the HW enough or should we upgrade?
KostiCZ wrote:
Is the HW enough or should we upgrade?
Kosti, do you have access to the hardware? Please drop me a PM what kindo of RAM is used in the server, i have some RAM´s i dont use anymore so maybe i can send you some
LDC-78 wrote:
so, is it possible to integrate a ranking funktion, for CTF/ATG/DM/TDM, that automaticly generates a list of best player, on a website?
Yes, this "ranking function" is already done for coop. I will have to see about getting it to work on other game modes as well.
KostiCZ
How exacting is your AA on processor load?
The VCAA relies on looping the "list" command to the console very quickly. On slowler cpus (such as yours), this can slow down VCAA's parse frequency. Normally this isn't a problem unless it's too slow. For example, the external ban list requires a decent parse speed as it needs to find the player and ban them before they have time to fully load (or spawn).
The slowest CPU the VCAA has been tested on is a P4 3.0ghz (2 years ago).
KostiCZ
Is the HW enough or should we upgrade?
I would definitely recommend upgrading if not just for the increased overhead and stability.
LG
I guess that is using mpresults.txt or Am I wrong?
Wrong. The VCAA generates a much more detailed result generated and sorted from the console "list" command.
Finally managed to get VCAA to parse the contents of the internal ban list (ban2.dat). This is a great improvement. Now, when in-game admins ban a player, that player will automatically be added to the external ban list. On top of that, VCAA will also remove these external bans if they no longer exist internally.
Solar wrote:
Finally managed to get the external ban list to parse the contents of the internal ban list (ban2.dat). This is a great improvement. Now, when in-game admins ban a player, that player will automatically be added to the external ban list. On top of that, VCAA will also remove these external bans if they no longer exist internally.
Nice also it will be nice some sort of banimport from other ban2.dat . There is console command but is it not working with dedicated server and bigger ban files or i dont know how to use it. I try it in game as admin, and also on the server with vcded. With smaller ban2.dat it was worked well. But on our site we have more than 130 banned ips.
LG wrote:
Nice also it will be nice some sort of banimport from other ban2.dat . There is console command but is it not working with dedicated server and bigger ban files or i dont know how to use it. I try it in game as admin, and also on the server with vcded. With smaller ban2.dat it was worked well. But on our site we have more than 130 banned ips.
I'm unsure about importing bans into ban2.dat. It was hard enough to read the file let alone write it.
When I add bans, they always go on my external ban list to prevent hackers from bypassing them.
I ran into some problems over the last couple days involving the new vote timers causing VCAA to crash. I have now fixed that and I'm back on track to finishing up the new features.
I can't put an exact date on it but I'm hoping within the next couple of weeks. But don't be disappointed if it doesn't happen.
OK, I asked just because Bakers have appointment in Harrachov next week and I want to discuss about our dedicated server with Alien (our webmaster) personaly. Anyway... looking for betaversion ;-)
Today I tried your VCDST but I have one problem... When I started manualy VCDED the setting window appear, so I can change maplist and all another server settings. The same is when the VCDED is launched by VCDST. The same window appear and I must click on launch button. The problem is when the server crashes. It cannot be restarted automaticaly because waiting on the "one mouse click". Any advice how to solve it?
It's very close. However, I won't have time to work on it this week as I'm spending the week out of town.
KostiCZ wrote:
Today I tried your VCDST but I have one problem... When I started manualy VCDED the setting window appear, so I can change maplist and all another server settings. The same is when the VCDED is launched by VCDST. The same window appear and I must click on launch button. The problem is when the server crashes. It cannot be restarted automaticaly because waiting on the "one mouse click". Any advice how to solve it?
Sounds like VCDST is failing to click the launch button. If I remember correctly, it sends a WM_LBUTTONDOWN message to the launcher at relative x/y coordinates. The only reason I can think of this not working is if the button is in a different position on your launcher possibly due to language setting. The only thing I can recommend is launching it in English. If it already is in English, it might be related to a delay on the launcher (probably drawing) due to slow CPU. Also, try disabling visual styles and other performance impacting settings in Windows. I'm assuming you're on Windows XP?
Just to be clear: VCAA will not have this problem as it only launches *.ded settings files (even for whole team respawn).
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