Server maintenance info.

[Borch]

Although this game is 19 years old, the server is not, there are many aspects of how the server can be setup that are independent of the original game. When ohmy first formed, Yasha was randomly making changes, enabling the gunship, and other stuff like that. If you complained, you were apt to be banned.

When I first took over when Yasha disappeared (died, went to prison, had a stroke, etc.?) I had changed the server to an early stock configuration, folks didn't like it, so I worked at getting it to where it had been. I wasn't fond of using windows, especially since windows is restrictive in what could be done, but I was familiar with linux/unix which is a much more stable and universal system for this sort of thing, so we moved the server to a linux configuration, which is pretty sweet in terms of being able to control and operate the server.

One day Fred complained about jump shooting, so I made a change to reflect that, which I thought wouldn't be noticeable, but foo noticed it, to which I said, "you weren't supposed to notice." I put it back.

But we have had players leave ohmy, and the server, because of an inordinate amount of jumping, so over the years there has been a discussion about that and during a meeting, IIRC, it was agreed to set jump shooting at 7. It can be set at between 0 and 10, 100% to 0% reduction in weapon strength when jumping, and 0. Unfortunately, it can apply to changes that happen when running over a hillock or something that changes the player's vertical position.

I had written some code to see what could be done about the jumping, with some success, but it was too cumbersome for me at the time, took up a lot of time and modifying the code is painful when it has ramifications throughout all the modules.

I had analyzed a log after I found myself unable to kill anyone with a BAR unless I hit them in the head. Turned out that the player was being healed before a second bullet would hit the player, causing it to take sometimes 190 hit points to kill someone with a BAR, when only 100 is required. To fix this, I slowed the healing rate, but recently have found that a server setting, in the last two months, that was set incorrectly to 5 instead of 5000 (the default value), which delays the amount of time before healing starts after being injured (this is currently set to 3000, 3 seconds). The setting is in milliseconds, which meant that 5 milliseconds is instantaneous start of healing. I discovered this when looking through one of the settings file (note that the Extreme 3.0 mod is about 6-7 years old and quite complex, and still has bugs). Incidentally, since I made this change to delay the start of healing, other weapons are more effective, which has reduced tanking, I believe, even with the flamethrower. Since healing was delayed, I turned the healing rate up.

We have map packs that have several maps in them (the iwd files are renamed zip files). We have 1474 maps in these map packs. Many of these were made in ohmy's infancy, when both Shart and I were learning, so some of the map packs had redundant files in them. It hadn't caused major problems, but it was kludgy and had bothered me. We also had over 600 maps that were not in the map packs that we could install on the server. This has bothered me greatly over the years and I have been seeking how to get those into our map packs, but there has been a problem with map conflicts.

I finally figured out what was causing these map conflicts, it was program calls in the script files for each map (.gsc suffix) that would call other script files. This is fine, normally, but the maps had different gsc files that they could call (a program calling another program to do something) and one file would be incompatible with another, cause the map to crash.

I figured out a way to prevent this years ago, by turning off the calls (shutting off all the exploding barrels, across the board), but this was only for barrels and those maps that were in our map packs. There were also problems with programs that handled lanterns, mortars, doors, etc.

So I recently spent a large amount of time (in addition to the amount of time I had spent before dealing with researching the problem, plus other aspects of working with the maps, where I figured out which maps had issues with conflicts and turned the conflicts off.

So since I believed I had the problem fixed, I worked on creating map packs for the new maps that have not been available to the server, but in so doing, I found maps that were accidentally placed in multiple mappacks we already had. Not a major problem, but it bothered me, so I removed the redundant maps and renamed the files they were in, because if I didn't they would conflict with the original maps.

So the mappacks that were corrected were removed and remade as Y1.etc, Y2.iwd, etc.

So I made up additional map packs, starting with X, for the new maps.

Years ago I made up a webpage for Shart to be able to make new map rotations, which would check and verify there were no problems with it and make it pretty easy for him to make rotations. Since I did that, with some tweaks to fix bugs, it has worked pretty well. The new mappacks work with that old system, with some minor tweaking for the additional X and Y mappacks names.

So when Jock was attempting to download one of these Y maps, he ran into the dreaded 10k/second download rate (which happens when the server is trying to provide that map pack, not from the redirect). So to try to help with that, I changed the redirect from http://ohmyctf.com/maps/main/ to https://ohmyctf.com/maps/main/, adding the "s" for a secure connection. Didn't help. So I returned it to the "http". So since then some folks have had problems downloading. Thinking about it today, it might be because the map was partially downloaded at the 10 k rate, so the game is trying to continue that download. If you have this issue, try deleting the partially downloaded mappack from your main folder and try again.

There is a setting, sv_wwwDlDisconnected, which I had kept turned off because I had found information years ago that it would cause server crashes if someone was on the server and was redirected to a download when they were the only player in game. I changed the setting, tried it today and it didn't crash, so maybe it will be ok. I have written code to monitor the server and look for it to be crashed, in which case it restarts, so it should be okay even if it does, because the server will be restarted automatically and it would be empty when it crashed, anyway.

Over the years there have been lots of things I've fixed, like the machine gun knives, for example.

So claiming that the game is "20 years old and is fine how it is" has not been the case, but for the players they haven't be close to what's going on, it might seem the case.