Messages

1

Offtopic / Re: UFO2000 Needs Players

« on: March 18, 2015, 09:03:00 am »

I can also post a news article on the UFOPaedia's main page announcing the news and the new servers.

Thanks.

But I'd also make a suggestion: keep the new weapons, units and maps that were designed for UFO2000 (great stuff - I've actually reused a lot of that material for OpenXCom) but set the defaults on the distributable back to the originals.

This sounds reasonable.

I know the argument was to prevent copyright issues but I think it has become clear with Long War (for the new Enemy Unknown) and OpenXcom that Firaxis endorses such modding, since it even announces streams through their Twitter feed of Long Way playthroughs. And being an XCom multiplayer was to me the main reason for the success of the UFO2000 project.

Interesting. Do they also announce/endorse mods for the old X-COM?

2

Offtopic / Re: UFO2000 Needs Players

« on: March 16, 2015, 08:39:31 am »

So you are paying the bill? If you ever need some support, you know, where to find me. (Yes, I'm serious!)

Yes, but it it not very expensive.

As you probably are the most experienced ufo2000 server operator, did you have any incidents of hacking, yet? It is one thing to put up a server, but it's a different matter, to keep it running without any troubles. From my perspective, that's still a little vague prospect, to be responsible for a server running over a longer period of time out there, myself.

I'm not aware of any incidents involving hacking. And ufo2000 is probably not a very attractive target for anyone to bother There was a security audit of the server code earlier, which revealed some problems - https://securitytracker.com/id?1016503 These problems are now fixed, and I don't think that there were any significant changes introduced to the ufo2000 server code after that.

I was not very happy about the mantis bugtracker security history though. This is a more likely target for the hackers.

As for running the server in general, it is always a good idea not to use your home computer or any other system with important information. That's why I'm using a VPS server. The worst thing that can happen is that the hackers may get access to user passwords (and the passwords are unfortunately stored with only a rather rudimentary hashing) or turn the server into a spam sending machine. Other than this, they can't really do more damage.

I'm especially interested in the way, how you create that server-stats-page.  As you possibly have seen, I did a rather crude one of my own. But yours show far more extensive information. I'd love to see, who you do that.

There is a lua script to generate that page: https://github.com/ufo2000/ufo2000/blob/master/script/db2htmlreport.lua
It uses a customized lua interpreter, which is built as part of ufo2000 when you run "make tools".

I assume, you create it with some kind of cron-job, not via live queries of the ufo2000.db-file?

Yes, it used to be a once per hour cron job. But now it just does live queries because there are too few users

Can you tell me, why I get the following error message on ubuntu 14.04 x64?

Code: [Select]

./init-scripts/main.lua:53: attempt to index local `fh' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
./init-scripts/main.lua:53: in main chunk

Apparently it can't create the "init-scripts.log" file, maybe because it does not have permissions to do this. Can you provide more details about how you are compiling it and running?

3

Offtopic / Re: UFO2000 Needs Players

« on: March 14, 2015, 07:20:53 pm »

Right now it looks like the ufopaedia is the best way to accumulate all the necessary ufo2000 information and does not need any special permissions to start contributing, hence things can keep rolling regardless of my availability.

Moreover, I'm seriously considering to change the https://ufo2000.sourceforge.net and https://ufo2000.net web sites to just redirect to https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=UFO2000

The volunteers are encouraged to start moving the useful and/or still relevant content to the wiki, so that this transition can happen smoothly. Since I obviously don't have time to properly take care of the ufo2000 project myself, I'm in favour of the decentralized "self service" approach. The game code can be also forked to various github repositories (or other free hosting services) and people can work on adding features or fixing bugs (if they wish to do so) with or without my approval. Not that my approval was in fact ever needed

4

Offtopic / Re: UFO2000 Needs Players

« on: March 14, 2015, 06:46:56 pm »

Edit: ...or not. Does anybody else have that problem, not being able to connect? Every time, I try, it says, it would be a wrong password. I even tried random names, just to make sure, noone else used the name first. I just can't get in.

Thanks for reporting the problem, this should be fixed now. Apparently the 'daemonize' mode in the ufo2000 server does not work correctly and the database link is just lost after forking. I'm sorry for the troubles.

Currently, you should find an ufo2000 matchmaking server running at the address mobile-infanterie.gamersunitonline.net:2000
[...]
This server is running at my home, consuming energy on my bill, so in consequence costing my money. That's ok, for the time beeing. But I intend to not have it running longer, as for the next 4 weeks.

VPS hosting has become relatively cheap nowadays (5$ per month at https://www.digitalocean.com), so I had restarted ufo2000.net after Hobbes tried to contact me in the IRC (even though I was away from my computer at that moment). Then he also mentioned this forum in the https://www.ufopaedia.org wiki, so here I am.

Regarding setting up ufo2000 backup servers, feel free to do this and please add the links to the ufo2000 server info page at the ufopaedia wiki. I will also try to provide the necessary server setup instructions there. Right now it looks like the ufopaedia is the best way to accumulate all the necessary ufo2000 information and does not need any special permissions to start contributing, hence things can keep rolling regardless of my availability.

5

Open Feedback / Re: GitHub ?

« on: July 11, 2010, 07:15:23 pm »

Maybe Serge could write more? He put Ufo2000 source in github.

The main ufo2000 repository is still using SVN. I only have set up automatic mirroring of it to github, just for convenience.

6

Suggestions / Re: Scripting access to the engine for modding

« on: June 20, 2010, 01:43:48 pm »

People who are interested in a scriptable xcom compatible engine may consider ufo2000 as an alternative

Regarding lua vs. xml. Being able to use scripts as opposed to just a plain structured data representation gives a bit more flexibility. For example, ufo2000 uses lua scripts for random maps generation (in order to ensure properly aligned roads, etc.).

AI is another good candidate for scripting, but it was mentioned already.

7

Programming / Re: [TASK] Converting cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates

« on: June 20, 2010, 01:25:06 pm »

x = radius * sin(lon) * cos(lat)
y = radius * (sin(lat) * cos(rotLat) + cos(lat) * sin(rotLat) * cos(lon))

(radius = globe radius, lon = longitude, lat = latitude, rotLat = rotation on the latitude, sin = sine, cos = cosine)

Now I need to invert these formulas to reverse the process (turn points on the globe into points on the flat map), so they become something like:

lat = ...
lon = ...

So... anyone have any ideas how to solve this?

Obviously, solving these equations should give zero, one or two distinct lat,lon pairs as a result for each x,y on input. Don't know if it's easy to solve these equations analytically (my math skills got a bit rusty nowadays). But being lazy, one can easily solve the problem numerically, by using Newton's method for example