Posted: 09 Oct 2017, 15:51
I've been trying to play around with some automated server doodads for RVGL, and there's still a few kinks i need to work out. Most of them are related to Optical Character Recognition not being 100% foulproof. I've also noticed some RVR people having issues sending in times in a timely manner, and there's some overlap between the needs of players and hosts, so i'd like to outline a few of 'em here.
When you/the host selects the next track, all race times will be saved to a text file.
It would probably go into the profiles folder, or maybe an entirely new place. They would have to be timestamped, and the text itself could be anything from CSV to XML, as long as both humans and software can easily interpret it.
Allow the host to pick a next track at random with a single menu option.
Some hosts are just looking to cycle through their tracks lazily.
Allow for automated hosting, which would include the former suggestion, but done automagically once all players have finished and/or a certain amount of time after the first player has finished.
With this, we would be able to host games indefinitely ( while consuming a spectator slot in the worse case)
If all of these features are to be implemented, we could start moving towards building dedicated servers ( and building custom backends to have server-specific rankings, automate tournament results, etc.)
When you/the host selects the next track, all race times will be saved to a text file.
It would probably go into the profiles folder, or maybe an entirely new place. They would have to be timestamped, and the text itself could be anything from CSV to XML, as long as both humans and software can easily interpret it.
Allow the host to pick a next track at random with a single menu option.
Some hosts are just looking to cycle through their tracks lazily.
Allow for automated hosting, which would include the former suggestion, but done automagically once all players have finished and/or a certain amount of time after the first player has finished.
With this, we would be able to host games indefinitely ( while consuming a spectator slot in the worse case)
If all of these features are to be implemented, we could start moving towards building dedicated servers ( and building custom backends to have server-specific rankings, automate tournament results, etc.)