Yr ladder - Discussion

[ZiGZaG]

Hey guys, as a lot of you are aware cncnet was intending a ladder for YR.

 

As of now this isn't going to happen unless we as a community make it happen.

 

I spoke with Cncnet developers and basically it's not happening because none of the developers here like Yr and don't have the time.

 

I asked about some of us making a donation/paying someone to do it and was told this was a no go.

 

Doesn't really leave many option's, but basically we need to find a developer from within the community.

 

Any thought's or idea's on the matter would be welcome.

[fir3w0rx]

Well there's Alex, but even if we paid him, would the cncnet admins welcome it? He's really not a bad guy btw, his entrance into the cncnet forums was just a little... uh... over the top, that's all. Just ignore his self-promotional posts

[Tore]

At the moment no one has the time to focus on YR. Everybody else is focusing on the other games CnCNet supports. (C&C1, RA1, Dune 2k, TS) YR is at the moment in a state of getting updates only if show stopper bugs show up.

 

The YR ladder (leaderboard) is mostly done server side. This basically means that if someone wants to help out with the ladder they would need to know how to get around C# for the client (for authentication) and some assembly to get the game to send data.

[Rampastring]

At the moment no one has the time to focus on YR. Everybody else is focusing on the other games CnCNet supports. (C&C1, RA1, Dune 2k, TS)

You can add DTA and TI to the list

[Wiganfc]

You really shouldn't have made promises you couldn't deliver on.

 

Thankfully, CNCNet is a community where your actions cannot and will not be punished other than a few posts on a forum.

 

But leading people to believe there would be a ladder and then going back on it, is very poor form & really discredits yourselves and your reputations.

 

The whole reason many people are here is to play YR again competitively. Now people know this isn't likely to happen, irrespective of your own opinions activity will largely decrease.

[SiRaLeX]

[...] they would need to know how to get around C# for the client (for authentication) and some assembly to get the game to send data.

From what I gather, the game needs to be modified (assembly) so as to dump the game results from network games to a file. This is the actual (difficult) part. It doesn't need to send anything or do anything else.

 

The CnCNet client (C#) already sends game result files (from RA1, TS) to your server using this mechanism. If I was to do the assembly part, I wouldn't even need to see the client code, if that's what you're worrying about. Adapting the client to send the YR results file to the server is very trivial and something Rampastring can do in literally 2 minutes.

 

[Tore]

You really shouldn't have made promises you couldn't deliver on.

 

Thankfully, CNCNet is a community where your actions cannot and will not be punished other than a few posts on a forum.

 

But leading people to believe there would be a ladder and then going back on it, is very poor form & really discredits yourselves and your reputations.

 

The whole reason many people are here is to play YR again competitively. Now people know this isn't likely to happen, irrespective of your own opinions activity will largely decrease.

 

No one said that the YR ladder will never be done. The ladder for RA1 and TS is not fully stable either and we have always said that the YR ladder will be done after the RA1 and TS ladders are stable. That being said YR actually had many people playing before any talk of a ladder for YR happened. If you want a ladder to be competitive right now you can always play on XWIS until the ladder here is done.

 

The CnCNet client (C#) already sends game result files (from RA1, TS) to your server using this mechanism.

 

That is Funky's client, YR is Rampa's client.

[FunkyFr3sh]

Just to explain what actually happened:

 

We moved to a new server as some of you noticed, there were a lot things that needed to be done to fix up bugs and reduce the delay. Grant has been spending a lot of time getting all these problems solved, he was sitting on it the whole weekend and also for hours during the week. He is just taking a break at the moment. This thread is mainly about finding people who are willing to help out just to speed things up and support grant doing the needed updates

 

This is a community server, everything was done by players for players, we managed to do a lot of awesome things with the other games already like high resolution patches and tons of features that the original games did never support at all. This all happened cause there were people who liked to contribute. The same things can be done with Red Alert 2/Yuri's revenge too, it's just about finding people willing to help. If there is only grant working on it then things will take a lot longer, no one can really force him to work faster on it since he is all doing it for free, just for fun.

 

I'm already working on the other 4 games, that's why I didn't add support for YR to my cncnet client, but rampastring was nice enough to add support for YR to his DTA client. So you guys will at least benefit from all the cool things rampastring adds for his DTA mod since most of it will be available to YR too. He is not a YR player, so it's understandable he doesn't want to spend all his time with that game, he rather works on his DTA mod

 

We have a solid base for awesomeness, but things don't happen automagically!

[Bomber791]

Total fucking bullshit man... Yeah you guys have a ladder for all the games but not for YR the most popular one of them all. wtf is wrong with you people... Telling us you would have one im waiting checking here a few times a week checkin out the server and now it's not happening? utter bullshit weve been promised the ladder was in the works for months and not you say there wont be one? what a joke. Also, Alex could do it for you guys but you won't allow that either, perfect. ra2/yr are competitive games the ladder is what makes it so good only true pro will understand that.

[Tore]

Total fucking bullshit man... Yeah you guys have a ladder for all the games but not for YR the most popular one of them all. wtf is wrong with you people... Telling us you would have one im waiting checking here a few times a week checkin out the server and now it's not happening? utter bullshit weve been promised the ladder was in the works for months and not you say there wont be one? what a joke. Also, Alex could do it for you guys but you won't allow that either, perfect. ra2/yr are competitive games the ladder is what makes it so good only true pro will understand that.

 

Not all the games have ladders. Currently only RA1 and TS have functioning ladders. (missing C&C1, Dune 2k and YR). The currently running ladder for RA1 and TS still has a few issues with it such as games occasionally not registering.

 

The most popular game on CnCNet is RA1.

 

No one has said the YR ladder will never happen. 

[fir3w0rx]

So... is Alex allowed to do it?

[Tore]

Alex has a chequered history. I guess it all depends on if the other people in the CnCNet team can trust him and if he is willing to do it.

[Rampastring]

You really shouldn't have made promises you couldn't deliver on.

It's still likely that YR will get a ladder one day, but currently it has been delayed due to lack of staff / the existing staff taking a break to clear out some stress.

 

To clarify: I'm the one who mainly works on the client, but as I'm not a YR player I mostly focus on generic features and code that is utilized by either all games that use my client (DTA, TI, and YR) or just DTA and TI. Grant recently joined me in the project and started taking care of the YR side, adding mainly YR-specific features to the client. These YR-specific features include the ladder, since DTA has fairly low player counts and so it wouldn't really benefit from a ladder. That means that I'm not interested in adding ladder support myself - although I can and will help if someone else like Grant decides to implement it.

 

FunkyFr3sh's post covered the overall situation pretty well. Basically, Grant had already done some work on ladder support for YR, but then we had to do an unexpectedly quick server move that brought some issues with it (you might've noticed this as lag and delays in the client when changing your game settings, locking the game etc.). Fixing that took some effort from me (and grant), and so we haven't been able to focus on the ladder lately. Grant felt exhausted after a week of pushing daily updates to YR and learning the client code so he could implement features like the ladder in the future, and so he's taking a break right now. That means that right now we have no one working on YR - but it doesn't mean that we'd have abandoned YR entirely.

 

Basically, we've been working on the ladder for months (first as a beta for RA1 and TS), there's already most of the work done on the YR ladder too, and while work on the YR ladder is on hold right now, it'll continue once Grant returns from his break or someone else starts working on it.

 

Adapting the client to send the YR results file to the server is very trivial and something Rampastring can do in literally 2 minutes.

Yeah. However, the work mainly comes from ladder auth code and UI design / implementation. That still doesn't make it a big job though.

 

While I could do the ladder quickly (if someone else did the game hacking part), I don't have a lot of free time and it's partially also a principle. When I added YR support to my client, I only promised to make it possible to play YR with my client, but with the assumption that someone else would support the YR community after release. I already have 3 other games to tend to, and I never promised that I'd provide active support (including new features) to YR. Despite that I've still been forced to do that when there's been no one else around to support YR (like after Iran quit, and now when Grant's taking a break), and I'm kinda getting fed up with it. YR is draining more free time from me than I agreed to give it when I added support for it, and I'd rather focus on my mods.

[Plokite_Wolf]

XWIS has YR ladders. If you're that pumped to play competitively, play there. http://xwis.net/yr/

[fir3w0rx]

Grant recently joined me in the project and started taking care of the YR side, adding mainly YR-specific features to the client.

Really? How much does Grant know these days? C#? Assembly? I thought he was more of a web-developer / advertising guy.

 

XWIS has YR ladders. If you're that pumped to play competitively, play there. http://xwis.net/yr/

If you play there, you'll have the highest and lowest rank at the same time.

 

If I was to do the assembly part, I wouldn't even need to see the client code, if that's what you're worrying about.

Just curious; if you did this, and other YR related coding in the future, would you make it open-source?

[Plokite_Wolf]

If you play there, you'll have the highest and lowest rank at the same time.

Now yes, but if all those who want a YR ladder start playing there, the situation will change. Think.

[fir3w0rx]

If you play there, you'll have the highest and lowest rank at the same time.

Now yes, but if all those who want a YR ladder start playing there, the situation will change. Think.

Players already do this for RA2, including myself (up until a few months ago anyway, before I got busy). But a ladder here would make this place so much more awesome than it already is, plus there are way more people to compete against here.

 

EDIT: I'm aware that the topic title is 'Yr ladder', but that's only because RA2 here is only a 'mode' and thus refers to both games (I'm pretty sure anyway ). But you do have a good point.

[Rampastring]

Really? How much does Grant know these days? C#? Assembly? I thought he was more of a web-developer / advertising guy.

You're correct, but he's been learning C# lately. His code still isn't that great and I've often had to fix up some mistakes that he has done, but I'm sure that he'll become more skilled over time (assuming he resumes work). He has also pushed a lot of YR updates to the update servers, helping me that way.

 

I have two questions for everyone who's interested in the ladder:

- Should the game options be locked to default settings (for example, you couldn't pick 50 000 starting money)?

- Should mod maps be allowed, or only the Westwood multiplayer maps?

[-AuF- AuFRuLeR]

default settings no mods... :ivan:

[Titan]

Default settings and no modded maps fo sho.

[[nra]Buffalo]

trusting alex lol the guy who demands and not asks. good luck if this guy does the ladder, i for one do not trust someone who makes trainers to prove a point or threats

[SiRaLeX]

Alex has a chequered history. I guess it all depends on if the other people in the CnCNet team can trust him and if he is willing to do it.

That's a good way to put it, mate. I like that word, chequered.

 

If I was to do the assembly part, I wouldn't even need to see the client code, if that's what you're worrying about.

Just curious; if you did this, and other YR related coding in the future, would you make it open-source?

My offer is to do the game hacking part. There really isn't much to make open-source.

 

It's a bunch of modifications to the game itself so that the stats are saved to a file (or wherever they want them saved), testing it out and making sure the game doesn't crash. I know everything about game results generation and I guarantee I'd do it reliably.

 

I could just modify the game executable itself, but I'd prefer to use an expansion DLL, because for me it's easier to do it that way.

 

Whether or not that would be open source is up to CnCNet. I don't claim ownership for something I have specifically made for someone, been paid for and have no use for myself.

 

Buffalo link=topic=5288.msg39685#msg39685 date=1453581440]

trusting alex lol the guy who demands and not asks. good luck if this guy does the ladder, i for one do not trust someone who makes trainers to prove a point or threats

I don't mind. I never played on CnCNet anyway, so it's not like I really care whether you have a ladder or not.    I guess it would be nice if you had a ladder, because then I might decide to play on CnCNet if it turned out to be competitive and active.

 

Either way, I just offered to do something that I know how to do best.

[[nra]Buffalo]

the way u offered it may not have been the right way or u might have allready been doing it now

[SiRaLeX]

You mean it would have been done already by now. I never offered to do it for free, because why would I?

[fir3w0rx]

I have two questions for everyone who's interested in the ladder:

- Should the game options be locked to default settings (for example, you couldn't pick 50 000 starting money)?

- Should mod maps be allowed, or only the Westwood multiplayer maps?

Definitely default settings:

• short game (finding the last remaining unit could take hours)
  
• credits = 10,000 (any less makes the first 2 minutes 'actionless' (for a lack of a better term) and boring, any more will encourage too much rushing)
  
• mcv repacks (having to make multiple mcvs on some maps just to expand will be really annoying)
  
• destroyable bridges (debatable because it can cause stale mates, but it's been enabled for so many years so probably best to leave it)
  
• no crates (crates make it impossible to catch cheaters, and it also creates too much luck which removes the need for skill)
  
• unit count = 0 (I'm not sure about this one, but 0 starting units have worked for a long time)
  
• random starting positions (makes it more fun, plus players won't have to argue over spots)
  

 

As for maps, Westwood/Standard maps and also community approved Standard maps (no modifications to unit speed, armor, cost, graphics... etc.)

 

Those settings have proven to work for years.

 

The following settings is just my suggestions (but no doubt others too):

• lock speed to fastest (no more speed sabotaging to make a match not count due to low fps, and also annoy other player)
  
• multi engineer (even the best players of all time have trouble against a $500 engineer being able to end a game)