Leaderboard

I look for two things in a project. Engagement from users and engagement from devs. If said project is meant to amount to anything, devs need to take the thing seriously. The cruel reality of the this endeavour is that this is neither easy nor fun. If everyone is looking for something fun to do, I guess that makes a lot of sense. Noone is tackling the big issues. Noone wants to go through hell for N months for fun. "We are doing this for fun" makes for a good tagline. But when things amount to something, it's no longer fun, it's work. Most projects aren't abandoned because there isn't usage. Most are abandoned because something someone did for fun became useful, others found it useful, and it became an actual thing that demanded a lot more than fun, which the maintainer couldn't offer. I don't have authority to dictate how people should act or feel. But that attitude wouldn't really deliver what the users of the software expects. Maybe that's alright. Maybe this codebase is a tech demo for people to code on and having an end product 0AD, the RTS game built by the community for the community, is just a byproduct. It's not about what people want to see. It's about what people expect to get and what you can offer.

Well, of course, nobody owes anyone anything. That is a two way road though. When the answer to everything is being an unpaid volunteer project, it says a lot more than what I presume you even intended to. That statement pretty much says, "we are out of our depth here, don't expect much from us, this is an inherent aspect of the project we can't ever change, deal with it or move on". The message isn't something current and potential users and contributors like to hear. And most of the time, they will choose the latter and just move on because well, seems like it will all be a heathen effort. And truthfully, people don't owe usage of the software being developed as much as they presumably aren't entitled to criticism because we are all altruistic here. And at that point, then what? development for development's sake? the means becomes the ends? That last statement may seem hyperbolic, but that's exactly what I am seeing here now. "It's an unpaid volunteer project. Take your entitlement elsewhere". Sure, but then what?

Sometimes, one just needs a break. It's not the end of the world or the project.

Yes that was the idea. To detail a bit more: There is a delayed distant attack. All computations are done in fixed-point arithmetic. Then there is a trajectory rendered. All computations are done with floats. To handle blocking projectiles : You have to do the second stuff in fixed-point arithmetic (slower) You have to check for obstructions (slow too) To check for obstructions : you have to also take into account height of obstructions. Cylinder or cuboid are probably doable. But that could look really bad for some units for which this shape approximation is a bad approximation. Something like that were done in the first simulation of the game (but that one could not handle multiplayer or saved games). So there is some work to do, performances could be hurt badly, and you have still design choice to do. -- fatherbushido

11:30 pm or so on 10/6/2020. While in bed tablet device wasn't connecting to internet (WiFi was working). I guess this explains why I fell asleep earlier last night. Attacks are pretty boring and old now. In any case, DDoS'r - can you do this more often at 11:30 pm, or so? I got some good sleep and this is helping my insomnia. Anyway, #gohardorgohome. Waiting for that ISP phone call.

This part is not entirely true. Its the same argument people and companies were using against open source for years. Its just a bunch of dudes working during their nights. It wont go faster than a snail. But time and time again, it has been proven to be wrong, because those same people deliver. With all the complaining, the burnout, the turnover, things still move forward. And its kinda disappointing to see this from a FOSS point of view because the principle behind the movement is being contradicted and we are to believe community development is a dead end. I guess you yourself believe we are marching towards oblivion. I have said my interpretation of why that's not the case here, but alas, they were neither constructive nor on topic and were removed.

@user1 My user: PurpleMotion Offender: Shalom7 (1050) He was hosting, I was taking out his base and he quit. I looked in the lobby to see if the server was running but he was gone. metadata.json commands.txt

@user1 Me: JohnDoe2 Other player: josecely commands.txt

Hi @Dizaka, the exact same thing is happening to me. I'm in a game and my internet is suddenly gone for 2,5,10 minutes or so. You are not the only one. Also almost every game I play the host gets disconnected and game end. I dont know whats happening but... this seems dirty play.

7:20 eastern time. Ddosed as a player. Will update as time progresses. 7:41 pm, still offline on that WAN port. 7:50 pm. Still offline. 7:55 pm, or so. DDoS ended.

That's the launching bug. But then we get a runtime bug that make the game unplayable for Ryzen users. Just ask @Dakara or @OptimusShepard There is a patch for it, but I lack the hardware knowledge to know if it's the proper one. Which is why I'm waiting for Itms return. And his branch is waiting for review from @wraitii Well that's good. Now that's one platform less to check. Still waiting for Itms's decision. Look, I'm looking forward to ending this as much as the next guy, so we can move on to the next version and the ones after that. But we still need people to work on this. For now they are low on time and that's showing. But they are doing the best they can and that's the most you can expect from volunteer work.

3:05 pm eastern time. Another DDOS on WAN for 0Ad. 3:24 or so, back online.

It's not a no brainer as SDL updates have been known to break a lot of things in the past. Also Windows is still using 2.0.5 My experience with mac players is that generally you can't ask them to compile the game A no brainer in the sense that dropping support for old mac os is acceptable but not supporting new ones is out of question, in the sense you need to stick close to upstream so that if you run into issues you are qualified to report them or get other forms of help. Also I'm playing a23 which was built against 2.0.12 without apparent issues for months albeit on Linux. My experience with mac is you are a good customer while your hardware is less than a year old, a decent if less than three and out of luck thereafter. Unlike Microsoft which puts considerable effort into forward compatibility Apple is perfectly fine for it's user to run into issues few years down the line. So if Apple doesn't care why should you? And if someone actually cares putting out a community build is already good enough IMHO. It's also needed to build SpiderMonkey which runs half the code of the game. Looks like spidermonkey-52 needs python for unit tests only. 52 is what I think Itms currently is at. They also affect all the other CPUs so they might make the game unplayable for other cpus Well, with a bit grepping the only use I found for all that cache handling is an aligned allocator which cares about L1 while the issue seems to be limited to L3, so commenting out the respective code and adding a TODO should work for now.

10/6/2020 around 1:23 pm Eastern Time. Clearly hit a nerve with someone through my last post. Internet/0Ad WAN port down due to DDoS. 1:36 pm. Whoever is doing this #gohardorgohome. My ISP hasn't called yet. 1:41 pm. It stopped. Chart is below. What's interesting is whoever is doing this is optimizing the attack. I've noticed that they are starting to send more packets now but lower bandwidth utilization. For example, see below: 185,054,775 packets received. That's like 100x higher than usual. Therefore, whoever is doing this is trying to, using what some people call a brain, to optimize the attack.

On 10/5/2020 between 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm eastern time the lobby users are being hit hard by who ever is the DDOS child. I'm being ignored for some reason. Mgically, a number of users who rarely, if ever, log in logged in. The first topic on these user's mind was DDOS. Peculiar but just speculation. Below is a WAN chart of traffic since 9/11. Most peaks, if not all, except between 9/15 and 9/16, are when I disconnected from 0ad due to, what I believe, were ddos attacks. Below is the corresponding LAN chart. Notice how traffic between 9/15 and 9/16 can be seen on LAN? That's because it goes past the router and isn't blocked/discarded like a DDOS attack. The 9/15-9/16 traffic is a 4 tb download.

Just did a quick search for DDOS on the forum. Looks like this has happened with players who get singled out. Example is Emperior: Not really an issue to ignore. I also haven't seen Emperior around.

Specing game. Phyzik mentioned something about screenshots and Issh luled about them (ph4r em!). Wasn't involved in game (was spec). This happened around 6:46 pm easter us time. First ddos during this game around 6:46. This one disconnected me from game and sent me to lobby. Received a 2nd ddos around 6:55 or so: Banned from game for connectivity issues. Host is Bonesnscars. (He did the right thing) Phyzik explicitly asked for ban. He directly stated his ph3ar of screenshots beforehand (before game started). Double checked who else asked for my ban, out of curiosity:

A concept for Misthophoroi hoplites.

Does that matter? The important thing is people see there is activity. Not too many, I suppose, however, it is the official page of the game, and when people visit it, they see the start of the last three posts, in this case June 4, 2020; April 30, 2020; September 12, 2019; which doesn't look very promising. Besides, the same message could be posted on various social media, of course.

True, but a part of public relations, especially with a project of this kind, is education. People can be educated about how and why things work, and this engages them. Also, any post, no matter how technical, tells the fans or potential fans that progress continues.

I'm pretty sure the purpose of social media is community engagement. Which doesn't occur from not posting. Again, not mean't as a criticism, merely an observation. If there is truth in the fact that potential players are being turned off 0AD by the perception that the project is dead, which could be arrived at due to there being no uploads to the official 0AD Youtube channel since the A23 trailer (i.e. no uploads since 2018), and infrequent social media posting generally (last post on FB was from 20th sept (only post in Sept) about European Bison) - then how could positive engagement not help? When has positive engagement with your community not helped any project ever?

About why there hasn't been a release for this time, pointing the things that you said

9:50 pm easter time (NY). DDOS again. Can't setup the monitoring yet ... Honestly, anytime a player disconnects from a game I'd probably blame DDOS. It seems like few network connections these days are unstable ... Note: I've offered to pay for counseling and therapy services for whoever is doing this. Please PM me.

Not even an aspirational timescale? We're all aware of how the development works and it's voluntary nature, and we're grateful to the creators for their work - make no mistake, there is universal appreciation, but there is the school of thought that a dream without a deadline is just a dream...

Lagged out around 4:55 Eastern Time. Logs again show a spike in traffic. Honestly, no idea who it is. This was from a game lobby as randomid started hosting. However, the spikes don't appear to be random/unintentional and are related to 0ad. Game chat provided below to list players inside the lobby. Note, I haven't reset my public IP so I can be bombed even if the person is not in 0ad.

4:16, game hosted. Players: 4:18 pm eastern time.: On launch kristian disconnected. Probably nothing. (Inbetween Phyzik asks me to stop raging / get mental help. ) 4:23 pm eastern time: Kicked by randomid for lagging. Logs below.

Players ig: thankfor pie, sabdala, furqan, randomid, Dizaka, Ivaylo_Uzunov, TheIlusiveman, Exvtheow Specs: Issh, Boudica, Ricsand, felixix Had a minor attack (Didn't disconnect from game lobby, just game). After I reconnected my guess is host got hit. Game disconnected completely. Gametime was around 11:00 am eastern time zone (US/NYC).

On 9/13/2020 around 7:10-22 p.m. Happened again. Game hosted by Phyzik. Ingame players were Isam_96 (1438), czar1812 (1326), _zoro_ (sleeping), anuragn (11115), and myself.

Looking at my traffic logs for today (don't have previous logs, unfortunately) I can see that my networks gets hit with a lot of traffic in a short period of time. This is the WAN port on my router. I believe at around 6:00 I was in a game lobby trying to play with bbleft and bonescape(sp?) I couldn't play as my whole internet connection went out again. Note: The traffic is over a time period of 20-25 minutes.

@user1 here some replays: commands.txt metadata.json commands.txt metadata.json

There's a lot of games that mostly 'disconnect' these days. Dunno if its a host problem or general game server issue. Just today 2 or more games 'disconnected' simultaneously , other players believe its coincidence. what can I say? "Prevention is better than cure" so im uploading two replays so you can use it as investigation lift. Replay is attached below! Reporter: Defc0n These are 2 different games that 'disconnected' today per what I witnessed. Happy investigation! @user1 commands.txt metadata.json commands.txt metadata.json