Why end uff server?

[Seleucids]

uff has pioneered hosting remote servers with fully automatic management - a step closer to games rooms hosted not on players' hardware dependent computers. This was a valuable experiment and his servers were very stable and fast in comparison to many player hosted games. 

From a moderation perspective, he has not beached any TOS and has behaved well in the lobby. his mods contributed to moderation. It really baffles everyone why he is forced to stop his valuable contributions. 

@Dunedan any explanations from your side? 

[Dunedan]

4 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

uff has pioneered hosting remote servers with fully automatic management

You might not be aware, but uff wasn't the first to do that. @victorcrimea is working on this topic as well (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/victorcrimea/0ad/src/branch/feature/dedicated-server/server) and at one point had a bot, similar to uffs, running in the lobby as well.

8 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

From a moderation perspective, he has not beached any TOS and has behaved well in the lobby. his mods contributed to moderation.

He registered and used multiple accounts, which violates the terms of use. In addition, as a general rule, we don't allow any kind of bots in the multiplayer lobby. That's primarily to prevent abuse and protect the privacy and security of all users and it's also why @victorcrimea wasn't allowed to run his dedicated hosting stuff in the official lobby any further.

That said, I suggested to uff yesterday to get in contact with @victorcrimea to collaborate on dedicated server functionality so we get something we can supported officially. We're an open source project after all, so we expect such contributions to be made using our usual processes and not in a way without us even knowing. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to better explain that to uff.

[Seleucids]

Thanks for the explanation 

What are your proposals regarding dedicated server functionality? 

There are for sure bots inside the lobby such as moderationbot and wfg bot. Could we make the uff-bot an approved one too?

I understand the concerns regarding privacy. However, I'm not sure why that is worse the current human hosts, who can obtain the IP address and GUID of all players who join 

[Dunedan]

2 hours ago, Seleucids said:

There are for sure bots inside the lobby such as moderationbot and wfg bot.

Sorry, my statement was incomplete: bots run by players aren't permitted, the ones run by Wildfire Games are of course permitted (and are actually necessary to run the multiplayer lobby).

2 hours ago, Seleucids said:

What are your proposals regarding dedicated server functionality?

What we need is a server, which can run headlessly, so without requiring a graphics card. It also has to be resource efficient, easy to isolate (e.g. by running it inside a Firecracker micro VM) and maintainable (so no re-implementation of the required functionality, but reuse of code we already have in pyrogenesis).

Additionally it should be integrated into pyrogenesis and XpartaMuPP, so whether or not to use a dedicated server is an option in the game UI rather than sending chat messages. That'd also allow us to use it for rated games, something which isn't possible with an unofficial solution.

It's probably also a good idea to get in touch with us developers while developing such functionality, so we can provide guidance where necessary, to avoid work which results in something which doesn't fit our needs and standards (for example a change of the network layer from UDP to QUIC is in the works right now (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8925), which would require changes to a dedicated server as well).

That said, if we're talking about ways to improve the ability of players to join multiplayer games and improve their performance, proper support for IPv6 (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/projects/9) is something I personally would like to see as a step before adding dedicated server functionality.