Roadmap / Status of Developments

[Sheeo]

I'll try and clear up some confusion about what's currently happening with development of FAF in this post.

We've got a bunch of projects on the pipleline and a lot of development has been happening, by a lot of people. Some of these have somewhat known release dates, but most do not. I'll note that the Council of Setons has not yet been established, and we don't have any rigid plans for releases until this happens.

I'll try and outline these below. Consider this post tentative.

Lobby

• Release 0.11
  Authors: Thygrrr, Eximius, Sheeo
  The next release of the lobby contains a bunch of under-the-hood changes to how it works. One of these is a revamp of the patching system works.
  You can fetch pre-releases here: https://github.com/FAForever/lobby/releases.
• Friendlist
  Author: Dragonfire
  An update to the lobby which contains a friendlist window. More information here.
• Lobby redesign
  Author: Spooky9
  A full redesign of the lobby. More information here.
• p2preconnect
  Author: root
  An update to the lobby local-proxycode that allows games to overcome IP-changes and other scenarios that would otherwise break games.
• new-protocol
  Author: Eximius
  A technical update to the lobby-server protocol that amongst other things, speeds up the lobby when starting. Development is going on here.

In general, work on the lobby is happening on Github here.

FA

• Patch 3641 (Tentative number)
  Authors: Sheeo, a_vehicle, Crotalus, Pip, IceDreamer, thygrrr, PattogoTehen, RK4000, Eximius
  Mainly bugfixes and performance improvements
• Balance Patch 3642 (Tentative number)
  Authors: Sheeo, a_vehicle, Crotalus, Pip, IceDreamer, thygrrr, PattogoTehen, RK4000, Eximius
  Tentative changelog described here.
  This won't be released until it's thoroughly tested by the community and blessed by the council of setons.
• Statistics
  Author: Sasin
  Sasin is planning to use statistics to do analysis of games and balance, more information here.
• Nomads
  Authors: Brute51, pip et. al.
  Trucking on as usual. They're working on land-balance and a destroyer rework is in progress.
• RK's Explosions
  Author: RK4000
  Trucking on as usual. He's working on making the explosions toggleable, and aiming for integration with main FAF.

In general, work on FAF patches to FA is happening on Github here.

The server code is open source here.


The rest of the code for FAF is also open source, you can find all the official projects listed here.

Did I miss your project or forget to list an author? Please let me know

[Ze_PilOt]

I notice that none of the actual issues is on the work :

- Tournament server crashing regularly (+ not very friendly for TD)
- The replay vault (the one that triggered the "We want server access!!!" nonsense).

Hopefully the p2p reconnect work will eventually lead to ipv6 support, the top priority if you want FA to survive more than a few months.

I'm not quite sure if starting to rework what is already working instead of fixing what is not is a good idea, but who am I to say that...

[Sheeo]

I notice that none of the actual issues is on the work :

- Tournament server crashing regularly (+ not very friendly for TD)
- The replay vault (the one that triggered the "We want server access!!!" nonsense).

I tried to list major, sort of well defined projects, not individual issues (We have github for that).

The replay vault works, I don't know of an issue with it at the moment. We did some serverside improvements shortly after the switch.

I'm unaware of issues with the tournament server.

This thread wasn't mean for discussing what people choose to spend their time on -- I'll leave that to themselves.

[Ze_PilOt]

The replay vault works, I don't know of an issue with it at the moment.

I should link you the thread where you are saying that you are unable to fix very important issues with it because of no server access then...

[Sheeo]

The replay vault works, I don't know of an issue with it at the moment.

I should link you the thread where you are saying that you are unable to fix very important issues with it because of no server access then...

... We did some serverside improvements shortly after the switch. You can see the commit here.

[visionik]

Hi Zep -

So far we haven't had to restart the tournament server. These graphs show you what's gone on with the core FA server processes over the last 10 days. All the times are GMT -8 Pacific (California) time:

https://scoutapp.com/dashboards/share/n ... 2-DBY8OIOQ

We did need to restart server.py and proxyServer.py 1-2 times in the first 24 hours; that was because the system wasn't configured to allow enough FD's per process. We fixed that configuration and restarted these processes.

We also had to restart the replayServer.py process a few times. I can't recall why right now, but it's very possible it was also the FD issue.

As you can see from the charts, we may have a few processes that have "memory leaks". It's nothing desperate yet, and I'm giving it another week or so to see if memory usage stabilizes.

That chart also shows TCP connections, which is an interesting indicator of high and low usage times

Maybe having more RAM has let the tournament server work longer?

Do you have any ideas as to why the tournament server was crashing?

Thanks again for everything you've done for FAF!

Best,

-Visionik

[Ze_PilOt]

Hi Zep -

So far we haven't had to restart the tournament server. These graphs show you what's gone on with the core FA server processes over the last 10 days:

It can bug quite a lot, but never had the time to investigate. When it happens, switching to the tournament tab "freeze" the lobby for some seconds then display nothing in it.

I suspect it's happening when the challonge server itself is too busy to answer the service, but I'm not sure of that. Checking your stat, it seems like it's leaking indeed.

For the proxy server, you should use the c++ version, not the python version, it's way less memory consuming (unless we are not taking of the same thing).

[rootbeer23]

Hopefully the p2p reconnect work will eventually lead to ipv6 support, the top priority if you want FA to survive more than a few months.

Do you have data to support this statement?

[Ze_PilOt]

Hope?

[visionik]

Hi Zep -
For the proxy server, you should use the c++ version, not the python version, it's way less memory consuming (unless we are not taking of the same thing).

Sorry yes, the server is running the non-Python proxy server. I just added the .py on proxyServer from habit