That's very confusing though. Would need an intermediate or something. Willing to add in more complicated mechanics if there's a clear reason though!

Free currently. Wasn't sure how to integrate a cost in a meaningful way. Open to suggestions.

Nope. I didn't put in server display logic. Good idea though.

PPS: I may have bumped up the number of bots in alliance while changing things.

PS: I really tried to get this in like a week ago, but life has been busy.

https://www.earthempires.com/...lan-gdi-in-alliance-51945

As some of you who hang out in discord might be aware, I've been trying to resurrect & finalize Pang's Clan GDI mechanic, partly to shake things up a bit, and partly as a result of some concerns about dwindling player time, which I get, personally having not a lot of time to commit.

So what does Clan GDI do?:

1) Clans in Clan GDI have a Y in the GDI column in the Clan list
2) Countries in Clans in Clan GDI:
- a) Cannot attack countries in clans that
-------- have not attacked them personally (all reset) OR
-------- have not attacked their clan recently (72 hours)
- b) Cannot attack countries in ANY CLAN without declaring war on that country
3) ALL COUNTRIES
- a) Cannot attack countries in Clans in Clan GDI that
-------- have not attacked them personally (all reset) OR
-------- have not attacked their clan recently (72 hours)
- b) Cannot attack countries in Clans in Clan GDI without declaring war on that country (if it's been more than 72 hours since last hit by that country)

Clans that JOIN Clan GDI *may not leave* for 10 days; and Clans that *LEAVE* Clan GDI may not rejoin for 10 days.

(NB: We originally were planning MMR requirements, but frankly that seems to have been the sticking point of all of this and why it was not finished 4 years ago, so for now, we will proceed without that.)

Note, spyops are not currently included in this mechanic. I will add that if it seems necessary in a coming reset.


I hope you all enjoy the new changes!

Best Regards,

- qzjul, Pang & the rest of the Dev Team

:-) I Try!

(Incidentally there were no FA packages on any server other than Alliance during this window)

Hi All,

I went through some of the other sorts of things that could have caused issues with the country_events table, and remembered that FA packages create a country event. So there was a bug where you could SEND an FA package, but then *not have it removed* from your country. But the other country would receive it.

There were a couple of pretty minor packages that were sent, before a pair of countries seem to figure out that this was a thing, and sent FA packages in a loop a couple of times. They have now been deleted for exploiting a bug.

The initial few seem incidental and small, but I'll do my best to wipe away anything from the explicit exploitation.

Thanks for bearing with me,

- qzjul

For the record, I try to run my decisions through at least one mod, as I am often a little out of touch with the current state of the game. That said! I like to think I'm unbiased, because I have literally no idea what is happening day-to-day on any server.

hah! We have pretty stable power!

As far as I can tell, there were none other than the KR

Not a bad idea; but tools are complicated sometimes.

Further clarification: there was zero oil bought during the glitch period

Turns out the market abusers were all bots! Well that simplifies my life.

Oh, and thanks for bearing with me, it's sometimes hard for me to find all the time the game deserves...

Hey all,

Apologies for the craziness yesterday; fyi the timeline was thus:
1) Server had a power failure; sadly, the battery backups failed *last month* and I was still trying to find where I can actually buy replacement batteries without having ridiculous shipping from the US

2) The country_events table had been corrupted due to improper shutdown; this meant that anything that generated an event (like, that would show up in the list on the main window) crashed part way; where depends on the exact code path; this resulted in some things being finalized, and others not

3) I brought up the bots, and they were erroring all over the place because of this, but I assumed the errors were w/ the bots; after about 30 mins of messing around with this, it was brought to my attn that it was actually a game problem;

4) I took the game offline, repaired the table, and brought it back

----

Then:

5) It came to our attention that some kills had been made with infinite turns; and that the market was screwy

So, because this was unique, it was decided that we'd del the countries that abused "infinite turns" bug, and resurrect the countries that had been killed; because there's not actually a way to do that with any sort of tool, I did it badly, and one of them was "re-killed" while it was kindof half-undead. So I resurrected it again.

Now, today, I looked into the market transactions, and we identified 3 countries that used "infinite spend" bug to buy out the market. I believe they'll be deleted.


Now, couple clarifications...

"Infinite" turns/spend bugs: Because of the way the bug happened, basically the events that were supposed to be recorded crashed the process; these typically are finalized *before* the playing country is saved. As far as I can tell, this effectively means that countries were able to spend their money over and over again (or use their turns/attacks), without actually getting any of the changes applied to their country. So, they bought bushels, but didn't *GET* the bushels; and didn't lose any money. BUT, the countries from whom bushels were purchased GOT money, and had their bushels purchased. But they would not get a notification about it.

Similarly with attacks. Because if they had, the turn/whatever would also have been removed.



As for whether or not we should have resurrected the countries in question; as it was a result of an exploit, and it SEEMED like a clean fix (the first time), it was decided that we could do that without affecting much. The subsequent kill complicated matters, but I figured since I'd kindof botched it the first time, it would be more fair to fix it than not. Zero hour decisions are hard sometimes.

Heh, yeaaaa I can relate to that "the one time that!!!" feeling lol ;)

Does anybody remember the reset that Mehul forgot to reset the server on the last day of alliance (somehow??); the reset just kept rolling for an extra day for no reason if I recall correctly...

The bot's handle is "Earth Empires" :-D

Hi All,

I'm very sorry for the upset & disappointment many of you will have had with the end of reset yesterday/today; I very much appreciate the amount of work that can go into countries over the reset.

Just an FYI as to what all happened, and where things are;
- I initiated a quick reboot to apply some changes that had built up, partly to do with trying to get a new dev environment set up
- We'd had a hard drive fail a few months back, but I'd forgotten to install grub onto it, and the server choked on boot
- Creation of USB recovery disks ensued, and the reset clocked by
- We agreed rolling back the end time would be best, so I did that
- I checked the code, and found that I'd written a function that should return everybody's goods in the case of a market table discrepancy years ago, and thought, perfect, that'll sort itself out
- After hearing that that was not the case, I examined the code more closely, and it appears that we erroneously added a block that set everything to zero right before re-calculating based on the market table, negating the bit that would return everybody's goods
- I have since released and pushed in a fix for that

Unfortunately, there's no way for us to track what countries had on market at the end of the reset - those tables get wiped at end reset; and the code that was *supposed* to handle discrepancies didn't work properly, and in fact erased the knowledge of what was there.

The only consolation I can really give is that we're hoping to actually get some development of some exciting new features done here in the next year; Slagpit has shown interest in development again, which has drawn pang & I into actually looking at things again, which is kinda exciting.

- qz

it'd need to be backed up on a turn-by-turn basis for that; there's no audit trail, if that's what you mean. I periodically back things up, but definitely not on a daily basis

I looked into the code, there was a bug in it that prevented the auto-give-back code from working; which has since been fixed. =(

Fixed; I copied the wrong timestamp yesterday apparently.

extended

errrr it shouldn't end at 0:54; i added 86400, let me look

(it effectively silently returns your goods)

yea, i think that code gives it the benefit of the doubt

if you have more in the "on market" column than it sees in the market.... it adds the difference to "owned"/actual goods and then resets the "on market" column to what it finds actually on market

it will not, however, notify you of this in any way

So... it *maaaay* have returned goods, and given people the benefit of the doubt? I don't remember how that code works; I forgot that it's slightly more complicated than just the reset numbers; the bot auto-deletes the market at end-reset

Hi guys -- as stated on Announcements: This was supposed to be a 5 min quick restart, but some hardware upgrades a few months ago meant it didn't come up correctly!

I've rolled back the FFA reset by 24h, so it doesn't affect so many people, by popular demand

This was supposed to be a 5 min quick restart, but some hardware upgrades a few months ago meant it didn't come up correctly!

FYI, I've rolled back the FFA reset by 24h, so it doesn't affect so many people, by popular demand

Sorry about that folks, I was looking at this a month ago, and thought I'd dealt with it properly, but must not have. Our domain setup is spread across three services so I think I missed one in the process...

I kinda liked limiting it on some combination of what you sent and such. But this seems like a good start.

congratz!

hah! Fair! I'll just have to actually get some things done =/

=D

How do I have 10000 posts....

Hm.

Congrats to all of you! =D I look forward to actually working with you all! I'm almost back to like actually being around...

Thanks to Pang for getting all this done, and jabroni and Bug & Requiem for helping!

I'm honestly really excited myself to get back into coding EE myself; It's really nice to see this move forward based on the API we've been constructing for a while; I'm hopeful that I'll be able to support the API side, and possibly match pace with bot features that I think will improve the health of the server and overall gameplay.

-qz

I approve this message! Seriously, good job Pang & jabroni & Bug & Requiem! Hopefully I'll get bots things going based on the additional API stuff they pushed through =D

*pokes in head*

I still like the idea of nerfing suiciders, as long as it can be done without nerfing warfare; I think Gerdler's ideas look good.

Biggest issue is that the code base is hard to deal with at this point. Needs refactoring.

I'd like to finish the API first, but then we could get into tweaks


The wiki is a little messed up since the migration, ya...

I called shaw and got the modem re-provisioned around then, has there been continuing problems? I'm trying to monitor.

Also I bought a new router, and am going to try installing shortly.

ya it was having some issues, I'm trying to diagnose wth is going on....

Sorry about the instability the last bit, I was testing for the move, and it broke; move went better though!

34

(Clarification: I found the errant code, but I don't know how it wasn't breaking before? Unless the bots literally just were still running since we changed it 6 months ago, which is entirely possible I suppose)

Should all be working. Not sure how that brokenness happened exactly.