Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Suggestion: Become independent from buildandshoot.com #553

Open
ordealx opened this issue Jan 18, 2017 · 26 comments
Open

Suggestion: Become independent from buildandshoot.com #553

ordealx opened this issue Jan 18, 2017 · 26 comments

Comments

@ordealx
Copy link

ordealx commented Jan 18, 2017

Seeing that buildandshoot.com has been in constant decline over the last years and now appears to be abandoned by its owners, i want to suggest to take precautions in case it suddenly becomes completely unavailable. I think it would be great to see a independent masterserver and maybe even a proper forum to build up a community focussed on OpenSpades.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

On a side note, if someone could clue me in: Do we even need the master server? It is very convenient to have a list, but if the master server was taken offline, could you still manually join the other servers?

I've tried to find information on the aos:// URIs, but haven't. It seems that they go aos://<SOME SERVER ID>:<PORT?>:<VERSION>, with a server ID assigned by the master server. If so, that would mean you can't play without connecting to the master server, or play servers that aren't in the list.

If it is not possible to join with only the IP address? Because if not, I think that is a very important feature to be added.

On a side note, it is probably a good idea to backup the server list JSON (http://services.buildandshoot.com/serverlist.json) periodically, in case it goes down; it would likely help in building a new list.

@feikname
Copy link
Collaborator

feikname commented Jan 18, 2017

@IPBX although not necessary, the master server list is a very practical feature. I'd hate to to not be able to browse the server list from OpenSpades.

Having said that, aos:// URIs can be converted to their respective IP addresses and are independent of the master server list. There is even an online tool made exactly for that.

Also, piqueserver is a work-in-progress continuation of the current PySpades/PySnip which we started recently, so supposing people adopt it, it'd be quite possible to update the default master server list of new (and maybe the old ones) servers from there.

I think we should try to contact BuildThenSnip LLC first, to know if they plan to keep their project and the master server list, this is a kind of change that should be taken very rarely, if taken at all.

EDIT: Just fixing some typos.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

@feikname Thanks! I wasn't suggesting we get rid of the master server, only take precaution so that OpenSpades is still usable without it, but as you've shown, it already is.

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

VelocityRa commented Jan 18, 2017

@IBPX Here's the code that handles it in OS.

There's no server ID assigned by the master server, it's just the server IP encoded in a certain way. The 'normal' way with 4 numbers seperated by periods (for example 123.123.123.123) is also acceptable judging by the code.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

The 'normal' way with 4 numbers seperated by periods (for example 123.123.123.123) is also acceptable judging by the code.

Do you know if it's acceptable in regular AoS 0.75/0.76 as well?

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

I don't know for sure, but if the code for that is there, chances are that it is.

@noway
Copy link
Contributor

noway commented Jan 18, 2017

aos vanilla uses integer representation of IP address in a little endian manner

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

VelocityRa commented Jan 18, 2017

Yes that's the way pretty much all aos URIs that you come across are encoded in, but does the client also accept normal IP formatting as well? That's what was asked.

OS includes that behaviour, so I assumed above that the client accepts those too.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

Yes that's the way pretty much all aos URIs that you come across are encoded in, but does the client also accept normal IP formatting as well?

Because if so, I'm not entirely sure why AoS even uses the encoded IPs in aos:// URis, instead of normal ones.

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

That's used so that clicking on a aos:// link from a browser, or opening it from a shortcut can be made to automatically start the client. It's one great use of URIs, it's used in a lot of applications.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

@VelocityRa I meant why doesn't just use aos://123.123.123.123 URIs, with normal IPs? I understand why the aos:// URIs are used, they're very nice.

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

VelocityRa commented Jan 18, 2017

Ah, yeah I'm not sure why really.

Two reasons of the top off my head are that it's a less compact encoding and more of a fuss to parse/decode?
The reason we represent IPs that way is human readability only anyway, so the only reason in favour of picking that is just that; readability. People wouldn't need to read those as normal IPs anyway, (they could just share them as is) so it kinda makes sense they didn't.

@IBPX
Copy link

IBPX commented Jan 18, 2017

I suppose so.

The only reason not to do that, I guess, is that it's harder for people to take their IP and turn it into an aos:// URI, but seeing as it seems you can use a regular "human-encoded" IP anyway, I doesn't seem to be a problem.

Thanks for the help.

@VelocityRa
Copy link
Collaborator

VelocityRa commented Jan 18, 2017

I don't think server admins would need to do that. I'm not sure about the process but most likely they just submit their IP to the master serverlist and that is done automatically (or by whoever manages it).

You're welcome :)

@NotAFile
Copy link
Contributor

What would be possible is for both OpenSpades and Piqueserver to get a list a list of fallback master servers from e.g. raw.github.com, so all servers switch over gracefully in case buildandshoot goes down. If somebody wants to implement something like that I wouldn't stop them but I'm not really sure it's at all necessary.

@feikname
Copy link
Collaborator

For the sake of information:

According to the Internet Archive, BuildAndShoot has entered maintenance mode since at least October 28, 2016. Which would mean they have been like this for 2 months and 20 days at minimum.

@100best
Copy link

100best commented Jan 19, 2017

I think a peer-to-peer master server might be nice that way no one has to host it (ex: clients host it), maybe even a peer-to-peer server would also be good because it works with closed ports (ex: routers).

@noway
Copy link
Contributor

noway commented Jan 19, 2017

In local network, even Bonjour/ZeroConf can be used!

Well, at least in local. Or some kind of DHT-like system.

But probably it's not worth implementing

@noway
Copy link
Contributor

noway commented Jan 21, 2017

for a centralized master server some kind of BaaS/PaaS can be used: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#paas
Some of them go for free. For example now offers 1GB/month bandwidth for OSS deploys.

@kmsiapps
Copy link
Contributor

kmsiapps commented Jan 22, 2017

image

Mmm.. It seems like BnS website is broken now.

EDIT by feikname: changed the screenshot, because the original one was vertically huge. (screenshot_2017-01-22-14-32-28)

@feikname
Copy link
Collaborator

Judging by the looks seems like they're about to upload a new website.

@NotAFile
Copy link
Contributor

The homepage is fine again currently, but it seems the forum has dissapeared, not sure if that is a new change

@ordealx
Copy link
Author

ordealx commented Jan 30, 2017

the homepage is the same "under construction" type now as it was before. only showing serverlist, no forum or any other sites they used to have. it is like this for almost 4 month now

@wokawoka
Copy link

wokawoka commented May 20, 2017

The buildandshoot master server seems down. I can't retreive the server list from the game and there are no servers listed on the public servers section of the buildandshoot.com page (it shoes just a loading servers ... screen). Does anybody know the address of an alternative master server and how to change the address in the openspades config? Thank you!

EDIT: sorry, the buildandshoot master server is back working again, but my question is still valid: is there an alternative master server available?

@yvt
Copy link
Owner

yvt commented May 20, 2017

Does anybody know the address of an alternative master server

None AFAIK. This website provides an alternate server list (probably by fetching from buildandshoot.com or having a prepopulated list) but does not provide an API endpoint. At least you can manually copy server URLs from there.

and how to change the address in the openspades config?

Change cl_serverListUrl from http://services.buildandshoot.com/serverlist.json to whatever master server API endpoint you found

@wokawoka
Copy link

Alright, thank you for your answer!
Unfortunately today apparently the master servers is having problems as periodically I'm still experiencing errors in connecting to it. Let's hope that it wil lnot leave us. In that case http://aos.acornserver.com/ would be a good resource to find servers (even if I believe that most of the players would not connect without having a master server ).
Thank you again!

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

10 participants