Re: (mEAn) ServerLoader forum is silent, what to do?
 

For some reason I thing a rearrangement is in order, but I'm not sure what it should look like just yet.

Re: (mEAn) ServerLoader forum is silent, what to do?
 

I've posted about this on the Coordinators forum at United Admins. I will send out an email to all the members of the board as well, just to let them know what we have started talking about.

Maybe what you here at Bots United could do is discuss this and see if all of you really are interested in working with United Admins on this project. If you are, perhaps you could appoint a coordinator to work as a liaison to get things rolling.

Just a note of caution though. :) I wouldn't want anyone coming into this with unrealistic expectations. United Admins is a pretty big organization, and, if you had access to the Coordinators forums, etc. you would quickly come to realize that communication isn't always perfect, and sometimes things take alot longer to be done than they should.

My point here is that alot of the success of the project will depend on the efforts of the coordinator you appoint. It will take some patience and persistance to get access to things that might interest you, such as the Titan project.

Anyway, I am sure that all of you, having developed your own software, understand the challenges that you will face better than I do. I just want you to know that I think the idea for this project is a fantastic one, and I will do everything in my power to support it officially in my position as Marine Bot coordinator at United Admins.

Marine Bot is a bot for Firearms only, and Frank McNeil and the others don't seem to be very interested in working on anything bigger at this point, which is not a problem, but part of my mandate as Marine Bot coordinator was to move beyond supporting one mod, or even one gaming platform, and this project really sounds like the ideal way to do it.

Re: (mEAn) ServerLoader forum is silent, what to do?
 

I know what you mean. I've already notified United Admins some time ago about Bots United and I've been invited by the Titan crew to discuss with them about the possible cooperation between bot coders and Titan so as to have Titan provide enough features to support bot plugins. What struck me immediately is that whether these guys are United, they are nonetheless Admins. And only this. They think in terms of administrative plugins ONLY, have an administrative style of coding, and they firmly believe all is needed for their Titan to work is just to hook EVENTS in the game (a player has connected. Player X killed player Y. The bomb has been planted.) I've been trying to make them open their eyes on what a real-time abstraction of the game data would make possible and WHY it was needed, but nobody didn't seem to be interested in what I was saying :(

I have the feeling they believe all a game is about and all they'll ever need is a succession of dates in time, like a HL server log. They seemed surprised when I asked them about more.

Also, they talk very much :) They spend ages designing complex OO interfaces and APIs, writing reference documents and a lot of complicated hierarchical procedures, before getting any snippet of code to work. Luckily for them the coders for their main projects (anti-cheat and stats) don't wait for the discussions to finish and are not inactive. I understand the need to write drafts and have guidelines, but guidelines are what they are: guidelines ; not a minuted plan of what I gotta code in 3 hours 14 minutes and 53 seconds and how :D (note: I exxagerate a lot, they're not at this point, but they talk a lot indeed).

Anyway, since while I was discussing with the Titan UA crew there has been no comment to the suggestions I made, I turned over to Bots United completely this time. I still believe we've got lots to learn by working together with them, but I wouldn't expect too much of their Titan: although their idea is brilliant, it lacks of audacity in the implementation. And I agree with botmeister, we must remain in full control no matter what happens.

Re: (mEAn) ServerLoader forum is silent, what to do?
 

I wholeheartedly agree with this as well. Based on my experience though I don't think this will be an issue with United Admins. There has basically been 0 interference with Marine Bot since we joined them.