[AA's AMAA]

1 hour ago, Krossarn said:

What do you like more. 
Playing the game or coding it?

 

It should really be the former, but at the moment it’s definitely the latter. I don’t like highpop so I just work on things on the side.

[AA's AMAA]

2 hours ago, Veterankyl said:

What are your favorite kinds of admin events to run? Do you like RP/Story stuff, giving the crew challenges, absolute chaos, or perhaps something else?

I dont run events 

[AA's AMAA]

2 minutes ago, AzuleUtama said:

If there was any one change / addition / deletion you could immediately implement into the codebase, what would it be and why? Ignoring factors like getting headmin approval or the development time / effort required.

Getting all of our pending map edits in instantly

[AA's AMAA]

9 hours ago, Froststahr said:

Have you considered using winrar to compress the memory itd put the extra CPU cores to good use and make smaller? itd be a good idea i think yeah

Aahahahhahahahah

I wish

 

9 hours ago, Froststahr said:

How optimistic are you about the current state of projects meant to replace byond? SS14 primarily, opendream I guess too

I think they will co-exist, but never fully replace BYOND. Every server already has their foundations on BYOND, their existing code teams, their people with accounts, etc etc.

Switching to SS14 for example would invalidate our entire coder team and our maint team as its an entirely new lang. Opendream may get somewhere as it still uses DM, but I see that as like, the replacement for when BYOND kicks the bucket. 

[AA's AMAA]

1 hour ago, Sonador said:

Really stupid question, but is it possible to hex edit or patch the executable to force it to be large address aware (at least to the degree a 32-bit process will allow?) I'm assuming if it were possible, it'd be done already, but a lot of older games I play, people have found methods to force them to enable more RAM usage.

There is a registry tweak you can do to allow it to use up to 4GB, but BYOND itself is only capable of addressing to 1.8GB, so the moment you go over that limit, you run into major stability issues and stuff starts to fall apart very quickly .

[AA's AMAA]

1 hour ago, Woje said:

Okay and now the best.

Lack of TG bloat so we can actually sustain >60 players without running out of memory.

For context, DD caps out at 1.8GB of RAM

[AA's AMAA]

11 minutes ago, Woje said:

Okay another one.
What is the stupidest feature of paracode and why?

Vox

 

In all seriousness, the dorms pool controller. It has no use unless someone emags it once per millennia, and used to cause horrific turf init issues 

[AA's AMAA]

4 minutes ago, MrChocolat said:

Yo, 

Cats or dogs? 

I have had both and I like both, they are nice pets

 

5 minutes ago, MrChocolat said:

Would you rather say Pain au chocolat or Chocolatine ? (French debate and it is still very hard to convince everyone) 

The former

[AA's AMAA]

Just now, Coolrune206 said:

Do you support "Improve, don't remove" or do you think that certain things aren't worth the time improving and should just be removed altogether?

I am fucking tired of this being thrown around as a buzzphrase on the github to the point where I will actively call people out who throw this out. 

[AA's AMAA]

2 hours ago, Cocacolagua said:

What is your opinion on off-station content such as gateways, space ruins and lavaland?

What is your most liked / disliked antagonist?

Do you think species should each be unique balance-wise, unique aesthetic-wise, both, or another measure?

I like off-station content because it makes stuff feel less packed on station

I really like the idea of wizard because of the chaos, and absolutely hate revs

I think they should be both 

 

1 hour ago, Coolrune206 said:

Why?

Yes

[What Government Structure does Paradise Station Follow?]

12 hours ago, Sirryan2002 said:

Heads of Staff: Heads of staff have the most authority over the server, they have decision making powers as well as control over the docket(a.k.a what issues get voted on). However, they are limited by a few things. Staff hiring is voted on by the staff and not solely by the Heads of staff. They share power over what changes are made to the codebase and can be vetoed regarding decisions towards DB/Hosting. Finally, there are three of them, each limiting each others power. Game Admins and CMs also play a role here but I'll get to that later.

 

12 hours ago, Sirryan2002 said:

Maintainers: Maintainers have the most authority over the codebase and contributions made to the server. However they are limited by Head of Staff vetoes and minorly the opinions of PRRs and Contributors. 

 

Heads of Staff and Maintainers share the same authority/weight in making codebase decisions, with a few exceptions:

• Heads have no vote on fix or refactor PRs
• Heads can object on design solely, maintainers can object on design and implementation
• Heads cannot veto a PR singlehandedly, nor can maintainers unless:
  • The PR has copyright/legal/license issues
  • The PR is going to cause horrific issues to the server down the road due to implementation
• The server host has no decision in pull requests, apart from an implementation veto regarding technical matters. They cannot veto on design principles.
  • Examples include tooling that runs server side, extra libraries for the server, data storage methods, etc etc

 

The three arms of the staff team (Heads - Host - Maints) tend to govern themselves and subordinates, however the heads have input in hiring/firing in each arm, and can be seen as the general overseers 

 

[What Government Structure does Paradise Station Follow?]

 

I powerpointed it up and tweaked it to how it runs, as far as I know

[Consider the dynamic game mode]

@MxNimbus433I was unaware of the threat level thing, after reading up, this seems fine.

 

 

Objection withdrawn. 

[Consider the dynamic game mode]

Not in favour

 

Wizard + Nukies + Cult in the same round? No thanks 

[Addition to the Mapping Standards section of contribution guidelines]

15 hours ago, PPI said:

Also mentioning something about fastdmm

This project has been dead for multiple years 

[ImageMagick Issues]

 

@Sirryan2002 should be fixed now 

[The Argument for a Wiki Admin]

@Shadeykins and @Sirryan2002 are now wiki managers 

[AA's AMAA]

8 minutes ago, Krossarn said:

What’s your thoughts about the server ’high’ population on the current map and available job slots?

Also, what’s your coding priority as of now?

Keep up the good work!

High pop has always been a dislike for me for to performance, lack of job slots and a low RP level due to so much chaos, but everyone else seems to enjoy it so I’m not going to be a dictator and change it.

 Code priorities shifted recently and as of now my priority is implementing 2FA for BYOND accounts on the server.

[AA's AMAA]

7 minutes ago, Veterankyl said:

What's your dream feature/addition for the server that wouldn't be a port/feature from another server?

I would love more advanced ingame scripting/nerd shit to do because I found that really entertaining, but sadly its too performance intensive to evaluate it all at runtime and manage, so its unlikely we will ever get something like that again. 

[AA's AMAA]

44 minutes ago, Pckables said:

In your opinion, what is Paradise's biggest selling point that separates it from other servers at the moment?

I honestly dont know. We have a lot of species variety and the karma jobs are nice, but as well as this, its nice being a standout server on the hub that isnt just "oh hey were yet another cookie-cutter TG downstream" 

[AA's AMAA]

3 minutes ago, Esenno said:

So are these deals in USD, GBP, or European Monopoly money?

USD because spark is US so its easier for him to convert

[AA's AMAA]

3 minutes ago, Spacemanspark said:

Give me $5000

Were not doing this forever. 

Give me $50,000, no more offers

[2021 - A space (hosting) odyssey]

Conclusion post

 

This is just a tiny glimpse into the hell of hosting, and why it takes so many hours and why its so draining on people. This entire thread only covers some of my issues, and doesnt even go into

• VPN Hell
• Thread-pinning to avoid resource conflicts
• Juggling multiple IPs 
• DNS
• Webserver mail sending hell
• DNS
• Did I mention DNS? 

 

So yeah, this is why the git has been a bit slow. Theres been a lot to deal with, and an entire mix of IRL hell too. But hey, atleast things are where they are now. 

[2021 - A space (hosting) odyssey]

Chapter 10 (BONUS CHAPTER) - Remotely managing a server where you dont have a KVM/IPMI console 

 

So as I mentioned in chapter 2, IPMI is super nice as you can do full hardware level access without being there. However, the secondary server I bought did not have this as standard. Let me give some context.

As well as the primary server in NYC, we needed another server to handle being an offsite backup incase the NYC datacentre burns to the floor or theres a natural disaster or whatever. Because of location (and pricing), I got a backup server in germany. Germany was great since its almost on the opposite side of the world to NYC, and the way I see it, if there is a natural disaster that affects both NYC and germany at the same time, paradise isnt my priority, finding a nuclear bunker is. Anyways, the server had the following:

• An i7-2600 CPU
• 16GB RAM
• 2x3TB HDDs
• 1 Gigabit symmetrical internet

This was plenty for backup resources, and for only £25 a month it was great, however, this is where the problems begin. There is no IPMI, only a "rescue system", which is where the real chaos begins. To install the backup server OS, I had to:

1. Boot into the rescue system
2. Get an ISO of the backup server
3. Make a VM in the rescue system that uses the real HDD as a virtual drive
4. Open the VM window over VNC so I could actually use it and install stuff 
5. Close the rescue system and restart the host OS, praying that it comes back up

.... and it didnt come back up.

Now, the provider does allow you to get a KVM console, but there are some catches:

• You only get a 3 hour lease on it
• Theres no virtual media or hardware control, just a keyboard, mouse and monitor
• The compression and input latency is horrific

To give you an idea of what I mean on the third point, have you ever used a keyboard with a full second of latency on keyup and keydown? If you held a key for a split second, it would type 5 of that letter at the other end, which makes entering stuff you cant see (like passwords) very unfun.

Oh, and in regards to the compression, this is a windows login screen

However, in a weird turn of events, this was the rescue system with ludicrous compression

It kinda has an old abandoned terminal aesthetic to it that I actually kinda like. 

 

After an hour of screwing around with horrific latency, I had the system actually boot properly and have its external IP set, which meant I could finally configure the backup server to backup the main server. 

[2021 - A space (hosting) odyssey]

Chapter 9 - The woes of getting logs into a nice viewer without killing the CPU

 

So, if youre an admin you already know this, but admins have a fancy webtool thingy to look at logs (Courtesy of Denghis and his wizardry). However, you need some way to get the logs into that (In real time keep in mind). At first I ran the importer on the gameserver, but that caused servere resource issues, which I wasnt having because BYOND needs to be the most performant thing running on that machine.

To try and combat this, I made a shared folder for the logs and mapped it on the logging server. I thought this would be the solution, but the log importer doesnt like network shares and kept throwing errors out, crippling the import process.

A lot of tinkering and tuning later, we finally had the log importer running on the gamserver again without nuking the entire CPU. This made admins happy because they could use log webtools again.