Warzone 2100 Forums

Mods: feel free to move if this is the wrong forum. I tried to find a good place to put it.

I got very tired of running two copies of Warzone 2100 to monitor the lobby games, and the constant need to click refresh. As a few of you may know, the aqu4bot IRC bot is my project and contains code that can fetch a list of games from the lobby using the same means the game itself does.

It was convenient to do it via IRC or with wzbot, but even that was an irritant. So I grabbed the code for aqu4's network core and the wz.c file for lobby communications, and made a simple, CLI lobby monitor for Linux and Windows.

Version 0.4+ updates every 15 seconds, and the delay can be increased via e.g. --refresh=45
You can also specify --enterkey to only refresh when enter is struck.

The link to the source is here: https://github.com/Subsentient/wzblue

DOWNLOADS:
A working Windows executable for the current release is here: http://universe2.us/collector/wzblue-0.4.exe
And a tarball for other operating systems here: https://github.com/Subsentient/wzblue/a ... 0.4.tar.gz


UPDATE: Fixed link to windows executable.
UPDATE: Updated to version 0.2. List of changes to follow.
UPDATE: Updated to version 0.3. List of changes to follow.
UPDATE: Updated to version 0.4. List of changes to follow.

Version 0.2 has been released. It includes a number of improvements:

**New color coded labels for easier reading.
Red is full, yellow is private, magenta is modded, and green is open/joinable.

**Support for MOTD on wz2100.net lobbies, and improved formatting for Warzone 2100 Legacy lobbies.

**Proper identification of modded games with mod list.
No more trying to join to find out someone put a map in the mods/autoload folder.


**Refresh time set to a mandatory 10 seconds, ability to reduce refresh time removed.

Along with other miscellanious formatting changes.

**Refresh time set to a mandatory 10 seconds,

This is causing problems. It blows up the server logs and is essentially creating a Denial of Service attack on the server. Please set the refresh rate to a more reasonable value.

It would be unfortunate if we had to take steps to deal with this.

stiv wrote:Please set the refresh rate to a more reasonable value.
It would be unfortunate if we had to take steps to deal with this.

I've got 60 secs in my launcher. Is it fine ?

stiv wrote:It would be unfortunate if we had to take steps to deal with this.

Your threats are unappreciated. 10 seconds was an increase from the 7 seconds default (3 second minimum) of the previous version, implemented as an attempt to resolve this issue, as I had promised to vexed.

Why the hell are you logging every single 'list' request? What meaningful information can be had? What if warzone's usage increased 700%?

I'd be happy to work with you on this, but you get more flies with honey than vinegar.

Listen, I made an attempt to correct the problem at the request of vexed, and I heard no more of it until today, when you resulted to intimidation.

I'll increase it to 30 seconds, and re-add the option to INCREASE the refresh delay. I have map-mod identification worked out properly so I was planning on something like this anyways.

Terminator wrote:I've got 60 secs in my launcher. Is it fine ?

It had damn well better be.

@stiv: Seriously, if there's a problem, or you don't find my solutions good enough, talk to me before getting your panties in a twist. I'm not an a****, and as far as I knew, it was taken care of.

Version 0.3 released.

See top post for download links.

** Map mod detection. Map-mods can now be detected by WZBlue for non-Legacy lobby servers. **

** Increase in refresh delay. 10 second delay of previous release was apparently still causing problems for the server, so increased to 30, and added the ability to increase it further.**

** Portability fix! WZBlue is now known to compile and work on Mac OS X without modification.
Extract the tarball or clone the repository, cd to the new directory, and type 'make' to build, and ./wzblue to start.**

Terminator wrote:I've got 60 secs in my launcher. Is it fine ?

That seems like a reasonable value.

(deleted for the good of Warzone by bendib. This technology has been abused by users where it's apparently becoming a constant DDOS.)

Well.. fixed... as in, you aren't banned anymore.
Too many connections per the time frame gets you banned.

maybe dumb Q. Can lobby refreshes be handled server side for connected clients at admins choice? with the refresh button therefore I suppose someone could dos manually by refreshing with the existing button if they click enough times too

They can. A lot of users click the refresh rate twice a second when they're waiting for a game to appear in the lobby.

BEHOLD! I have revived WZBlue and I am working on a graphical frontend! It's nearly complete. Minimum refresh time is 5 secs, won't go lower than that, but defaults to 10. Not releasing any code until I've ironed out any potentially problematic bugs.

I'm trying to get it right this time, and prevent it from being a huge burden on the lobby server, which is what caused issues last time.

A nice feature here is you can click the Join button, and it fires WZ up to directly join that game.