RimBlock
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Cool, let me know when done and I will look at getting my Plot for Life up on my Git so we can try linking in.
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RimBlock,
Since you're the in-house SQL expert, I for one, looking very much forward to an improved version of the above SQL code from you [the original poster is away since Dec. 2013...]. Thanks in advance!
Not sure about that :) but I am happy to have a look.
I can work on the backend DB triggers and even the sqf code to disable the main menu whilst the inventoy is open but I have no PHP / web coding experience so to have a editable comment field connected to the player / username entry, someone else would have to put together the web frontend.
Will have a look over the weekend.
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Well, you pay for the server, so you do whatever you want really. You've run it successfully this far and you got yourself some awesome regulars, why should anything change?
We also get a lot of "this is how you should run your server" and "I used to run my own dayz and minecraft server succesfully, yet I am playing on yours, so here's how you run your server now..." type of guys... and I mean ... a lot.
Also think about it - people who has never had a server, they will only have inexperienced opinions and completely different (not necessary wrong in all cases) view on how stuff runs behind the curtain.
The "entitled generation" is the worst, imo. They are completely oblivious when it comes to questions like these, I'd strongly suggest thinking twice before taking any advice or opinions from them.
Yep but I am more looking at promoting a decent debate on the subject rather than looking for advice.
No doubt there will be good suggestion s that have and will be made based on this but that is not really the intention of the thread.
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I think we're sort of mixing up things a little here and looking back, it's mostly my fault...
This function really just allows you to track where a player comes into your server and uses a different name. It only writes an entry to the table if a player does this. So, is really handy if you want to keep track of who's who. This allows me know my players by their PID rather than name.
My comments on dupers/exploiters/others with warnings is simply that if someone intends to try and dupe again after a warning they normally always come back with a different name. So, this is also helpful for quickly spotting this. But, only is useful for this if they have changed their name.....anyway, my losing connection duping problem has been solved....see this link http://epochmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/12886-anti-duping-script/
My first post on this thread was to improve this function better by modifying it to do this:
1/ Show the original alias the player had changed from?
Currently when a new row is created, the contents tell you the new alias the player is using which, is also the indication that they had a different name before. But, to find out what the original alias was you still need to search back through log files. Could both aliases (old & new) be added to the row when it is created?
2/ Each row only shows each alias used once?
Currently, if a player toggles between two aliases, the same aliases keep being appended to the row. I think it would be better if in this example it only showed the 2 aliases and only added another if it was a new alias. I'm only keen to know who is who not, when they have been who...if that makes sense
Sure. Understand that two directions have merged :) .
Have seen the script to stop the duping and it is one way although I may go a slightly different direction (prompted by the original script you linked in) and look to disable whichever key opens the main menu (witht he abort option) whilst the inventory is open. This would be transparent and stop the duping as well.
Whilst the question has been answered by the code itsatrap has provided I would be more inclined to put a new alias for a playerUID in a seperate row and manage the rowcount with housekeeping as it will be easier, in my experience, to report on and manage. I would also timestamp the entries for better reconstruction abilities of events after the occured. Just different ways to solve the same issue though based on personal preference.
My suggestion was to further enhance a good idea to allow admins to add comments for the playerUIDs / names recording infractions accessable from a web based gui so there is an on-line record availabe to all admins. Should be pretty easy to do and could add a fair bit of value where you have multiple admins on a server dealing with some players who change their names to generic ones popular with a lot of players.
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Good info. Keep them comming.
How about players views who do not run servers. How do they expect an admin to behave and what should be allowed / not allowed to the admins.
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The community is not one single entity with one single view and as they say "You can't please all the people all of the time."
I still strongly believe that the people developing mods for Epoch should have some sort of insight as to what is going in to Epoch releases as it prevents us spending so much of our own personal time for something that may be pointless. A subforum for confirmed mod makers (people who have put out a mod that works for example). The mods can then put up a post saying that they are looking at improving aaa, bbb & ccc whithout needing to give specifics. Mod makers then know not to bother with those areas until the release is out.
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We have all heard of numerious servers where one or more of the server administrators are highlighted as abusing their admin powers.
This, I think, opens up a interesting topic on how admins should perform their tasks which may be different from players and admins points of views.
My own personal opinion (which I am fully aware may not match other server owners or players) is that there are two acceptible types of administration (with the possible combination of both).
1. Out of game administration.
Administration via RCON only. No in-game administration at all.
2. Referee Administration.
Have a character in-game who is not part of the game (activity wise) like a football ref. They perform admin tasks, check reports of abuse etc but do not participate in the game at all (no shooting, looting or rooting tooting). To make this doable, the admin should be in God mode with an easily identifiable skin and their may be a central base for the admins with vehicles etc to make the movement around the map fairly quick without hacks. Conversly they may also be configured so they cannot carry or hold weapons
If an admin wants to play the game they should use their own game character and not the admin character.
So what are other peoples views on my own views above and any other suggestions of their own and what is acceptible behaviour for admins and what is not ?. Please keep in mind that admins have tasks to perform and so expecting an admin to perform admin duties in-game but be a standard player if fairly unworkable (would you expect to have to wait 30minutes for an admin to walk across the map to check out a report you filed or to have a vehicle at their disposal ?).
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1. Why did you get into hosting?
I have hosted a minecraft server for the kids (3 of them) on my home lan for a while and see the satisfaction they get from playing in a safe and controllable environment. I came to Epoch by way of DayZ SA (although played OFP extensively before that) and liked the way I can run my own server, set the enviroment the way I want it and be sure the admins aren't being abusive (it is just me so that one is currently easy). I don't like the idea of spending hours of my time, the results of which are at the whim of a 3rd party and could vanish at any time and so try to make sure my server will be reliable and a safe haven for like minded people.
2. What are your likes/dislikes (with server hosting presumably)?
Likes
Setup the environment just the way I like it.
Meeting some great friendly and helpful people.
Sharing the experience.
Dislikes
People whos only purpose is to make others lives difficult (griefing, harrassing, bullying).
People from the over entitled generation who just whine constantly if they don't get what they want.
3. What have you sworn never to do, only to do later thinking "Fuck it"?
I host (will be) from home and have been looking to move to a 1Gbps fibre connection but have been waiting for the current 200Mbit connection contract to expire from another service provider. I then found out that my wife recontracted for another two years with the 200Mbit provider without checking with me so ended up arranging for a second fibre feed which is only really to be used for hosting my Epoch server.
4. What do you think of the Dayz community as a whole?
I have no real experience witht he DayZ community but the Epoch community is generally very good. I help where I can and others take the time to offer ideas and suggestions when I am looking to solve a problem and have not thought of a solution. It seems we can have a decent conversation on the forums here without decending in to insults or arguments even if people have different opinions which is fairly rare on the internet so it is pretty good from an Epoch point of view.
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Plot poles are there to restrict people building all sort of crap in inappropriate places and do a fairly good job. If you want a base then you should have to work or it.
Maintenance is there to give a pseudo realistic mechanism to an admin helper process that allows buildables that are placed naturally get removed if they are not actively wanted (i.e. not maintained). How effective this is depends on its configuration by the server owner but it can work pretty well. It also gives a motivation to earn gold one way or another, in order to keep your base so drives player activity to some extent.
I personally think the plot poles and maintenance are pretty good solutions to a couple of major issues for server owner / admins (although maintenance could be fine tuned a bit).
RB
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Thanks Rimblock, now I understand.
When I warn a player about anything I normally note their PID separately and ask my admins to do the same. This is normally dupers where we warn for the first offence and delete their items in storage down to 5 of everything except only 2 bc's and perm ban for repeated offence.
This is slightly different. If a player comes in and dupes again after a warning, they will most likely be using a different alias. thanks to this superb SQL above, I can now quickly look in that table to see if its the same player using a new identity as it links all their aliases by PID.
Firstly, just to make it clear, the trigger sql is great and I will probably look to be using it with a few small modifications. I don't want people to think I don't think this is a good idea, I do.
One part from your reply that puzzles me though.
If you are already logging playerUIDs that have been given infractions, why do you care about player names ?. Surely having an infractions table in the DB with playerUIDs and having a field for storing notes / details about infractions, editable from a web frontend will also serve the purpose in a single place. Not sure what tracking names will bring to the party if the decisions are made based on recored playerUIDs anyway.
Not trying to pick holes but just suggesting alternatives and trying to find out why this maybe better for some server owners in some cases.
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Someone logs on to the server called "Awesome". They do something bad and get a warning. Over the next month 3 other players join at different times and all call themselves "Awesome" (amongst other players). At the beginning of the 2nd month, a player called "awesome" does something bad. How to tell if it was the the person using the name awesome who was already warned or one of the other 3 awesome without additional records ?.Hi Rimblock, not sure I understand your post as the SQL provided above does track the player's aliases against the PID's.....
id uid PlayerNames
4 125xxx782 Zexxxay,Mxxxge
This is what it creates in the new Player alias table.....
The point being that multiple people can use the same name so how to tell which one has the warning X months down the line without something to link them to the warning.
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Due to the way any player can change their name to more or less anything you may get issues of a player changing their name to appear to be another player or just two players who happen to have chosen the same name (one good and one causing issues).
Would be better if there were a PHP utility that could allow admins to update the trigger populated table with 'notes" so you could take bans etc to a name at the time and tne report on the playerUIDs with notes to make sure you have the right playerUID of the idiot rather than the good buy...
Could end up with a player CIM system ;)
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Cool.
Now to go searching again for bitwise calculation alternatives in ARMA II :) .
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vbawol's hard work and earned respect isn't relative to this, sarcasm is due to the implication that I didn't get responses do to me not using paste bin.(duh I should have known)<<sarcasm. Being 24 hours old is also not relative. Many topics get replies in hours if not minutes. Due to the overwhelming responses I didn't feel to inclined to post anything more regarding my main post. Thanks for all the tips for future reference, will make sure and use paste bin ^^
Edit: I edited my original post using paste bin so not to use up hosting space.
The we are reading VBAwols response differently as I see no connection between him asking you to use pastebin and the fact you didn't get a reply, hence the suprise on the sarcastic response.
I have posts here that have no response at all after weeks like on bitwize calculations in Epoch / ARMA II. 18 days and no response positive or negative. I just take it that out of the 90+ people who have taken a look, no one has anything to add or share. Thats fine so I go take a look elsewhere.
Pastebin is probably the web server freindly way to do it but spoiler tag can also help if the text is not so long but still longer than a normal post (i.e. a bit of log output, sqf or cfg file contents etc). I will also need to look in to using them more if I need to post logs etc as well.
Taking the "you didn't reply to me so I am not going to help you" stance really doesn't add anything to the community. I find that helping others makes them more inclined to go out of their way to help you and tends to show you are not one of the "over entitled" generation. I help where I can (hadn't seen your post, experienced your error or used your hosting provider so nothing to add in this case) and get a fair bit back when required for other helpful people here.
Anyway, if you feel inclined to reveal what the issue was and how it was fixed then I am sure it will be of interest to others, if not now then possibly in the future. If not then no matter.
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Thanks for the support vbawol..I should have know to use paste bin to get a response. :blink:
Nope putting the log file on pastebin wont get you a response but is clearly better than posting pages and pages of your log file in the first post. Spoiler tags are also sometimes helpful as an alternative but then they still rely on you putting the data on the website which is funded by the Epoch team (upload / download / storage etc).
The alternative you seem to have gone for is;
- Dump your log in the post when asking for help.
- Complain when no-one has replied in the first 24 hours and when the great total of 25 people have viewed your thread.
- State that your hosting provider has fixed the issue but provide no information for anyone else who may encounter the issue in future on how it was fixed.
- Be sarcastic to the lead developer, who has put a large amount of time and effort in to providing the Epoch mod to all of us for free.
Not really the way I would have gone if I wanted help from the community now or in future.
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Zip file added to first post. That has pre-modified sqf files and directories for use on a clean install of vanilla Epoch (may overwrite other mods otherwise).l
Sorted out a coupe of lines in the install instructions that had "and replace" appended to them (issue with the forum editor).
Will look at the historical alignment sql tomorrow.
The zip downloaded was sanity tested with
- Placing a plot pole
- Building a half cinder wall
- Upgrading the cinder wall
- removing the cinder wall
- removing the plot pole
Have not tested tagging in the zip file but should be fine.
Enjoy.
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Check your fn_selfactions.sqf file as the part of the "show plot boundary" code that handles the removal of the menu item appears to be misconfigured so it is not being removed.
The option should be removed fromthe list when you look at another object. If you do not look at another object (i.e. you always look at the floor) then the option will remain. This is a limitation of the way it is coded and also affects the maintain area options as well. Check out post in this thread for a detailed explainantion on how the items appear and disappear from the menu.
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Your questions have been answered in OP. Wonderful feedback.
Cool, so it sounds like a '"GitHub DayZ enhancements branch Hub" (I have to stop myself adding another hub on the end :D ).
If so then yep, sounds good. A central point in the spiders web that all the enhancements are linked from in GitHub.
Might need a DayZ generic and an Epoch specific folder though as enhancements to the traders and building system are big factors in Epoch and are not in DayZ.
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And as expected I do not have any issues with charID-to-playerID conversion - proceeding with installation step #1 now.
Cool.
Hold off the historic realignment sql at the end of the install if you have more than 99 characterIDs in the character_data table. Locked doors use 3 digits and so you can have an overlap if you have valid characterIDs of XXX. I need to amend the code to exclude lockables which I will do tonight. The rest of the install is good though and will work fine.
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I tend to prefer to run a more realistic (ok, where possible) server so shy away from teleporting, banning etc unless the person is doing something that would not be possible in real life.
Sitting there trying multiple combinations is valid. It can be done in real life. Speed dialing the combinations via a keypress simulator is not and so introducing the medic animation between tries will help to close that problem off without putting in a limit to the number of tries. TBH if someone wants to waste their life trying all 999 combinations over X hours (ok, only 2.7 hours max with a 10sec delay between tries) to get in a door in a computer game then at least it keeps them off the streets ;) . So all you people with padlocks with only three tumblers, a thief could get it open fairly quickly just trying the combinations in sequence.
Safes can quite reasonibly have a valid number of tries before needing a reset.
People using various scripts / tools / hacks can look at the codes for doors / locks and this is what this enhancement is designed to stop.
If you are going to teleport them then maybe make it entertaining. Zombie pit at Stary with broken legs and they respawn on death as an undying zombie. I hate respawning as a zombie :) ...
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Hello,
I do not have the Gold edition ArmA 2.
The playerUID field can have numbers and characters. BIS changed their policy Anniversary with the annirversory edition and has started to include letters in the playerUID field.
If you are building and maintaining the Linux version then you may want to take this in to account or more and more players may have the issue going forwards.
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Ok, so having an ideas back and forth with OtterNas3 and we got to chating about this problem. From that discussion I think there is a fairly viable way to secure the safes and other lockables codes without encryption.
The codes would be stored in a serverside array on object load and not sent to the clients (the characterID variable attached to the lockable will be 0). The client will send the code to the server for validation. Nothing changes in the data stored in the DB for the object. The code is still saved in the characterID field where admins can view it.
Adding the animation for unlocking (good old medic anim) and the ability for the owner to reset the code via self service and we should be good.
I will be having a look at this very shortly (maybe start the design and coding next week).
RB
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I so want to install this, but just know the second I get it working 1.5 will come out.
Haha, I know your pain. The stuff I am spending hours on at the moment I am just hoping will not become obsolete when 1.0.5 is out (doubt it for the refueling stuff though).
I will amend this for 1.0.5 if needed though so no need to worry too much.
I will look at packaging it up as a download tonight. Have been saying I would for a while but have never got round to it as I have to build another test server in order to do it which is a fiar bit of work / time. Will give it priority and get the historicals update SQL sorted out so it ignores locakbles as well.
RB
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@Rimblock: p3d models comes with multple LODs that also defines collisions, they can't be removed, even epoch preview models uses seperate p3d model with alpha on texture (_ca.paa suffix), that's all there is to it:
There is no easy way to stop collision in Arma, unless the model is made to not collide to begin with.
Thanks for the info guys.
Seems ARMA 3 has a diablecollisionwith command which would probably work for the A3 Epoch when it comes out (vehicle to vehicle so player to buildable should be ok).
[1.0.5] Suggestions
in General Discussion.
Posted
arma2net is a mod that allows you to access the backend DB from within ARMA II sqf scripts. As DayZ Mod and therefore Epoch are sitting on ARMA II it can be used within EPoch as well.
I have had issues with arma2net, which I believe are down to incompatible Dot Net versions in the newer versions of Windows, but from the infomation Sandbird has provided in his threads, it would seem fairly easy to use.
The only caution would be that you would then have a dependancy on another third party mod and it being kept up to date and any other third party addons it uses (i.e. mono).
I agree 100% with Sandbird that an open call for DB access would be fantastic but also understand that the hiveext.dll stuff is not part of Epoch but a standalone project that was utilised by DayZ and so also used by Epoch for their backend hive. The GitHub with the source code is available here. The Epoch team may not have developers with knowledge of C++ and may not want to take on the maintenance of this code if they modified it which I can fully understand.
I would imagine it is unlikely the original author will amend it as the Git is not being actively developed based on recent activity (6 months ago).
If there are any c++ devs out there who want ot have a go then please do.