Biocross Server Management System

In terms of interoperability with FLHook what would you like to see, personally I’m not TOO familiar with FLHook, but I’ve noted through testing the ini files it leaves behind - they could easily be parsed for info - anything else?

Basically to use FLHooks kick/ban/msg functions.
I know, you can use the FLServer gui for that as well, but thats not very nice

You can communicate with FLHook easily via a socket connection. The socket connection also features an eventmode, you could use that to display in a special window of your server operator whats going on at the server, like who is killing who, who is respawning where, etc…

1st. ;D THIS looks VERY promissing.

2nd. PLEASE
@HazardFN:

……I was thinking maybe adding my own ranking system with in it …

Atm we are discussing a concept for our next version,
were we would like 2 “bypass” the ranking system with
one or two special rep(s) and the reputation level the player got with that/those faction(s)
based on online time / mission / npc kills / frags.

Depending on that, we would like to set the rep of the player,
so he/she can get some xtra goodies (4 example access 2 battleships),
when reaching a certain reputation.

Backdraw:
AFAIK we would have 2 set the rep “by hand”.
And getting something like this, which would completely bypass the money based
FL ranking system would be great. ;D

Just realease some new pictures over at Freeworlds new forum - check them out it features the new mdi tabbed interface I have been working on for the character editor…

Love the FLHook idea - any chance you could give me any info on how to connect to FLhook via a socket connection and how to encapsulate the event mode?

And I always thought you could configure FLStat to order its ranking output in an order you like - or were you thinking of something else? If you weren’t thinking of something else and FLStat does just order by money then this can be ordered by anything that is contained within the PlayerXML decoded straight from the FL File itself!

That’s a shiny new operator you’re doing there, nice job…

Just a short comment, one of the screenshots is labeled/named “Working With Discovery Mod” but those bases listed there are in no way from Discovery… but that’s not really important, maybe just a mistake, it just hooked my sight…

Your right there I meant freeworlds - bear mind I post these at 3 - 4 (GMT) in the morning lmao thank you for pointing that out will edit that - Here are the images of the tabbed player editor

As you can see the player editor works WITH the search - next feature here after I have wrote the modify code for FL Files is the ability to rename the tabs to whatever you like - for example Player Seach could be come Sith or Jedi etc.

would you have to make up data files so i could recognise ships and weapons

Biocross comes with a file converter that converts all original IONCross GAMEDATA into XML - it’s not perfect and you should really hand check them quickly afterwards to see that everything is OK!

So the answer is no-ish you can just send the files into the converter and as long as they are properly formatted and contain no & characters everything will be fine - if they do contain & characters do a quick find and replace and replace theme with ‘and’. I’m thinking of building that automatically into the converter.

The converter is finished so I will release that now possibly so all server admins get a chance to see how it works…

In addition:
There’s a “gamedata creator” by Lancer Solurus,
which works pretty well.
(Not sure if it’s already hosted here)

Love the FLHook idea - any chance you could give me any info on how to connect to FLhook via a socket connection and how to encapsulate the event mode?

Take a look at the FLHook readme, it should all be explained very well.

This is a whole different kind of GAMEDATA no more text files as Biocross doesn’t use them any more - it uses a refined and quicker XML format.

You may now download my GAMEDATA2XML program now, includes an added test XML button for the purposes of the beta! No documentation but you should figure it out - if you can’t or find it fairly difficult let me know and I’ll write a tutorial for you guys good luck, and I really hope this converter makes the job of converting your GAMEDATA to Biocross easier!
http://www.redhazard.spacialhosting.com/Biosoft GAMEDATA2XML/Biosoft GAMEDATA2XML Setup.msi

You will need the latest .NET Framework 3.5 from Microsoft’s Web Site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=333325FD-AE52-4E35-B531-508D977D32A6&displaylang=en

No validation is required so no WGA sniffing your arse

Just finished a new feature to do with the player editor and the tabbed searches - it’s a fairly simple feature… that involves naming your search tabs!

In case your wondering “there are more damn sith on the server than that” these are just a select few of the servers fl files I’ve copied over for testing purposes

btw.: Does your server operator support at minimum 100 000 chars?

Because we have like 60 000 or something

Supports as many numbers as your willing to hold - your intial load will take a long time generating the XML Cache but after that things SHOULD go smoothly as it syncs from then on - if IONCross can do it this can, however because its got so many more features your memory and cpu usage may rise a little :S

But if your willing to let me test the program on your server we can find out how well it handles these players any time you like (no FL files will be touched or written to - just a simple read and cache)

Perhaps we could set up a benchmark to see if IFSO is faster - Sushi is convinced Biocross is faster by a long shot after it’s initially loaded, especially the advanced search page.

In my opinion, the simple fact Biocross is actively supported while IFSO isn’t is already a big plus in the former’s favor

Just curious, have you heard of that Plasma operator? Another guy’s building that up over at FLC.

@HazardFN:

Supports as many numbers as your willing to hold - your intial load will take a long time generating the XML Cache but after that things SHOULD go smoothly as it syncs from then on - if IONCross can do it this can, however because its got so many more features your memory and cpu usage may rise a little :S

But if your willing to let me test the program on your server we can find out how well it handles these players any time you like (no FL files will be touched or written to - just a simple read and cache)

Perhaps we could set up a benchmark to see if IFSO is faster - Sushi is convinced Biocross is faster by a long shot after it’s initially loaded, especially the advanced search page.

Sure, why not

The problem with Ioncross is that it
a) cannot read fl char files that are already decrypted (our flcharadmin tool does that plus FLHook has the ability to deactivate charfile encryption completely and we use that)
b) it does not support more than 20 000 player files i think

Though we still use Ioncross for its excellent restart flserver capability.
Implement a good working restart capability and you’ve won for us hehe

@w0dk4:

Though we still use Ioncross for its excellent restart flserver capability.
Implement a good working restart capability and you’ve won for us hehe

Yeah the restart function of IFSO and the “ensure FL server is running” functions are the main reason why i’m running it.
IFSO still has some bugs specialy on in the banning menu thats why i try to run other tools doing IFSO jobs.

@Hazard: Good work as far as i can see, keep the good work. To me it looks like u’re doing the best Server Manager we have ever seen in the FL community.

Regards
Mind

Any of you had chance to try out any GAMEDATA conversions really need some feedback

Mine so far cannot read already decrypted files - however I’ll code an alternate subroutine which can be turned on and off by a check box - for example if you know ALL of your FL files are already decoded you check that box - would only work if ALL were decoded first…

OMG that gives me an IDEA!

lmao

Biocross can do it on it’s initial load, that way FLDecode wouldn’t even be needed at all and could make edits soo much easier… and that way I can be sure ALL files are decoded!

You guys are great really get my brain going on a journey lmao

Well, encoded FL files are useful because they’re supposed to be faster to parse for FL

Just out of curiosity, can’t you do like FL probably does? Read the first four characters to see if it’s FLS1, in which case you know you have an encoded .fl file?

Still you could argue that the decoding time will waste cpu power which may be more expensive than reading the unencrypted ini out of the cached file system memory.

Of course that gets ugly when your char database is very large (like ours), in that case you need a lot of ram (that we have :P)

Looking at what I know about parsing, decoding a file is longer the larger the file is; thus, the encoded files, being smaller, should require less looping through each character and less unnecessary overhead (working with bytes VS Strings) than unencoded files.

Whether the file is encoded or not, the game/controller still has to parse them into memory
(Of course, this assumes an empty memory where each .fl file must be read from disk)

I definitely think FL doesn’t preload all the characters… It most likely reads the file when the player tries to intiate login. And it’s there that parsing an encoded file takes less time. It should actually be the same with any server operator…

But it’s late, maybe I’m not thinking exactly straight

EDIT: Oh and hey, I always wanted to ask: Why Biocross? ;D