New TCP server running now

[smiley1983]

[smiley1983]

[aerique]

[smiley1983]

Yes, I agree that taking organizers out of the official final rankings would work. That just leaves the small problem of the codebase before the big problem of actually trying to run such a thing.

I should also add that if I were running a server myself, I wouldn't try to run anything "official" to begin with, more likely something along the lines of the beta testing server which ran before Ants, but offering a game like Chess or Tron to avoid creating a large pool of beta testers with months of extra knowledge of the specific contest problem.

I've looked more at the zeta codebase, and it's less complete than I had hoped. That means that the fastest path to a working server probably involves building from the epsilon codebase, but I don't want to do that myself. I'm still thinking about the options, learning a bit about sandboxes and hoping someone else acts first.

[eashoka]

[smiley1983]

I'm pretty confident that the obstacle to running another official contest isn't a lack of people willing to donate money; the problem is gaining non-profit status so it doesn't attract a huge tax debt, and also perhaps something to do with ownership.

There's nothing to stop the community running something in the meantime, though.

[ramn]

[eashoka]

Noticed 2 bugs possibly in the TCP server code.

1) Some perfectly completed games (as shown in the command console where the local games are running) are not getting end up in the DB and not shown in the games page. I noticed this happen about 1 in every 20 game like..

2) Some games which have completed and recorded in the server have not taken into account in rating calculation. Even though they appear in a player's history, rating before and after the game is absolutely not changed (even thought it should).

If this is a possible threading issue in the framework, probably this is affecting Ants tcp server as well ? (I noticed the bugs in Planet Wars)

[smiley1983]

Thank you for the bug report. It might be worth filing an issue on the github page.

Currently I'm busy with other things, and not likely to fix this; if anyone does find out exactly what's going wrong, please post here. If anyone fixes it, please issue a pull request on github and I will update the server code.

The various game servers are all running near-identical code with a few minor modifications, so it's very likely that this issue affects all of them.

[GreenTea]