New command to restart servers and select game mode

1 October 2015 02:37

Ever wanted to be able to select specific game mode rather than waiting for the mercy of random? Now you can do it with new !restart command! All you need is to give it some description of the game mode you want. For example !restart citybuilder 3 hours temperate 1990.

However, there are some conditions for using it:

  • Server has to be empty. No companies other than server one and no other clients. Although, someday I'll probably add voting system to overcome this restriction.
  • Timetabled servers can't be restarted.
  • Game mode you want has to be allowed on this server.
  • Doesn't work on CB GS and FIRS servers yet (I'll fix it soon).

For specifying game mode you may need to include

  • Goal type: cb, city, balance, money, cash, quest
  • Industry set: ecs, firs, yeti
  • Goal value or game duration: 5k, 30k, 5000, 15m, 15 millions, 1h, 3h, blitz, 3 hours, etc...
  • Climate: temp, temperate, tropic, arctic, toy, toyland
  • Starting year: 90, 00, 1990, 2015, etc...

You don't have provide all of these, only what is enough to distinguish from other game modes. For example !restart 90 will be enough on 3h cb server, and !restart temperate will do for blitz. Finally, if you just want to restart server and don't care about game mode you can simply type !restart.

Also there is !listgm command to see available game modes, it accepts game mode description as well (!listgm cb temp for example).

1 October 2015 09:00

Cool feature, great work. You said it isn't possible to restart a timetabled server, but later you mentioned a restart command for quests. So is it possible to restart a quest server?

Lol

1 October 2015 12:47

lol wrote:

You said it isn't possible to restart a timetabled server, but later you mentioned a restart command for quests. So is it possible to restart a quest server?

No, not yet. But it may become possible soon since I'm thinking of switching at least one quest server to free runs.

1 October 2015 17:08

Cool feature.

However I'm kind of sceptical about this thing as it would allow for people to just restart their way to a better score. How about having a minimum time in between restarts (like 15mins)?.

1 October 2015 18:28

Well, the downside of that is to have highscores that are impossible to beat unless you're willing to spend eternity looking for perfect map. And it's even worse imo. What I'd really like to do is make all maps equally good but I guess there is no perfect solution, so we'll have to find some kind of balance. There has to be some restart timeout at least to prevent excessive server load, but it's duration is an open question. I'll set it for 10min for now and see how it goes.

3 October 2015 07:14

epic stuff.. Gelidis 100% use this :D

3 October 2015 12:56

Yeah, I'm already abusing it heavily :D

9 October 2015 17:16

Might as well have manual start on all 3h cb servers? Or?

21 October 2015 12:10

That feature is amazing indeed. One problem, I didn't achieve to restart quest server in normal quest 85 temp. tried : !restart temp !restart temp 85 !restart quest temp 85 etc...

I can only do it with ecs, and now we have 2 ecs quest servers ^^

21 October 2015 15:26

darulezzz wrote:

That feature is amazing indeed. One problem, I didn't achieve to restart quest server in normal quest 85 temp. tried : !restart temp !restart temp 85 !restart quest temp 85

Yeah, I know of it, but didn't come up with a good way to fix it yet. Problem is that normally omitting some part of game mode description means that it can be any. But in case of industry set there is an ambiguity, in some cases it may mean standard industry set. I could add some keyword for it, but it doesn't have any distinctive name and I don't want to add smth not quite clear like "normal" to majority of our game modes.

Treating omitted industry set as "normal" wouldn't work well too as in most cases "any" makes more sense, for example, on ecs-only server or in !listgm command.

P.S. For now you can use !restart without arguments to get non-ecs quest, requires some luck though.

24 October 2015 03:37

darulezzz wrote:

That feature is amazing indeed. One problem, I didn't achieve to restart quest server in normal quest 85 temp. tried : !restart temp !restart temp 85 !restart quest temp 85 etc...

Ok, now !restart prioritizes normal industry set if no other was specified so all above should work.

UPD: Beware that doesn't apply to !restart without arguments, it is still completely random.