IRC logs of Libera.Chat #BZFlag for Tuesday, 2025-10-28

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Juesthey blast007, i have a few ideas/suggestions for the game and i was wondering about feasibility of it and where it stands in the possible roadmap 14:56
Juestnot a priority of course14:56
Juestbut14:56
Juest1) custom cameras set by the map replacing the first person camera for like racing or scenic gameplay14:57
Juest2) make autopilot a bad flag and make it inaccessible via a keybind on demand, also is there even a setting to allow/disallow autopilot already?14:58
Juest3) possible to fork/daemonize bzfs?14:59
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blast007what do you mean by daemonize?15:57
blast007run it in the background?15:57
blast007cuz you already can15:57
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blast007custom camera would be a bit confusing if that was for people playing16:04
blast007and yes, there is _disableRobots that affects autopilot as well16:04
blast007last I messed with it, the client would accept a MsgAutopilot for itself.  I had an April Fools prank server that would automatically spawn players and force autopilot on (among other things like always spawning players facing a corner, and spawning everyone as a rabbit on an FFA server)16:06
blast007were you thinking of observer mode for the custom cameras?16:08
blast007That could make sense.  You'd need to add something to the world format so that would require a protocol break.16:09
Juestoh, bzfs already can fork and run in the background?17:54
Juestyes, for people playing, the controls would remain the same, its for like top down experiences where the camera is anchored and moving with the tank17:54
Juestfor observer mode maybe replace the chase camera with the "cinematic" camera, as other racing games may have17:56
Juestso it would be on the world format side of things? or a plugin?17:56
Juesthow about autopilot as a bad flag?18:00
blast007Juest: *any* process can run in the background18:08
blast007bzfs &18:08
blast007bam, now you have bzfs running in the background18:08
blast007I go with a script that effectively do that, but also loops and writes out a PID file18:09
blast007https://static.bzexcess.com/runserver.sh18:10
blast007(my config also loads a shared config, and that other config loads serverControl which will watch for some filenames to know to shut down a server)18:11
Juestblast007: that's not proper daemon fork() its just shell jobs in the background in a tty18:12
blast007what possible benefit would that have?18:48
Juestservers and embedded19:41
Juestnot bothering the user19:41
blast007but what is the actual benefit?20:23
* Juest sighs20:28
Juestsorry for the suggestion then20:28
blast007you can run bzfs via systemd already, and systemd even supports template unit files, so you can run multiple instances20:31
Juesthow about unprivileged users with no user services?20:32
blast007I had experimented with that a bit.  You could have a standard directory structure for your servers, such as organizing them by port number.  Then you have a systemd unit named something like bzflag-server@.service, and you can create multiple instances of that.  Inside the systemd unit you can reference the instance identified with %i.20:33
blast007you could create a service account that bzfs runs out of20:34
Juesti guess but im not talking about systemd systems, i get its a minority but its a thing20:35
blast007you're talking about how to run bzfs20:35
blast007that's one of the many ways to do it20:36
Juesttrue20:36
blast007from running GNU screen and having an instance per window, to background processes, to systemd templates, they all work fine20:36
Juestfork() could be just another option in the arsenal :) plus built in pid file management20:37
Juestsee znc for instance20:37
blast007what would fork() do differently?20:37
blast007you just keep referring to it, but not explaining the "why"20:37
Juestyou're aware what it does, right?20:37
Juesti am not good at explaining in detail and particularly why20:38
Juestparticularly explaining why*20:38
Juesthmm, it could be possible to use fork() to spawn a farm of server configurations in a single box in a more automated manner20:39
blast007how is that better than systemd template units?20:40
Juestthat would involve a configuration hierarchy system for bzfs to learn/know what to load20:40
Juestthe bzfs main process would manage them and restart if necessary20:41
Juestjust an option for users who may not know or like systemd template system20:41
Juestit would have made more sense to implement if we were in the sysvinit era20:42
Juestbasically 10+ years ago20:42
Juest15*20:42
Juestim thinking, about doing custom cameras in bzf, novel thing i know, maybe a plugin might be more suitable for this but doing it in the world would be the option with less overhead at the cost of compatibility20:44
blast007plugin couldn't do it20:45
Juestand outside the api?20:45
blast007I mean it would require client modifications too20:52
blast007and protocol changes20:52
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BulletCatcherI agree with blast007 that a self-daemonizing option for bzfs has little (if any) value.  Any server management system we would invent would be just as difficult for someone to learn to use as systemd or anything else, so they might as well learn somthing that may be useful in another context.23:54
BulletCatcherEven if we were to invent something that meets Juest's needs, it probably wouldn't meet the specific needs of anyone else.23:57
BulletCatcherWhen I ran a server I wrote some scripts to automate the whole thing, but it was complicated and I wouldn't want to have to teach anyone else how to use it.23:59

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