eXpansion 1.0.0 ~ Beta (06/03/2016)

[endbase]

Hey guys did an update this morning and noticed something different debug info on forcemods.

But It ain't working yet here is my screeny

[oliverde8]

Hi,

Just wanted to update where we are at.

We are having an issue with some widget that dissapears in some conditions we spent a lot of time working on that.

The big improvement the core that eXpansion uses(ManiaLive) is that it has a great GuiHandler. It doesen't do a query per window per player to the dedicated server. It groups them into one single big query.

The theory is nice but in practice this doesen't work very well. There are 2 main issues.

• It makes the assumption that all the players that are connected to the server when the process starts are still connected when it finally does the grouped execution. Which isn't always the case.
• It makes the assumption it can fit all the data in a single call, which isn't realistic in reality.

The big issue about this is that it doesn't affect 1 player but all players. If one element in the group fails all elements fails.
I would like to point out that in my opinion the first case should be properly handled by the dedicated server. Instead it simply ignores all the data it receives.

We had already done a fix for the second case but recently we started having more issues. It turns out our fix didn't make the grouping taking number of players properly. We have recoded the part and hopefully the bug is fixed.

This bring us to a new problem. We still have missing widgets but when we do CTRL+G the widgets are there. Actually the widget appears then suddenly some dissapers. So what is happening ?
We believe that the game is loosing the widgets. Either the maniascript is to heavy or something else...

So how to avoid the issue? Well it seems the issue is related with number of players/number of records you save. The more records you save the heavier the interface becomes as all records are in the interface. For me the issue starts with 4K records and over 80 players. So for 240 players you should not have more then 500 records.

I would say that 500 record is today the threshold of our local records widget. Anything more will

What is the long term solution? Well we will continue to investigate to see if there is anything we are missing. We are also going to see create a topic to see if Nadeo is aware of this issue. There might simply be a limit to the total size of windows displayed.

Why are we the only controller affected? Because we are the only controller using Maniascript to update their time widgets. So we need to send all records to the widgets so that the maniscript can process them.

Why don't we do like other controllers? Well this method is much much faster, it allows us to display player specific informations to 200 players without killing the controller. It is the main reason why eXpansion is so responsive with so much players.
And well Maniascript was designed to do this so in long term with Nadeo making the game better it is going to work.
Also it works fine with 100 records saved and well, that is quite good already.
Finally and mainly because it would remove the meaning of what is eXpansion.

We are still preparing for the release that should be soon (hopefully tomorrow),

[Palteza]

Thanks for feedback and explanations

You're right, that wouldn't make any sense to change the controller specificity "just" because of these issues.
Hope you'll find and hope this is not a Nadeo's limitation (because I guess with the amount of work they have, this kind of change won't come fast ...).

[tcq]

Just keep up the good work. For me, eXpansion is the best controller out there due to it's customisable and well defined GUI. Use it always when I want to start up a small server to hunt some dedimania record

[endbase]

Best controller evaah