[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by Fridgecritter

I think someone who uses this repack is going to be the guy who has little or no knowledge of configuring anything, and not having the benefit of putting it together from installs and compile, will be searching for things within the files that they can easily change to suit their needs, as evidenced by the replies on this thread.

Having said that, in my humble opinion, I think this is a great contribution. If it gets people interested and contributing, great. I think there should be a version with bots however, OR a write-up on how to modify this installation to add bots. Simply getting the compiled installs with bots enabled, then running a few database queries would do the trick, no? The trick would be not over-writing the config file and maybe a few other key files, so the easiest way would be if it were included in the install as a choice.

Also, there are a few successful servers with bots enabled. Is it mostly opinion weighing in on the decision not to include bots? And please take that in the most respectful way. I really am asking to find out.

It would be awesome for new people if someone posted the steps to successfully add bots to this repack if you are dead set on not including them. I know Ax Classic repack includes bots, and people do whole raids with nothing but bots. I'm interested to hear the arguments for instability.

Sure, I will elaborate this for you.

1) This repack is for anyone and everyone, if you want to setup a dev environment, this is a very simple base to configuring an environment with little to be done on top of it. I've used it myself several times already, I can setup a server within 10-30 minutes from nothing (Given I didn't run into something stupid) and this still beats the piss out of that with a few minutes of install.

Folks that are even our best developers struggle with setting up a server/environment and spend hours trying to get thing setup with the proper database upgrading, stable source etc.

Plus, you get a server build that is setup just like how I would set it up, without missing important things and everything included working to date. With all the configurations of Perl, MariaDB and binary compilation completely optimized to efficiency.

I get tons of PM's, E-Mails and IM's all the time for folks asking help with the array of anything of all the above and this is my way of doing once, helping many times over and over.

And especially, with folks who have little to no technical knowledge, try over and over to set something up with many struggles and re-attempts and many frustrating days to set a server up let a lone even start configuring and customizing things. The barrier of entry to express themselves should not that difficult.

Even if someone gets a server 'running' and then you actually get player stimulation and you have zone crashes with little to no idea as to how they are occurring yet they are frustrating what little player base you had tried to gain with your great ideas and inspirations and you are left with trying to troubleshoot these issues (Not knowing how to) and taking you away form original intent which was to maximize on your creativity and fun for others.


2) Bots. At the time of this repack, the character player profile just transitioned from being stored in a blob form to now being stored in several individual database tables with many performance gains to benefit. The stage of this repack is on code that was both tried and tested on EZ and PEQ for weeks to work out issues from both the result of this massive conversion and many other conversions and additions being made.

With this, bots were completely broken, the views were completely off and there were many aspects of the bots code that was not 'working'. Weeks after this, this issue was addressed and they might be somewhat functional now.

While I'm not specifically discluding bots, I'm not including them because I don't personally use them and haven't because they've been a mess for a long time. I'm not going to put a repack out knowing the many issues that I've seen with bots over time and it out to folks knowing there are various functional issues. This is something folks can learn to add on their own if the desire is that strong.

What it plainly comes down to is that bots need to be gone through, and really truly time tested and eliminate the crashes observed from player stimulus and use over time and eliminate the zone hangs before I can present a proving and working/stable and efficient repack with them.


3) There is an attitude that some accumulate that it is one person's sole responsibility to take ownership over doing things in this community. We are a community because 'WE' all participate, contribute and do things to make it better. So if someone wants to take ownership of bots and make sure they are spick and span, provide a way to install them, and make them something folks can easily incorporate in their environment go ahead and do so.


In the end, this repack has had massive success. I've gotten several upon several PM's hearing folks stories about this, E-Mails included and of course all of the responses in this thread.

That's not to say we can't have other installers that are topical to this, that say configure a LS on top of it, or configure bots on top of it, or offer a way to seamlessly upgrade from this base to something else.

We're constantly working on ways to improve the community and the code base while we all are very busy in our real lives that with everything this community has done collectively over time is absolutely fucking outstanding.

Hopefully that helps