Recognized by Council Server-side suggestions

[Karride]

So I have run a small server for awhile now. Nothing fancy, just me and a couple of regulars building and fighting pirates. It seems to me there are a couple of functions that would be relatively easy to implement that would help server admins immensely.


User Pruning
I think any admin can tell you that user turnover tends to be pretty high in StarMade. People login, play for awhile, get bored and leave or stop playing. Looking in my protected.txt, I have 1,151 entries. Of those, 5 are actually active regulars on my server.

It would be nice to have a command like "admin_prune_players xx" where xx is number of days that users to prune have been idle. This command would delete the user, delete any of their blueprints (maybe archive them on the server) and either delete or turn pirate any entities they spawned (admin configurable).


Faction Pruning
Same idea as the player pruning. While I don't have an exact count, my server probably has at least 500 factions. Most of these are 1 player "protect my assets" factions.
It would be nice to have a command to delete any factions that have no active players, and the option to either delete or turn pirate any faction assets.


"Soft" server reset"
Server resets are a pain; You have to make lots of noise so the players know it is coming, get together lists of Home Sectors to Export/Import....and then there is the fun of importing sectors and re-assigning faction ID's.
And lets not forget the users that miss the 50 announcements about the reset, so that you have to load a backup of the old DB and get their stuff out. Of course, you could always choose not to reset, but then you risk missing out on new stations and planets, and new users have to move further and further out to find unexplored territory.

So my thinking is have a soft reset. This command would look at the faction list for home bases, and maybe a table of sectors that have been visited in some configurable number of days, and "snapshot" those sectors. Then it would reset the world, while keeping those snapshot sectors intact. This way you can get new features and new exploration possibilities, without all the hassle of a full reset.

 

[ToasterBorst]

All of these suggestions would be quiet useful in server management, in general we definitely need more tools and more control. Will tag as 'read' *for now* as I've also forward the thread to the other server manager on council.

 

[Erth Paradine]

Regarding a soft server reset, this could be accomplished using the existing bulk export/import tool, but we'd need ways to also auto-assign factions back to the imported entities as well (of which there is no way to do this from outside the game...existing /faction_set_entity does not have UID support). The bulk tool also fubars entity names, which is really annoying. As an alternative, we use a web-based export/import tool; where pilots visit, request a sector to be migrated over (export/import occurs in background), and then pilots are responsible for re-establishing faction settings. It's a bit tedious, but does help ease the pain of resets.

Player pruning could be accomplished with existing information and commands:

• Parse protected.txt, in this colon-delimited file the third entry is an epoch timestamp matching the last time that player logged-in. Could also obtain last login information with /player_info, although a complete list of players seems easier to establish by looking at protected.txt.
• Run "/player_unprotect" to remove entries from protected.txt.
• Delete file: StarMade/server-database/world0/ENTITY_PLAYERCHARACTER_PlayerName.ent
• Delete file: StarMade/server-database/world0/ENTITY_PLAYERSTATE_PlayerName.ent

As a server owner - it would be nice to have this function better built-into existing admin tools, and while switching controlled entities to different factions is also a server command. Wrapping all this stuff up into a single command option could be quite nifty.


Faction pruning could be accomplished with existing information and commands:

• Run command "/faction_list" look for factions in the negative, and judge based upon that value if you want to remove it or not. Process could be easily automated.
• Also could use "/faction_list_members" which then checks the status of each member by running "/player_info" to confirm nobody has logged-in within your desired timeframe.
• Automation is easier with the StarNet.jar tool.

A few more things that'd help server owners:

• Read by Council - General-ledger for faction points and player credits.
  
• Allow players to leave #general
  
• Log to syslog
  
• Recognized - /add_admin_allowed_comand

 

[Zaphord]

Yes to all of these. My server is so bloated with players and factions that don't play anymore.

 

[FlyingDebris]

As a server owner,

Spoiler

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[Erth Paradine]

...
Faction Pruning
Same idea as the player pruning. While I don't have an exact count, my server probably has at least 500 factions. Most of these are 1 player "protect my assets" factions.
It would be nice to have a command to delete any factions that have no active players, and the option to either delete or turn pirate any faction assets.
...

Another reason for server-side faction pruning support, is that we're seeing more than two minute long hourly whole-server hangs while it churns on a relatively small StarMade/server-database/world0/factions.fac file: T1529 Server hangs on faction updates

 

[Ghent96]

Love the OP, especially the soft-reset. I don't own a server, but have been admin for awhile, and our pains setting up everything after a reset are immense. Wipes suck for players, but they suck even worse for admins and especially for content-creating admins (as opposed to more managerial admins) like me. My time should be invested in creating new scenarios and enjoyment for my players, NOT in fiddling with setting up all the same content that I've already done a dozen times before.