Fully automatic co-op hosting on Hyperlobby - info, feedback

Dude Joined: Oct 09, 2006 Posts: 17

Greetings everyone,
Automatic rotation of co-op missions have been around since 2006, and a handful of squadrons / hosts have used it successfully in the past 5 years to run both casual short co-op missions, DCG campaigns, SEOW battles in unattended mode, using high capacity dedicated server machinces. Over the 10 years of IL-2, there have been a lot of user created co-op campaigns as well, which deserve to be available, even if the creator not even flying IL-2 anymore. The automatic co-op server allows sharing those threasures with everyone, and having it played together in a cooperative manners.

One problem however always remained - even though a player can join a co-op in progress, it can never enter the battle already ongoing (just use in-game chat while waiting for the next mission to launch). So a constant problem was that players joined the server at the "wrong" time. So co-ops are still (even after so many mods) require time coordination, new players MUST be notified when is their best time to join in between missions.

In order to solve that last problem, I programmed a small application that annnounces on HL when a new co-op mission is ready to be played. It's not a hack, it's a normal Java + Visual Basic mouse/keyboard emulation.

So with this new feature activated, a co-op server can reserve a co-op slot in HL, announce it's own version, mission name, aircraft type etc, and bring in players at the most appropriate time, to the co-op server, just before starting the next mission.

As far as the first tests showed, people can see it two differentways:
a) as a good thing for the players, since there will always be co-ops available at their fingertips, on fairly powerful machines, no lag etc. That's our intetion.
b) but it can also be seen as an intrusion to the normal life of the HL lobby, with a ruthless, heartless robot flooding HL with its own advertisment. That's NOT our intention.

Some of the clarifications I tried to sort out with the admins of HL, to agree on where are the limits of being informative, but not intrusive, so hopefully we won't make anyone angry in the future.

But as I cannot be online to explain as often as needed, I created this topic, feel free to post your comments or questiosn on this idea, and I will try to answer regularly.

Some links for background info:

The original co-op server idea back in 2006 (loooong discussion):
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/23110283/m/8111000864/p/1

The latest co-op server description:
http://web.t-online.hu/rnzoli/IL2DSC/intro-coop.html

Link to the 102nd squadron, which provided a high capacity server in Europe 24/7 for the past 5 years.
http://102nd.org/

Cheers,
Zoltan Nagy
(rnzoli)

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 9:13 am

Very nice

I've made something similar.

Dude Joined: Oct 09, 2006 Posts: 17

Situation update after discussion with HL admins.

The version, CRT, mission name and aircraft types are now included in the game info, it will NOT take up chat capacity.

The co-op server will only use co-op #2-#4 (for maximum 5 minutes), so as not to interfere with real people hosting their co-op missions in co-op #1 in the default General Room.
(For beginners: co-op #2-#4 are visible in the Cooperative room. )

A short reminder ("Starting in 1 min") text chat in the lobby will only occur, if there is a player already on the server.
The empty server will not emit any HL chat, even when it is starting to host a new mission with new planeset.

Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 1:13 pm

I'm just curious what did you use to write this program?

Dude Joined: Oct 09, 2006 Posts: 17

IDE: Netbeans and MS Visual Studio. 98% is in Java, the VB part is only needed because for the Win API calls, well, and because I couldn't get my head around the Java Native Interface (JNI) until now Rolling Eyes

The sources are not distributable, the binaries are available to only a handful of people (server operators) that have already signed a non-disclosure agreement with me (real names, addresses, phone numbers etc.)

Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2011 2:24 pm

Ah i see I'll have to start playing around with Java some time