Server Help

[Chebby]

How do I make a bot wait for 10 seconds? I tried C++'s Sleep(1000); but that didn't work. Can anyone help?

[Solo Ace]

That'd be Sleep(10000), but you should use the ticker (in MERVbot) instead of Sleep().

[D1st0rt]

I'm sure somebody will correct me, but I believe sleep makes the current thread inactive for the specified amount of time. This might mean you don't send or receive packets (depending on how merv is threaded, I haven't looked), so I would go with Solo and use EVENT_Tick.
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[Mr Ekted]

Definitely do not use Sleep(). But also I would not use tick events. This requires polling. If you have 10 bots with 10 modules each, that's 100 polls per tick. What a waste of CPU.
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4,691 irradiated haggis!

[Cyan~Fire]

MERV sends an EVENT_Tick every second anyway.
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[Bak]

he's not running 10 bots with 10 copies of the exact module. He's running one bot with one version of the module -> 1 poll per tick
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SubSpace Discretion: A Third Generation SubSpace Client

[Mr Ekted]

[50% Packetloss]

I found powerbot's timer methods much handier that mervbots. But yah, in mervbot you need to use event_tick, its called once every second (or close to it depending on how often control is returned to the core).
So a posibility is to have a variable in event_tick that increments each time the event is run and keep track of the time that way. Use of the sleep() function will cause your bot to lag out.

[Mr Ekted]

You can't really rely on events coming at any particular rate. Timing 10 events that are supposed to occur every second will not guarantee a 10 second interval. If you don't need that kind of precision, then I guess it's fine, but it still means polling of a kind (checking your own counter every tick).

[Underlord]

Code: Show/Hide // spawn.h         class botInfo         {         int countdown[1];                  public:                 botInfo(CALL_HANDLE given)                 {                 countdown[0] = 10;   // initially starts at 10 seconds //spawn.cpp             case EVENT_Tick:   // called once a second             {                 for (int i = 0; i < 1; ++i)                     --countdown[i];                 if (countdown[0] == 0) // 10 seconds have passed                 {                    countdown[0] = 10;  // reset timer                    // insert code that happens every 10 seconds here                 }

[Mr Ekted]

Exactly what I was saying NOT to do.

[D1st0rt]

thats how merv does it, if you want people to do it right, you should just give us all a copy of powerbot

[Solo Ace]

Instead of saying what not to do, could you tell him then how to do it right?

[Cyan~Fire]

@Solo:

[Solo Ace]

Meh, sorry, I thought I read that part of this thread already.

I think he means the core should do the time checking and notify the plugins when it's supposed to, instead of notifying the plugins each tick to let them run a timer seperately.

[Mr Ekted]

Yes. Powerbot has a SetTimer() call. The core manages all the timers sorted by time, so it only needs to check the shortest one. Even if there are 100 different timers going for all the modules, there's only ever 1 poll unless a bunch of timers trigger at the same time. Merv could do this.

[D1st0rt]

like I said, hook us up and put an end to such nonsense

[Cyan~Fire]

[Solo Ace]

Uh, what? Catid's stopping with Merv?

[Cyan~Fire]

No, just every time I've talked to him, he's said that he hates MERV. That plus the fact that he hasn't replied to an email i sent him about a source code improvement and no new updates makes me think he's not going to actively develop it anymore. Also, notice that all the recent changes in Changelog.txt are other people's/bugfixes.

[50% Packetloss]

He stopped working on it a while ago. Last I talked to him he was working on a game with his friend, but the new semester started so he is probably busy with Eletrical Engeneering classes. Id be sick of merv too if I got junk mail from newbs all the time; instead I get a lot of email about making my shlong bigger. Powerbot is better than merv in many ways but requires a deeper understanding on how the game works. Switching from merv to powerbot is a little wierd, as it handles data a little differently, but overall they have a lot of people willing to help out and one very well documented header file; every line is commented and clear as to its purpose. It also has mysql support; that alone pretty much blows merv out of the water.

[D1st0rt]

Dr Brain swears by mysql

[CypherJF]

I like MySQL for what one does with it. I mean for a zone, for a local website, etc. it's fine. If you're running a corporation, etc. another DBMS, like Oracle, is much more appropriate. lol.
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Performance is often the art of cheating carefully. - James Gosling

[D1st0rt]

doesn't oracle cost like $80,000 for a single license?

[Dr Brain]

I like MySQL for storing dynamic data.

If I were running a corperation, I'd probably look into PostgreSQL.
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Hyperspace Owner

Smong> so long as 99% deaths feel lame it will always be hyperspace to me