Multiplayer logging

[Prof]

Many game servers implement a server-side logging feature, which logs player joins, various player actions (for a game such as this, only "big" actions, perhaps, such as creating a company, buying shares, heavy use of landscaping tools in a short period of time, etc), player quits, player chat, etc etc.

The game server can then normally be configured to either buffer log entries and then write them to the logfile at its own discretion, or write them to the logfile as the events happen.

In conjunction with rcon, external programs can then read this log file and react to things happening on the server.

I, for example, use this method to keep those who use bad language in chat off Call of Duty servers.

I, personally, think that such a feature (if not already implemented) would be of great use to server admins; tools can then be written to assist in the administration of an OpenTTD server.

[Brianetta]

My autopilot script is already working in this direction. Events such as land modification and company dealings are not knowable from the console, but joins, parts and chats certainly are.

Details are in the OpenTTD General forum thread, "Dedicated server autopilot"

[Prof]

Nice - I'll give that script a try.


But even so - the advantages of having live logging supported by the game server I feel should be realised in an ace online game such as this

I already mentioned that using logging in conjunction with rcon can be quite a powerful basis for an admin tool.

[Brianetta]

rcon or not, the autopilot could respond to anything it reads in the in-game chat, and can do anything that the tcl language can do - including modifying web pages, chatting on an IRC server, emailing somebody or whatever. It can also type commands in, and chat to other players.

Eliza anybody?

[Prof]

Eliza anybody?

http://www.alicebot.org/

[Moriarty]

Eliza anybody?

http://www.alicebot.org/

Cool. I can have an intelligent Online conversation at last...

[Prof]

So, can anyone tell me if server-side logging is planned for OttD?

I'm sure it would help it sell itself as an online game - its part of the 'standard online-game' feature set

[Brianetta]

Something like this?

This wasn't going to be how I announced this in public, but hey, it works. There were some teething problems at first.

I'm not distributing that version, by the way. I'm not 100% happy with the approach I used.

If you want a chat log in a file, and have Linux with the usual suite of command line utils (plus Expect) on which to run the server, the following command will run the game with an autopilot, and also log all public game chat to the file chatlog. The command should all be one line:

Code: Select all

mkfifo chatpipe ; (  grep "^.All" chatpipe | awk '{print(strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S",systime()) " " $0)}' > chatlog ) & ./autopilot | tee chatpipe

Everything up to and including the first semicolon can be removed after the first run.

In fact, even if you don't have Expect or autopilot, you can just replace autopilot with openttd -D and get chat logging from a regular dedicated server console. Magic!

[Moriarty]

Is there a reason OTTD doesn't do the logging itself? The ability is there (it can already make a log for the dedicated server relating to typed in commands). I don't see it being that hard to add a few more strings to it.

[Prof]

After seeing the other 'log' entries from previous posts here, it might be an idea to print them differently in order to make them easier to parse (and perhaps with more info per line) - for example,

C:1:player:hi there
(C = chat, slot 1, player's name, chat text)

or something along those lines...

Brianetta - in response to autopilot, I've just setup a dedicated server here, and the output to the console is *very* limited - this of course impacts on the capabilities of your script.