Character Dumps

[Avenger]

Ok, if anyone is still out there developing this game, it would be nice to see some method of filing a character dump, maybe some command from the character information screen, so we can post our mang chars to angband.oook.cz. Also some kind of instant pseudo dump on death, followed by a real dump upon ghost death, so we can post our characters final inventory and equips instead of just showing that empty ghost inventory, would be nice. That pseudo dump concept would also be nice for the high scores list, so we can see what killed our character, not our ghost. Also, somebody start posting on this forum; it looks like no one has been here for about a month.

[Fink]

Would be interesting to break out the score list from the game to a website thats autoupdated (well, not break out, but maybe duplicate). Say, have a hard limit of moves or points or something to filter for temp characters, or just a quick comparison ("if I dont make it past the 200th entry on the list, then ignore my score adition").

This idea is kind of like the counterstrike server suites available that log stats and squirrel them away by player name or ip. The admin then dumps this into a website for stat ranking etc thats updated frequently. So, for us, a simple version of that based on the common info from the score.

[Berendol]

You can use a job scheduler (like cron or whatever you use) and the Dynamo suite from BMAngband to produce a score list. With minor modifications, it should work with any MAngband server.

I believe Crimson has something similar as well.

If you recall the DServ website last year, it had the latest scores and MVP lists every hour. Just set up a cron job that dumps the output into a file, and copies that file onto your webserver.

There's one minor problem and one major problem with character dumps. The minor problem is that disk I/O, as performed by MAngband, is blocking - hence the game freezes if your power management sleeps the disk and someone logs in. When you die, if this is not worked around, you will freeze the server while the game writes the dump. The major problem is this: How will the game send your dump to you? If it posts on the website, people will PK you just to see what you have. Email will require a lot of coding and the game doesn't know your address (that would require registration and a lot of code.) On-screen, it would only show you something, and you couldn't copy and paste it.

[Fink]

I've never tried to mess with it at all, but is there a log option in MAng? Like, console (or whatever we would call that window) output? If so, dump to that, and leave it to the player to keep their logging on if they want dumps?

[Avenger]

I'm not familiar enough with C or with the way the server system is set up to know the technicalities of or difficulties with setting up a character dump system. I do know that ToMEnet has this system, since there are several ToMEnet char dumps on angband.oook.cz. It would be a nice feature, certainly not necessary, but something to consider if somebody starts developing MAngband again.

[Jug]

I can't believe MAngband isn't even represented over on the angband.oook.cz ladder! Shocking.

Adding character dumps to MAngband is a cracking idea... and if no-one else is working on this, I'm going to make it next on my todo list.

- Jug

[Jug]

I've now implemented basic server-side character dumps.

To see this in action head over to http://mangband.org.uk/ironman.php and look for a character name which you can click on (they should be slightly purple).  At the time of writing only a few dead characters have dumps (Jug at rank 3 being one),  but by the time you read this there could well be others.

All Ironman MAngband deaths now create a character dump, the ones on the ladder which don't have a dump are the characters who died before this was implemented.

It would be cool if there was something like this on the main mangband.org server imho.

- Jug

p.s. adding the last messages to the character dump is a few items down on my todo list, coming soon.