Armagetron Discord

General Stuff about Armagetron, That doesn't belong anywhere else...
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by sinewav »

Ratchet wrote:I was falsely optimistic that I could suggest something that might help bring this game back from the dumps. I just need to accept it and move on like everyone else has :/
I think your idea is a good one. I don't know anything about Discord and after looking around a bit I still don't know exactly what it is. Some sort of TeamSpeak alternative with a chat/web portal? If it works for Arma, great. I personally don't care if it is open source or not (as long as there are no license issues). The problem with Arma's popularity comes down to the fact that very few of us have time to play, let alone promote or develop the game. We have always relied on someone from the community, anyone, to take initiative and move the game in a new direction. We can only hope someone steps up to do it. Will having a chat server bring new people to the game (or oldies back to the game)? I thought people were considering Steam as a way to promote Arma? As someone who knows next to nothing about gaming culture, unfortunately I don't have much to add.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Lucifer »

Ratchet wrote:I don't think many of my gaming friends know jack about open source software. And, I would argue, why the hell should they?
Recent election fraud due to closed source voting machines might be a reason people should care... ;)
Essentially, open source has enabled this game to have some amazing features that it otherwise would not have. However, I can't agree with the notion of completely separating the game from anything that isn't open source. It's a handicap as far as I'm concerned.
You *do* realize the open source operating systems pretty much dominate, these days, right? Desktop/laptop operating systems are the only area where open source operating systems are still waaaaaay behind. But everywhere else.....

In any case, talking about integrating teamspeak with the client shouldn't be interpreted as "I'm going to start working on that right now!" What I'm going to work on right now is taking a shower and going to sleep.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Light »

Ratchet wrote:I was falsely optimistic that I could suggest something that might help bring this game back from the dumps. I just need to accept it and move on like everyone else has :/
The point of me saying the options for your idea already is exist is that people have done it. The problem is that you need to constantly tell people how to get there, or actively advertise it so they know it's there. For it to easily be there for all users, especially for support, having it built in makes a lot of sense.

Simply going off of your idea doesn't take agreement of anyone else. You can simply throw the server up and start going with it to see how it works out. You don't seem to want to do it, but the option is available to you to have your idea put through instantly because it only really has to go by you. So, if you think it's the proper direction to move, just throw up a server and see how it goes. You will likely get a few people that actively use it, and from my experience, it will be used while they play other games as well, but you'll have people to talk to and a place to direct people. It's just not the direction I'd like to see things go, but we disagree on that, and that's fine.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Ratchet »

@Sinewav: Thanks. Really. I can understand what you are talking about and I can certainly agree that I should've explained it and probably included a few pictures to show exactly what I mean. I'm at work at the moment and access is pretty restricted so I'll get a graphic later today to illustrate its purpose. (Assuming I remember)

But, for now: It's almost identical to IRC. Except, it has a gorgeous* interface. It's completely free** and can duplicate every function IRC has. The sidebar is very helpful in showing the different groups within the channel (mods, admins, etc) (of course, IRC does this too, so not really an extra feature). An added benefit is it's the best voice-communication software I've used. It has very good audio at a quality that is only slightly reduced from that of Skype. When I use teamspeak, the sound seems "tinny" or computerized. However, the quality on Discord is just low enough to increase bandwidth elsewhere but high enough to compete with Skype. It's one of those programs that "just works." The voice (mic/headphones) interface is idiot friendly and allows you to easily set things up if you need to. It has always done it correctly for me automatically so I haven't even had to mess with it.

I don't think this is going to be a way of promoting the game to new players per se. However, it could potentially be much easier to connect with gamers from other games by utilizing an interface they are already familiar with (instead of IRC, which is likely very foreign to them). Also, I think it would be a better hub to retain the existing players. All of those guys that play LoL and whatever else games, how do you contact them? If we had a place like I'm imagining, they would always be within short reach even though they're playing a different game. We could have a little sub-room for other popular games. I'm sure that, even if it isn't their primary form of communication, every LoL player uses discord. Others who have left Arma and picked up on other games likely use Discord. It's just the next big thing in the gaming world.

*
I keep harping on the beauty of the application. I think it's sexy. Someone going to IRC might be intimidated by the lack of visual appeal. I can say with 100% honesty that it's a huge turn off when I'm working with IRC because of how incredibly bland it is. I realize that many of you probably do not share this view with me. However, since it is important to me, I feel justified in mentioning it.

**One of the developers on reddit mentioned that "We're allergic to data selling and ads. You won't find a trace of that around us here." With that being said, he also mentioned that there are no plans to go open source. So, there's that.

Of course, one of the appealing things to me regarding Armagetron is how people are very creative and always have been in regards with creating new programs/bots. Discord seems to be (at least on the front end) happy to help with things of that nature and even gives documentation on the API.



@Lucifer: Election fraud did not occur because of a closed source voice/text communication app. We're talking about different magnitudes of importance. I will likely never compare two programs and pick one over the other because it is specifically open source. Likewise, I can't imagine too many gamers deciding to play Armagetron just because of the developers' view on open source applications.

"You *do* realize the open source operating systems pretty much dominate, these days, right? Desktop/laptop operating systems are the only area where open source operating systems are still waaaaaay behind. But everywhere else....."

:roll: Sounds like a spew of nonsensical bullshit to me. As you pointed out, computer usage isn't even remotely close. Windows and Mac absolutely dominate the market. Regarding "everywhere else," as you put it, "open source" doesn't even come close to "dominating." Android (which is loosely considered open source) barely tops 50% of all users worldwide. And then, every app you use on your Android device is closed source. If you have some sort of meaningful analysis to back your claim, go for it.



@Light: I agree. However, doesn't your argument go the same way with IRC? What I'm talking about is an alternative to IRC that may offer a slight (but needed) improvement in user gain/retention. IRC is daunting for some people that aren't super computer nerds. We don't currently advertise in too many places that we have an IRC channel. It's there if you go looking for it, though. I would go as far as to agree that it would be helpful to advertise better.

Regarding me starting the server up, yep. I know. I could go through with it. But I can't see myself loading the game up just to go into the servers and pester people to go to my server. I'm not looking for any sort of happiness or credit for starting something new, I just want the game to hopefully prosper. I feel like this would be a small step in the right direction. And, of course, I certainly think that it should be set up in a way that people will stick around in the server even if they're playing a different game. That way, if I'm trying to start up a game in sumo or something, I can prod people to come join me if they feel up to it, even if they're not currently on tron.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Light »

Ratchet wrote:@Light: I agree. However, doesn't your argument go the same way with IRC? What I'm talking about is an alternative to IRC that may offer a slight (but needed) improvement in user gain/retention. IRC is daunting for some people that aren't super computer nerds. We don't currently advertise in too many places that we have an IRC channel. It's there if you go looking for it, though. I would go as far as to agree that it would be helpful to advertise better.
Well, that would point out our main point of disagreement. I thought you were wanting an in-game chat, rather than replacement for the use of IRC. As far as that goes, I would probably go the route of a chatbox on the forums, which should already have plenty of pre-built options available as a plugin for phpbb. That wouldn't give us voice chat outside of the game, so may be a compromise for what you were wanting, but in my opinion is all that's necessary. I actually wanted to suggest this in the past, because at worst I would be willing to write a small, lightweight chatbox for the site. I think it would kill the little activity left on the forums pretty well, though. I don't know how much of a good or bad thing that may be.

I also agree with IRC being a bit of a pain. I mean, we have an easy to use web client linked around, which you could use if you wanted to quickly get someone in there, but I don't like keeping up extra applications or webpages to accomplish it. I would rather see it built in here, where it probably should have been all along.

I don't know if any chatbox plugins currently support different channels, but it wouldn't be anything difficult to add to it (or create).

I sort of hopped in to this topic because in-game voice chat is something I have wanted for quite a while, but never bothered to ask for. It would be awesome if we could get a basic idea of it thrown into 0.4, even if it doesn't look pretty. If using mumble, it doesn't seem like it should be a huge task to throw in the bare minimum using their API. I could be wrong, though.
Ratchet wrote: :roll: Sounds like a spew of nonsensical bullshit to me. As you pointed out, computer usage isn't even remotely close. Windows and Mac absolutely dominate the market. Regarding "everywhere else," as you put it, "open source" doesn't even come close to "dominating." Android (which is loosely considered open source) barely tops 50% of all users worldwide. And then, every app you use on your Android device is closed source. If you have some sort of meaningful analysis to back your claim, go for it.
You're leaving out servers. Just about every web server is run off of an open source flavor of Linux, processing servers tend to follow along, and even many game servers. For the basic user interaction, most people are still using Windows and Mac, but the numbers are growing for us thanks to Ubuntu.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Ratchet »

So, essentially you want the same two things that Discord offers but in a different way. You want in-game voice chat and a chatbox on the forums.

I want both of them in one place, one easy-to-use app. I think that if the timing were better (whenever we still had the bulk of our players), this could have been a very good thing for the game. Of course, it may not be too late, who knows. But, the point remains, this is an excellent asset for the game. Our forums are old. IRC feels ancient. Development is slow. Something, anything new and refreshing might help. An update/upgrade in any way, shape, or form.

Regarding what Z-man said, try it for yourself. I know not everyone has fantastic computers so I can't honestly say what sort of performance hit you take for using Discord in a web browser while tronning. I know the app itself isn't much more (if at all) resource intensive than something like Teamspeak. If you can't get the app and you have to use it in Chrome (or your favorite web browser), it may not be different from using the standalone app. Unfortunately, I can't offer much testing in that area.

Regarding servers and open source software, sure. I think that the control a unix server offers is pretty hard to beat. However, Windows servers aren't too far behind in that regard. I wouldn't go as far as to say that open source is taking over the world (or even coming remotely close) any kind of soon.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by vov »

I've recently discovered Discord for me and some of my friends, it rocks! If you are familiar with IRC, add voice channels to that and there you go basically. I'd definitely join a tron discord server when playing.
It also works within a web browser without requiring a download by just giving someone a link to the channel - that's much easier than IRC.
Ratchet wrote:I didn't already do it because 1) I don't want to create something if no one is interested and, 2) I don't want to be in charge of making all of the appropriate people admins/mods.
Screw it, I just made a server. it has two text and three voice channels so far. If you got any suggestions, go for it (either here or there, heh).
https://discord.gg/qr3z3dE
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by sinewav »

vov wrote:It also works within a web browser without requiring a download by just giving someone a link to the channel - that's much easier than IRC.
Ok I see how this works. Pretty cool. So maybe during Ladle we post the URL in the Arma server's round_console_message and after enough people join Discord we make teams? How does everyone feel about this? I bet we can hook a bot into it eventually.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Ratchet »

It is extremely nifty, seriously! And yes, it should be little effort to integrate bots with. I'm sure it's comparably easy to integrating with IRC, though I haven't looked into it that far.

Thanks Vov for taking the initiative! I've also included a screenshot below of what a different server I hang out in looks like:

http://i.imgur.com/2e4H43X.png
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Monkey »

It's not working for me and I've tried several times :( It just says "connecting". I'm using Firefox btw.

Edit: After a very long wait I'm in.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Lucifer »

Light wrote: I sort of hopped in to this topic because in-game voice chat is something I have wanted for quite a while, but never bothered to ask for. It would be awesome if we could get a basic idea of it thrown into 0.4, even if it doesn't look pretty. If using mumble, it doesn't seem like it should be a huge task to throw in the bare minimum using their API. I could be wrong, though.
Take a look at the mumble api and see how easy it is. Maybe I'll google it up myself. All we need is a way to direct the client to a server, a process running that we can say "turn the microphone off/on", and keybinds to support that.

Capturing the microphone stream and encoding it is fairly straightforward and there's plenty of recipe-type code out there to get started. Where that gets complicated is when you start looking at how to set up the server.
Ratchet wrote: :roll: Sounds like a spew of nonsensical bullshit to me. As you pointed out, computer usage isn't even remotely close. Windows and Mac absolutely dominate the market. Regarding "everywhere else," as you put it, "open source" doesn't even come close to "dominating." Android (which is loosely considered open source) barely tops 50% of all users worldwide. And then, every app you use on your Android device is closed source. If you have some sort of meaningful analysis to back your claim, go for it.
You're leaving out servers. Just about every web server is run off of an open source flavor of Linux, processing servers tend to follow along, and even many game servers. For the basic user interaction, most people are still using Windows and Mac, but the numbers are growing for us thanks to Ubuntu.
Android on phones and tablets ships on something like 70-80% of devices, and more and more people are leaving their desktop/laptop computers behind in favor of phones and tablet (I haven't seen any studies of that). Linux servers on the internet are like at 80% of market share or higher. Hell, Amazon uses php for its backend. Google's always used Linux for it's gigantic cluster. So, yes, many specific apps for Android aren't open source (but you can go to F-Droid, apparently, and go for open source there). There's also an Android distribution you can install on your device that removes all the Google branding, if you want. But if you go by a per-device count, you find a linux kernel on more than 50% of computers in existence today (and don't tell me my phone and tablet aren't computers, they're more powerful computers than the laptop I'm typing on).
Ratchet wrote: I know not everyone has fantastic computers so I can't honestly say what sort of performance hit you take for using Discord in a web browser while tronning.
That would be impossible for me. For some reason, any web browser I run will randomly take up huge chunks of memory, and I have a whole GB sitting here. It's weird, but basically I don't use web browsers on my laptop unless I need to type a lot or print.
Ratchet wrote: When I use teamspeak, the sound seems "tinny" or computerized.
Last I checked, teamspeak used an aggressively lossy setting for Speex. I mentioned a newer codec from Xiph that claims to get the same bandwidth usage for slightly more CPU usage at a much higher quality. Anyway, the "tinny" sound you're hearing is frequencies getting filtered out by the codec to make it compress better and use less bandwidth. The older VOIP services like Vonage used to suffer from that same problem periodically.
Ratchet wrote: However, it could potentially be much easier to connect with gamers from other games by utilizing an interface they are already familiar with (instead of IRC, which is likely very foreign to them). Also, I think it would be a better hub to retain the existing players.
I'd be interested in this feature. More like a bar where you hang out with people and play games, and when someone's interested in what you're playing, you can have them download it and play it. To get this feature, I'd personally prefer to see a series of bots/plugin-type-things that connect game server chat, the irc channels, and any other service. You know, try to round up where everybody hangs out already.
Ratchet wrote: @Lucifer: Election fraud did not occur because of a closed source voice/text communication app.
I don't have a link handy, but it actually did. It was a diebold software revision that ran on a few machines in one of the midwest states. It was enough to throw the local elections, but didn't affect national elections (it was an off-year, so there weren't any national elections in the incident I'm thinking about). And magnitude of importance is irrelevant. Your computer works with so much information that you own, that you create, that it is imperative you have access to the code that manipulates that information. If you don't, you can't assert your rights over that information. Doesn't matter if it's vote tallying, credit card information, or a love letter. It's yours, you own it, and you have rights over it that disappear in the face of opaque binary blobs.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Ratchet »

Another super cool feature is that you can go into the settings of the app pretty easily and set it up such that it recognizes armagetronad.exe as a game. Thus, when you play tron, the discord server automatically shows everyone else that you're playing:

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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Light »

Lucifer wrote:Take a look at the mumble api and see how easy it is. Maybe I'll google it up myself. All we need is a way to direct the client to a server, a process running that we can say "turn the microphone off/on", and keybinds to support that.

Capturing the microphone stream and encoding it is fairly straightforward and there's plenty of recipe-type code out there to get started. Where that gets complicated is when you start looking at how to set up the server.
I'll check it out if I get some time. Without looking, I assume Mumble's API probably takes care of most of it. I expect to see it ready to activate the microphone and stream it, but I could be wrong. Directing the client would take a server edit, but that should be simple enough to toss in the beginning with the rest of the stuff the client gets. Would just need to make sure to disconnect when you leave, or at the least change channels when you join a different server. Debatable on which would be best, but when the time comes to actually do something the different options can be toyed with.

I've been busy lately with rescues, events, foster doggies and of course, work .... Eventually I'll get a break. lol
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Lucifer »

Light wrote: I'll check it out if I get some time. Without looking, I assume Mumble's API probably takes care of most of it. I expect to see it ready to activate the microphone and stream it, but I could be wrong. Directing the client would take a server edit, but that should be simple enough to toss in the beginning with the rest of the stuff the client gets. Would just need to make sure to disconnect when you leave, or at the least change channels when you join a different server. Debatable on which would be best, but when the time comes to actually do something the different options can be toyed with.

I've been busy lately with rescues, events, foster doggies and of course, work .... Eventually I'll get a break. lol
I looked around at it. It uses something called ICE, instead of DBUS, and it's cross-platform, but I couldn't get a solid bead on how to set it up for simple clients. If what I looked at is how to set it up for simple clients, we're not doing it, heh.
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Re: Armagetron Discord

Post by Z-Man »

Ratchet wrote:Another super cool feature is that you can go into the settings of the app pretty easily and set it up such that it recognizes armagetronad.exe as a game. Thus, when you play tron, the discord server automatically shows everyone else that you're playing:

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Now that sounds quite useful. Is it possible to automate this registration in our installer? Because I'm afraid that if manual steps are involved, barely anybody is going to do that.

I'm thinking about adding minimal support. Mind you, nothing probably will come out of that. What I have in mind is simply a way for the server to tell a client that it should open a specific URI. Mumble has mumble://-URIs that could then simply be used to hurl users into the correct mumble server for that game server. Or the game server could send discord invite URIs, who are we to dictate that choice? Obvious concerns here: The user on the client will want to select which URI types to accept, and URIs can send users to malicious sites. Or, if unchecked, do nasty things on the local machine.
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