Pre-release Version now on 2.7

[LaFayette]

@Panther you beat me to the announcement : )

2.7 contains quality of life improvements for running bots and will give players limited mod capability within bots.

2.6 bots have been taken down and are replaced with 2.7. Players participating in the beta testing of 2.6 should upgrade to 2.7

@cernel re: versioning

What we have written down is as follows (I would consider all of this more guideline rather than law):
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/blob/master/docs/development/versioning.md

The second part is certainly true in this situation for a variety of matters. If we start having to ask "are you on an early 2.6 version or a later 2.6 version" - that means there's enough upgrades/changes/fixes where it matters.

An unresolved issue, what does "compatibility" even mean? Are we talking backward compatibility, forward, or both? Further, there's at least 4 additional different dimensions: maps, network games, network to lobby, save games. Thus, there's at least 8 different axes of "compatibility" that we could be talking about.

For now, 'maps' and 'save games' with backward compatibility are perhaps the most operative when it comes to the compatibility consideration. To another extent, that really also says "save games" because map compatibility is maintained indefinitely. We can also partition bots/lobby based on version number, thus having a different value is useful for that purpose.

Though, let's please drop this topic from further discussion here. It would be a disservice to 2.7 to dominate this thread with re-hashing versioning numbers.

[beelee]

while joining a bot, it will list the same game multiple times in select map. I'm still able to join.

Hmm ... for some reason i can't take a shot of it

[LaFayette]

I'm working on the duplicate map issue. Please be sure to test everything and let me know about ALL issues, do not try to rate-limit and only let me know about one or two issues. We are working against a deadline to find problems so that we can mark all future versions of TripleA as standard releases.

[beelee]

Everytime I see a issue i post it

[LaFayette]

Thanks! I think the duplicate map issue is largely fixed now.

Not all bots are updating version cleanly, I'm working out those kinks. Nonetheless, all bots are on a pretty recent version of 2.7.

I've noticed as well the in-game [mod] tag drops off when the game is started.

I need to also write up some release notes & documentation for the updates on the updated bots. They're all running on docker now! Further, they update themselves to the latest version on restart, and now that they restart in-between games.. it's a much better situation there

[Cernel]

@lafayette said in Pre-release Version now on 2.7:

and now that they restart in-between games..

My guess is that this should keep the RAM usage fairly down. Maybe now it would be feasible to have as many as 5 bots per server instead of only 3 or 4 (so needing less servers)? Just wondering.

[LaFayette]

@cernel Restarting between would indeed help with memory leaks. How much that will help, is an open question. Thus, to the extent that restarts would let us run more bots - I don't know. We would need do some analysis. We lack a good record of available/free memory, so it's hard to tease out.

My guess, RAM usage most depends on the size of the maps being played and how far they are into the game. EG: a round 20 WaW is going to use a lot more RAM compared to a Classic round 1. What fraction is overall memory leak? I really don't know.

When I'm looking at bots, I do try to see how many large/heavy games are currently going and avoid those bot servers. The latest 2.7 bots now run 3 instances rather than 4 as well. I saw a number of 2.6 bots getting crunched and losing their 4th instance. With luck the 3 will allow for smoother operations.

Long term, I am very optimistic about 'network relay' to replace the bots. The relay would be bounded only by network capacity and not at all by CPU or memory.

[Cernel]

@lafayette Of course, we already know that the bot being influenced at all by the skin of the map is pointless because the bot does not need to look at the map.

Ideally, the bot should not have any skins and not load the skin at all.

(By "skin", I mean the skin elements of the map, not talking about map-skins.)

[Cernel]

@lafayette said in Pre-release Version now on 2.7:

I saw a number of 2.6 bots getting crunched and losing their 4th instance. With luck the 3 will allow for smoother operations.

I guess this has been happening in 2.5 too: I've never seen all bots functionally present in the lobby at the same time.

[LaFayette]

Release notes updated: https://triplea-game.org/release_notes/
Bots should be in good shape. Duplicate map problem should be largely fixed now.
No major known issues.