The problem with the halfd protocol is that it is way too verbose. This querying standard will be used for ALL 3rd party server interactions (i.e when you are not actually in the game). We need to minimise the "cost" of getting the status of a server. That is why the standard specified default queries (ala stored procedures in the db world) to minimise the bandwidth when getting commonly used queries. The standard also allows programs to query on an ad-hoc basis for the data they want, it doesn't all need to be lumped into on giant packet.
If you read the standard you will see it is similar to the halfd format, Rob actually helped in its creation. Right now it is zero limited rather than tab limited because we didn't want to put any arbiarty constaints on the strings you can use in response packets. We also designed the standard to work for all FPS style gaming engines (in the hope that others would implement it).
- Alfred
Brian A. Stumm wrote:
AND to add to this...
the most popular HL mods are team based. One should be able to get the damned TEAM scores via a query as well...
Why can I not determine that (in TF) Red teams score is 20 and Blue teams score is 10 via a query...
THAT is an absolute must in whatever standard is determined. The engine should allow the mod to set a mod type flag (aka team based) which means the engine will track team scores...
On a side note, does anyone know how I can obtain team scores for TFC in the current hlds, even via a middle man hack? by middle man I mean something such as how botman's code sits between the engine and mod? I've figured out how to determine lots of info like the x,y,z coords of each player, kills, deaths, current weapon held, armor, health, etc etc etc but for the life of me CANNOT find the phreaking team score and THAT is completely frustrating...
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Brian A. Stumm wrote:
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Alfred wrote:
http://www.adminmod.org/alfred/SQS_v03.html
This standard was produces by this list about 6 months ago. Hopefully something like this will appear in HL2, nothing concrete about this side of the engine has been decided however.
yes I've reviewed that before. I should have commented before.
a tab delimited format would be much better. Its a system that has been in use for better than 20 years now.
Are you familiar with the halfd newapi standard?
lines 18 type UPDATE up 1 time 1537 data users [STF]H4X I-NET_COP [STF]1337 TheOtherWhiteMeat pings 5 5 5 5 frags 0 10 1 1 times 60:42:35 60:42:35 60:42:35 60:42:35 ips 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 userid 843 844 845 846 wonid 0 0 0 0 model Pyro Pyro Engineer Engineer team Blue Red Blue Red deaths 0 0 1 1 map 2fort cnt 4 vote 1
Formatting may get wasted here but let me explain. First line tells us how many lines to expect ie:
lines\t18\r\n
\t meaning TAB and \r\n meaning newline.
Now we read 18 lines, the 18th line is blank which indicates end of packet.
These subsequent lines are key/data pairs. This provides us with a multidimensional array of data.
From the data above we can see that...
The player with name "theotherwhitemeat" has ping of 5, 1 frag, been playing for 60 hours 42 minutes 35 minutes, is from ip 127.0.0.1, userid is 846, wonid is 0 (this is a bot), model/class is engineer, team is red, has 1 death. We also know that voting is enabled (1) the map is 2fort and that there are 1537 seconds left on map. This is a single Halfd packet. There are other "type" messages that COULD be received. ie:
lines 8 type INIT up 1 auth 2 name SpokaneTeamFortress.com #2 ip 216.255.199.157 max 14 port 27016
type indicates the kind of data we are reading...
Anyone that is familiar with database import can deal with this type of data in any language. Tab Delimited...
Players cannot use tabs or newlines in chat messages (in current hlds engine) which also makes this preferable.
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