http://olympuschess.com/acca/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3
Things have been wild since CCT
so thought I would kick this off by giving an update.In recent weeks here are some things I'm working on for the future of the OICS server.
* Some website changes. I cleaned a couple engines out, added several including 6 more cores (4 of which are on 24/7) and migrated the Nightmare and Raptor engines to that node.
* Game database fixes. I found a bad bug in my gamebot "parser". While the gamebot recorder itself is capturing all games, when I do my monthly conversion from raw ICS output to PGN and SCID, I was missing a lot of games. This is why I haven't updated the website with games since November. I retain all data, so plan to re-convert all date.. new and before December. This will give anyone (especially authors) a full dataset of their games.
* Create a beautiful live game site so people can view what's being played without having to login to the server itself. Good for authors, anyone, even myself since it gives me a nice snapshot of how things are.
* Mamer, not really what to say. This is an issue that plagues both me and H.G. Mullers sites. It's a nice bot, and I respect the authors, but there are definitely bugs and issues that need to be worked out. While the ICS has only crashed 1 time (at this time) in 8 months. Mamer crashes ever day or two, which causes a problem with the tourney bot. After CCT and issues with mamer there, there has been some input and other people willing to help to revise the code. So perhaps mamer will live on, and with updates I can also update my own.
However as a second note, to address other issues. I'm thinking about dropping the whole tourney bot/mamer combo, and write from scratch my own "mamer" type bot. The reason, is that one of my biggest complaints, is that people want to come and go as they please (which I understand). Either, there is a 30 1 tourney going on and people have to wait hours to join the next tourney meaning wasted time, or they are in such a tourney and want to leave but can't (or if they do) breaks the tournament leaving everyone in limbo.
So the goal is to write a fresh tourney bot that acts like mamer, to do just 1-on-1 games. But pairing them just as if they were in a bigger tournament. This way people can come in as they please, and at most can leave once the current game is done. I also plan to add a "opt-in opt-out" feature. This is the second most requested feature (though it might be less important if people aren't bound to an actual tournament and only on a 1-on-1 game basis). I also plan to utilized a more modern approach to tournament control that mamer is a bit dated on (at least the version that is publicly available).
* Future goal for the live game site. This is mostly for ACCA purposes. But tinkering with the idea of adding a web-based chat function. This way people who want can just view the site, and if interested chat about any given game.
* Live Game Site feature: Add the capability to view all games, but click on one and just see that game. For me the tricky part is keeping the "chat option" upon change. This is really a push for me to update my HTML 1.0 skills to the new world of ajax/javascript/css
Which I like since I've been meaning to learn these things, but really needed a project to push me there.* RECENT UPDATE: Due to some ELO concerns, and out of balance with real world values, I manually upped everyones ELO by 650. After looking at top and low engines, and finding a median across all the data, it seemed 650 was a modest boost to put things better in line. Plus I upped the default rating of 1600 to 1800. To push more points into the system.
Think that's it for now, off the top of my head. Will add more the the thread as things mature.
-Josh