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The ultimate goal of the project & development update 2015/02/10
Posted by Jman,
11 February 2015
·
1458 views
I guess I should go over the goals of the project, a brief roadmap to how I'm going to get there, and then post some development updates. Hopefully I can keep up with some sort of developer journal on here.
Project Goal: To create a Control panel that is secure, stable and useful.
Expanding on this, I would like to create sort of a "one stop shop" control panel where almost all, if not all of your server management is taken care of. While some things may not be possible, some other things might be extremely possible, I guess it depends on the limitation of PHP and my imagination. Task system, admin announcement system, among others are all on my list. The ability for the control panel to set "system broadcasts" to fire every set interval. These are all things that need to be augmented into a successful RO Management interface. I've been a GM on a couple of big games and I'm going for a control panel that is used mainly for larger server management, as I've used for those big games.
Project roadmap:
The project will see the most useful stuff implementing first. I just finished -most- of the account editing interfaces and the module is stable enough to get pushed back into the master. Unfortunately in my haste, I had forgotten about the updates I did to the sql databases, so master went back into unstable.
I'm aiming to fix this by branching out off of master every new feature I am currently working on. I'm developing from multiple machines so this enables me to keep working on something and allow you guys to see the progress of a certain feature and keep my code going across the multiple machines I'm working from. Some of the features I won't finish for some time, some I can finish within a day. It depends on what it is. Minor edits will be immediately committed and pushed to master, including bug fixes. If I find a bug with something in the master branch I'm trying to fix those right away.
I plan to make use of tags within github to manage some sort of releases. Hopefully with any luck, some official releases and I'll get a bit more feedback, even if the releases are in a "beta" or "development" phase.
As mentioned, the "Issues" system within github is where bug reports should be made. Bug reports will only be accepted for the master branch, not any of the other branches, as those are considered "in development". A branch is worked on until it is done or stable to merge into master. The branch is merged and then deleted. Therefore a branch will be considered "bleeding edge", a "trunk" if you will and will be prone to bugs, afterall it's a work in progress.
I plan on releasing some sort of demo, probably by tomorrow so that people can try it out a bit and get a feel for how it works and functions. The demo will include a bunch of demo accounts for the backend and will keep up to date with master for stability. The highest level account will be 98 so that I can still keep a head up with a level 99 account, but the demo will likely be wiped and reloaded with clean data every week or two.
As for the development update
As I mentioned, I plan on creating a "one stop shop" for Hercules server management. It will be anticipated that you will need to install HAT onto the server that is hosting your RO server. Therefore, why not put some metrics like Load Averages, Hard Drive space and memory usage into the control panel? The system_stats branch was created to fill this very purpose. It will use an XML dump from a utility called 'Linfo'. Right now and for the near future, only Linux machines will be supported. Windows will likely post an error. I will optimize and only include the information that's relevant so you can see with a glance what your server's resources look like in comparison to how many users are logged in. I hope to have this feature completed by the end of this week or early next week. I'll be out of town this weekend but might be available to write a few lines of code
Project Goal: To create a Control panel that is secure, stable and useful.
Expanding on this, I would like to create sort of a "one stop shop" control panel where almost all, if not all of your server management is taken care of. While some things may not be possible, some other things might be extremely possible, I guess it depends on the limitation of PHP and my imagination. Task system, admin announcement system, among others are all on my list. The ability for the control panel to set "system broadcasts" to fire every set interval. These are all things that need to be augmented into a successful RO Management interface. I've been a GM on a couple of big games and I'm going for a control panel that is used mainly for larger server management, as I've used for those big games.
Project roadmap:
The project will see the most useful stuff implementing first. I just finished -most- of the account editing interfaces and the module is stable enough to get pushed back into the master. Unfortunately in my haste, I had forgotten about the updates I did to the sql databases, so master went back into unstable.
I'm aiming to fix this by branching out off of master every new feature I am currently working on. I'm developing from multiple machines so this enables me to keep working on something and allow you guys to see the progress of a certain feature and keep my code going across the multiple machines I'm working from. Some of the features I won't finish for some time, some I can finish within a day. It depends on what it is. Minor edits will be immediately committed and pushed to master, including bug fixes. If I find a bug with something in the master branch I'm trying to fix those right away.
I plan to make use of tags within github to manage some sort of releases. Hopefully with any luck, some official releases and I'll get a bit more feedback, even if the releases are in a "beta" or "development" phase.
As mentioned, the "Issues" system within github is where bug reports should be made. Bug reports will only be accepted for the master branch, not any of the other branches, as those are considered "in development". A branch is worked on until it is done or stable to merge into master. The branch is merged and then deleted. Therefore a branch will be considered "bleeding edge", a "trunk" if you will and will be prone to bugs, afterall it's a work in progress.
I plan on releasing some sort of demo, probably by tomorrow so that people can try it out a bit and get a feel for how it works and functions. The demo will include a bunch of demo accounts for the backend and will keep up to date with master for stability. The highest level account will be 98 so that I can still keep a head up with a level 99 account, but the demo will likely be wiped and reloaded with clean data every week or two.
As for the development update
As I mentioned, I plan on creating a "one stop shop" for Hercules server management. It will be anticipated that you will need to install HAT onto the server that is hosting your RO server. Therefore, why not put some metrics like Load Averages, Hard Drive space and memory usage into the control panel? The system_stats branch was created to fill this very purpose. It will use an XML dump from a utility called 'Linfo'. Right now and for the near future, only Linux machines will be supported. Windows will likely post an error. I will optimize and only include the information that's relevant so you can see with a glance what your server's resources look like in comparison to how many users are logged in. I hope to have this feature completed by the end of this week or early next week. I'll be out of town this weekend but might be available to write a few lines of code
