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Future of weblobby

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7 years ago
Hello. I am RUrankAdminikinz and I maintain weblobby (aka swl). In its day swl served us well as a lobby client that wasn't butt-ugly, was more stable and didn't suffer from weird ZKL bugs and updates. It provided a working alternative during the nuZKL release fiasco. For a long time it was the superior way of idling in chat. I think we had a good run.

Since then two things happened:
  • Chobby has grown up into a beautiful young lobby and it's only getting better.
  • We got Discord integration. Discord is the chat idling solution. It even has mobile!

For the past few weeks I've been idling in discord and using chobby to play. This seems to work well, and I find myself never having the urge to open swl instead.

I don't really want to maintain zk lobby server support. To tell you a secret, I actually haven't been doing it for a while now, MM only happened thanks to CHrankAdminDeinFreund. Even that is incomplete (doesn't show the "1v1 available nao!" thing, etc). I'm thinking I'll probably disable MM (maybe just filter the coop queue out?) and then tell people to stop using it to play zk (you can still idle in chat I guess) and if it works, it's by accident.

Two things can change that:
  • Several people posting here telling me how swl is the best thing to ever happen to them and the prettiest lobby and please I want full zk server support and here's a list of reasons why I don't want to use discord+chobby.
  • Someone stepping up to do all the work.

I'm not discontinuing swl proper. I just don't want to maintain support for latest zk server features when chobby does it better and it changes often and having swl in the wild makes testing more annoying for AUrankAdminGoogleFrog.
+8 / -0
This would concern me less if Chobby were actually an option for me at this point.
+1 / -0


7 years ago
USrank[Evo]ForbodingAngel nothing changes as far as you're concerned (otherwise I would talk to you first instead of pulling the rug from under you!). This is exclusively about making swl work with ZKLS. It still supports spring lobby server and if that breaks, I'll fix it.

Maybe you meant that it's concerning as an indication that I'm thinking about dropping swl altogether fairly soon and that's the first step. I can't really say that's true, spring server is much more conservative and it doesn't take much time to maintain swl there. It's not exactly in active development, and I'd love for someone to help, but I'm not planning on killing swl entirely any time soon. A year from now? It's gonna live. 2 years? I'll think about it, depends on what happens with chobby and evo and that BA installer by tzaeru and whether someone joins in.
+0 / -0

7 years ago
Hey, I'm JPrankgajop and I helped develop Chobby. Back in the day, I also helped in creating a very early QT port for SWL, and I still use SWL for connecting to the Spring server (it's the best lobby for it still).

I can understand why you want to stop maintaining a lobby for ZKS. The protocol isn't documented, changes happen all the time and decisions aren't made by any real consensus. This might sound like criticism, but this model works well for ZK and ZK-Chobby, as it gives devs a high amount of flexibility.

Uberserver changes on the other hand are slow (both because there is little development, but also because we tend to work towards agreements first) and the protocol is well documented. I also use Discord for Uber, but I can't think of dropping SWL (or future Chobby), even if it's just for idling, because I really want to be able to join custom channels (s44, battletech, etc.). Also, open source matters.

PS: I'd like some help in finishing the port for Chobby to uber. #MakeSpringGreatAgain
+0 / -0
I liked the SWL over ZKL except a few things. One of them, which made me go back to ZKL was, that on weaker computers (minÄ™ isnt quite a NASA computer) Swl failed to keep up with chat !Y !N spam. Chat lines appeared at rate of one line every ~0.5 second. Adding this to the fact that each !N created 3 lines, and we have a pretty big delay.

Doesnt sound very bothering, but in 10v10 game it took the swl a coupled of minutes to realize sth Has changed. And if a quick !Map and !Start happened, my lobby started initializing the startup of ZK after the game (the actual match) Has started.
Resulting in the !Kick Failer polls.

In ZKL it never was the case
+0 / -0
Skasi
7 years ago
I never used weblobby, I just wanna say: Mobile Discord can be teh shit.
+0 / -0
7 years ago
please keep weblobby. It is fantastic, and operates well on my linux systems.

The UI is simple and sleek without any messy graphics in the background.

I am a big fan of being able to "alt tab" back to the lobby client while in game, or while loading.

If my game gets bugged/frozen, i don't have to restart everything from scratch, just kill process, and "start game" in the lobby.

Also, i have found that Chobby would cause me some bugs, but they would come and go, and depended on what other programs i was running at the same time as Chobby, since i tend to multitask a lot.

+1 for weblobby.
+5 / -0
Lynx
Chobby has got better than it was, which was for me unusable, but Web Lobby feels more elegant and has lovely visuals. I would be disappointed to see it discontinued. I was happily using it for the last few months whilst Chobby had major problems running in Linux. Web Lobby still performs an important function in providing an elegant and stable alternative.
+2 / -0
Firepluk
7 years ago
would be cool to keep a bare minimum working - chat, hosting/joining rooms
when chobby has a problem it's good if there is something simpler available
+4 / -0
Lynx
6 years ago
Looks like Chobby may be broken but I get an engine error message using WebLobby now:

Error Downloading engine 104.0.1-92-g4409317 develop:
No engine version found for 104.0.1-92-g4409317 develop

+0 / -0
quote:
Looks like Chobby may be broken

Sorry, what's broken?

EDIT: Nvm, saw the other thread now.
+0 / -0