Move towards highly configurable servers

[Fink]

This seems like a good time to bring this topic up. This something that Bill has been pushing for, and I was reminded of it in the discussion on pvp (specificly, the idea of having pvp settings that are exposed to a cfg file, so server ops dont have to mess around much in code).

We should think about keeping as much as possible of the different settings, values, and wotnot that the game uses in a server config file that is separate from the server code itself.

Ideally, a joe-average server-op-to-be could pop open this config file, see both A) well chosen default values, and B) a whole huge mess of stuff to tweak, tweak away in a text editor, and run the server - all without having to recompile.

This both keeps things more easily tweakable in general, and also lowers the bar for entry a tad for those wishing to host a server. In an ideal world, only the hardest of the hardcore who have some really kooky stuff they want to pull (ie, things that border on variant-hood) would actually need to recompile the code to get the exact setup they want for their server: everyone else could just tweak the stuff they want, find everything they want to tweak available in the cfg, and hit the server.exe .

So, I bring this up here just to plant the thought that Bill has been trying to get us all thinking about, and also as a thread to post any ideas for things that should/could reside in a config file.

[Fink]

I'll start it off with:

Player starting inventory could be set via config instead of code.

Currently, modifying what players start with involves mucking about in the code, with moderate odds of making a mistake (I've done so in the past on my ironman server, for example). It would be great to instead see this kind of thing modifiable via config options.

[Berendol]

GhostDiving = [true / false]

[Billsey]

I've done quite a bit of work on this vein, though I hadn't thought of starting inventory... At first blush it seems very doable, perhaps even easy, though I'll have to actually look at the code to decide. It would be easiest of we did starting inventory as a separately loaded config file, like monsters and items are today.

Getting Jug's code to do Ironman as a config option was simple (except for the player starting inventory). Same thing with most of the rest that I've tried.

I believe it's in our best interests to only use #ifdef type code blocks for platform ports and use config options for everything else short of variants.

[Crimson]

That having been said, who put strnicmp() in Jug's code base, without even a check to make sure that was available outside of MSVC/BCC (which it's not, unless you now include another special libarary)

[Billsey]

Uh... That would be Jug who did that.