ARSSE vs Baka Admin

[Shoozza]

This is not a battle you have been fooled!

I have a problem: ARSSE can only be updated by me. It's never going to be opensource because KeFear went missing (need this permission).
Now I wonder what should I do?

1) Rewrite ARSSE (ARSSE 2?)
2) Drop ARSSE and work on another admin client (Baka Admin).

Another question: Do you think is Baka Admin a good alternative for the Veteran ARSSE users and if not why and what needs to change?

[jrgp]

Option 3: say "fuck KeFear" and open source ARSSE. If he's never coming back, he can't necessarily get pissed at you and I doubt he cares at this point.

I choose Option 3.

Another question: Do you think is Baka Admin a good alternative for the Veteran ARSSE users and if not why and what needs to change?

Baka has become the de-facto admin client for windows users. Take it for a spin and see how its sleek interface puts ARSSE to shame.

[Bonecrusher]

I'd say rewrite ARSSE as baka doesnt need much work, everythings implemented there already, ill stick to arsse

pics for someone who doesnt use both of them:
Baka

ARSSE:

[jrgp]

Baka looks a lot nicer on Win7 with the special windows effects enabled.

[Bonecrusher]

can u take screen jrgp

[jrgp]

can u take screen jrgp

Get out from under your forum equivalent of a rock and look at the official Baka  thread with all of VTT's screenshots. None of my machines run Win 7/Vista so I can't take a screenshot.

[Prodigyx]

1) Rewrite ARSSE

or... Option 3

[SyavX]

#2 has more sense, since rewriting ARSSE by yourself without open-sourcing it will take too much time. You'd better focus on Soldat.

As for ARSSE vs. BA usage, there should be no problems for ARSSE users to migrate to BA, if only they don't use ARSSE's scripts and/or IRC functions.

[Falcon`]

Yeah, and mind to add baka admin support to logeye too. This app is very usable.

[Mr]

ARSSE is a great admin client when it comes to functionality, it provides an unique way to add custom actions (scripts) and has an IRC feature for relaying messages from the server to an IRC channel, which is also useful in some situations.
However, ARSSE has its issues: The interface is not very clean (there's simply too much stuff on there), the scripts can't do much things, and ARSSE uses sync. I/O which makes it freeze sometimes and show console messages with a delay if there's lots of spam.

Baka Admin solves most of these issues. It's fast, small and stable (also, it has a very neat interface on Vista and up). There is SolTV in Baka Admin, which is cool for quickly getting an overview about a match when an admin request comes in.
A major drawback here is that there is absolutely no option to extend the client's functionality to for example have it respond to a player saying !admin (other than editing the source code, which the 'normal user' usally cannot do - this is why most veteran server admins still use ARSSE).

However, there's one issue that both admin clients have:

Neither ARSSE nor Baka Admin are aware of what is really going on on the server.
They identify certain message types using regular expressions or other patterns, but cannot really filter out any useful information from it (and pass that on to the scripts).

The reason for that is not that the developers were too lazy (they gave their best), the reason is that the Soldat server simply generates unparsable console output that changes with nearly every new release.
This is not so bad if a human is using the client, however, once one starts to automate things, the horror begins, which is why this is what must be changed first before starting to write a new (official) admin client.

[tk]

That's exactly why a new admin protocol should be implemented, and I mean actual protocol here (sth like irc protocol but lighter), not what we currently have. If you are going to do some effort on writing a new client, it only makes sense with a new admin protocol imo.