User Screen Capture Ability

[choppergirl]

TCAdmin needs the built in diagnostic ability to be able to take a screen snapshot, by clicking on a link in the control panel, and returning a JPEG screen capture in a webbrowser of what's going on on the screen the game server is running on.

 

 

Why? Because this is frustrating running a game server completely blind. My game server will crash, and TCAdmin will not restart it. My guess is that it has crashed, with an open dialog box displaying an error message, and is hung at this point, and the process is still running though no longer functioning as a game server. In other words, the process is hung in an infinate loop waiting for a user interaction to click the Okay button in the error dialog box, before it will terminate. The process is not dead, but hung waiting for user input. So TCAdmin does not restart it, and my server is effectively 'dead' until I manually check on it and restart it. There is no way for me to confirm this, nor is there a way for me to see what this error dialog box is saying, so I could actually fix the error.

 

 

Screen capture could be used to see diagnostic messages out put in the game server window when it is launched, and verify that when you click 'START', and 'STOP', the game server is actually started and stopped. I went for a month one time trying to figure out why a server was not starting, which turned out to be the name of the application to launch was set wrong. There was no way to 'see' that it was not actually starting at all. TCAdmin like a blind fool would happily report my server was "RUNNING" after clicking the START button, when in fact it wasn't running at all because it never started.

 

 

I don't think this would be a security compromise, to just be able to 'see' the screen the game servers are running on, because its not like you would be able to interact with them like VNC. And this is sorely needed.

 

TCAdmin is a remote process administration tool, and yet using it is like trying to run a cash register blind. You can't see a blasted thing as to what is actually going on when you press buttons. Neigther the remote server screen, nor a dump of the server process list, nor whether your application is *actually* launched or shutdown (see my other post about the bug on the START/SHUTDOWN page being a simple state toggle, and not actually reporting if the process is for real running or not).

 

Because this is so critical, and because TCAdmin is suppose to be a remote process administration tool and this is such an essential feature that is necessary in such software, I'm upgrading this to a BUG, instead of just a feature request.

 

Would you let a blind man babysit your children? Probably not. Likewise, would you let a blind man babysit your application and game servers?

 

 

CHOPPERGIRL

http://choppergirl.air-war.org

[studeggle]

Trouble is isolating popup messages from a specific game, as generic screenshots would include all games running and most people running TcAdmin have many customers per box.

 

Some of us have put on our thinking caps and devised a solution for piping all the information from each game to each customer but as it took many months of programming the codes not up for free use. Sorry we have to pay our programmers in more then good vibes.

 

There may also be something in Tcadmin2 it appears it will be full of many new features.

 

 

I would also have to SERIOUSLY disagree with you analogy of running a register blind. When your pressing a button on the register you don't see the electrons you just trust they are doing what they have been wired or programmed to do. If they do you get a response a bit of text in a window, a draw popping open, a receipt printing. But you don't see the register doing those things just the effect. You can see the game running or not running, you can see the crash files in your folders, and the list goes on...