Hey guys,
(for TL;DR see bottom)
I am getting really fed up with this stupid Dungeon Finder.
Especially the part where everyone in the group accepts the invitation, but then there are no instance servers ready, and ESO lies to us that "some declined the invite" and all the crap starts from anew.
Especially in the context that whenever you form a group and enter any dungeon manually (by teleporting there) you get an instance immediately.
As multiple games have had serious problems with their group finder tools, I have already rewritten a DungeonFinder-like tool myself.
It is thread-safe, fair queueing (if someone aborts or instance servers etc are not ready etc, people will get put back in front of the queue).
When tested in a perfect ESO-like (4 roles, 4 and 12 player missions) environment , with a huge number of ready instance servers and lots of people joining fast, it can form about 1200 groups and dispatch them to their shards per second. (running on i7-4790 at about 50%, no speed optimizations made yet, only proof-of-concept)
So my plan is to host that on my server, and make an
- ingame UI (selecting role + missions)
- coordination over my server
- group invitation system
- auto-port to dungeon
TL;DR:
The only problem I see there is: how can I open a socket in LUA from within ESO and communicate with my server? Protocol (TCP/UDP/any other) is not relevant to me.
Communication would go two ways, sending and receiving.
I know theres such libraries for LUA, but is there any method included in ESO already, or does the possibility exist to bring such a lib into the ESO environment?
Off-topic: another idea is to create a UI, selecting missions+role, that UI postst to chat (maybe theres hidden channels, havent checked), and from there on work like (or even use) AutoInvite, and kick off the mission once everyone has joined.