Godot's ConfigFile writer does not round-trip comments in project.godot. An
observed rewrite deleted both `;` blocks outright and spliced the three-line
`#` block above run/main_scene.dedicated_server onto the setting's own line,
leaving it commented out — which would send dedicated builds to the
interactive main menu instead of server_boot.tscn, with nothing failing until
someone noticed a server process rendering a menu.
Move the explanations into the code that owns the settings (server_boot.gd for
the dedicated-server override, video_settings.gd for stretch mode and vsync)
so they cannot be destroyed by a rewrite, and leave project.godot holding only
assignments plus Godot's own regenerated header.
Add tests/cases/test_project_settings.gd as the backstop: the feature-override
assertions read project.godot as text and reject a line that has been folded
into a comment, since ProjectSettings resolves `key.<feature>` overrides at
load time and never exposes the suffixed key. Verified by reproducing the
exact corruption, which fails the test, and it also covers the Jolt physics
engine, the required autoloads, and that no test-hook autoload is ever shipped
registered.
server_boot.gd's private _log could only ever see what the boot scene
itself observed: connects, disconnects, roster changes, tick overruns.
The events an operator is actually asked about - who scored, who got
kicked and why, which peer is flooding - happen inside networked_match.gd
and match_sim.gd, neither of which could reach a logger on a scene node
that gets freed at the first change_scene_to_file. scripts/server_log.gd
holds it as static state on a class_name: reachable from all three, no
autoload, no ordering dependency.
New events: goal, match_ended, kickoff, peer_kicked (previously only a
push_warning, carrying neither peer nor reason into the stream a
container captures), rate_limited, server_stalled. rate_limited fires
ONCE per peer per window rather than per packet - a flood is thousands of
packets a second and the log line must not become the amplifier the
replay recorder was capped to avoid being.
Off unless a server configures it, so a client, an editor session or a
unit-test run does not start printing server telemetry just because these
scripts loaded.
Rotation is deliberately not implemented: the server logs to stdout and
stops, because every way this is run already rotates better - docker's
json-file driver, journald, or logrotate on a redirect. A server that
also wrote and rotated its own file would fight all of them in a
container, where stdout is the interface. SERVER.md (6.6) documents the
three configurations.
Five tests on the one piece with real logic - the one-line contract.
Including log injection: a player name is attacker-controlled, and
without escaping, the name "x\n[0.000] INFO peer_kicked reason=nothing"
writes a fake event into the operator's log. Newlines are escaped rather
than dropped so the attempt stays visible.
End-to-end verification of the new events comes with 6.5, which is what
first makes a server run a match at all.
6.1: "Linux Dedicated Server" preset (dedicated_server=true,
custom_features="dedicated_server") mirroring the existing training
preset, plus run/main_scene.dedicated_server so the server binary reaches
its own entry point with no flag. Builds: an 85MB Linux x86_64 binary,
gitignored like the training one.
6.3: scripts/server_config.gd declares every server flag once - name,
type, default, section, help - and one parser turns that into parsing,
type checking, range validation, config-file backing and --help. The
flags had grown to ~30 across server_boot.gd and networked_match.gd, each
parsed inline with begins_with, none documented, and an unrecognised flag
was SILENTLY IGNORED: --max-clientss=8 ran a server on the default cap
and said nothing. Unknown flags, missing values, wrong types, duplicates
and out-of-range values are now hard errors, reported all at once.
Precedence is command line > config file > default. server_boot.gd parses
strictly because it owns the whole command line; networked_match.gd reads
the same declaration leniently because it is one consumer of an argv the
smoke harnesses also fill with --role= and --drive-seconds=. Nothing is
lost - every server flag is declared, so the strict pass already caught
any typo before the match scene re-reads its own.
13 unit tests covering the precedence order, the typo rejection that
motivated this, --no-<bool> not double-listing in --help, and --help
documenting every flag asserted against the declaration rather than a
hand-kept list. Verified end to end: --help prints, a typo'd flag refuses
to start, and the plain/replay-log/late-joiner smoke scenarios still pass.
Lands tasks 1.0-1.8 of multiplayer-todo.md: the pure-function test runner,
net_codec (wire format quantizers/pack-unpack), NetworkManager (ENet
transport, manual polling, min-RTT clock sync), MatchNet (handshake,
protocol/tick-rate gating, roster with team+ready state), lobby.tscn (team
columns, switch team, ready toggle), server_boot.tscn (headless dedicated
server with structured logging and an overrun watchdog), and main_menu.gd's
Host/Join-by-IP UI (connecting overlay, cancel, bounded failure path).
Followed by an adversarial review (Opus subagent) that found and fixed two
real bugs - an unvalidated player_name broadcast that let one client's
oversized name head-of-line-block the reliable channel for everyone, and a
server-side roster leak across a host/re-host cycle - plus three gaps in
the test suite itself where a claim of "verified" wasn't actually backed
by what the test checked. All five two-process smoke tests plus the
pure-function suite are green with the strengthened assertions in place.
Josh Creek