Clarity on Timeline Updating

[pezhore]

Can someone help clarify a thing for me? With my Ghost NPCs reporting in to the api server, I can publish updates using "Run timeLine"... But what's the difference between TimelinePartial and Timeline?

[sei-dupdyke]

There is a default timeline that every client has that you can think of as the baseline of all the activities that client will do throughout the day. I think of partial timelines as Just In Time JIT activities that the NPC needs to do right now.

It's like describing "everything you do at work" vs. "my boss told me to fill out my TPS report right now". 😃

[pezhore]

I think I get it, but just to be sure let's take these three scenarios:

Scenario 1

• The NPC's timeline is scheduled from 00:00-24:00 in a loop, to ping a server once and wait for 5 minutes.
• I do a TimelinePartial update and have it do a curl command timeline that doesn't loop.

Outcome: The NPC dutifully pings until the partial update comes through, it does the curl command, then goes back to pinging?

Scenario 2

• The NPC's timeline is scheduled from 00:00-24:00 in a loop, to ping a server once and wait for 5 minutes.
• This time, the TimelinePartial update has the same schedule and is a loop to do the curl command.

Outcome: The NPC does its pings until the partial timeline update comes through, then it switches to the curl command on loop, never going back to the ping (unless the process restarts or another timeline update happens)?

Scenario 3

• The NPC's timeline is scheduled from 00:00-24:00 in a loop, to ping a server once and wait for 5 minutes.
• I do a Timeline update that has the schedule 00:00-24:00 in a loop to do the curl command

Outcome: The NPC does its ping loop until the timeline update, after which it does the curl loop. The NPC never goes back to pinging, unless there's a timeline update?

[sei-dupdyke]

Every handler in the default timeline is spun off into its own process. So, if you setup a ping every 5 minutes that gets handled separately from any other handler in case you do multiple activities with the same handler. An example of this might be that you have two browser handlers configured. One browses random public internet sites every 5 minutes throughout the day. The second one might browse an internal sharepoint site every 15 minutes, so that throughout the course of the day, you get a good spread of internal/external traffic.

So, in the scenarios you propose:

Scenario 1

Pings happen on one process and the curl request happens on another separate process. It could be that both happen at the same time (but that's statistically unlikely).

2

There is no switch, the NPC is truly multi-tasking :)

3

Here you just switch out the default timeline. When that file on disk is changed, the ghosts client resets entirely, so all the currently running processes stop, read the new timeline, and go do those activities.

HTH