BT411/docs/OPERATOR_GUIDE.md

BattleTech 4.11 — Operator Console Guide

How to run a games night: set up a mission, get pods seated, launch rounds, and recover when something sticks. Written for the sysop at the console, not for players.

Engineering detail (ports, protocol, state machine) lives in context/operator-console.md. Player-facing instructions ship in the zip as README.txt.

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1. Starting the console

cd C:\git\bt411
python tools\btoperator.py

A window titled BT411 Operator Console opens. That is the console.

One thing worth knowing: there are two programs. btoperator.py is the window you use. btconsole.py is the headless relay it starts for you in the background — all the actual networking. You never launch that one directly; its output is what scrolls in the log pane at the bottom of the window. When this guide says "the relay said…", that is where to look.

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2. Set up the mission, then start the session

Work top to bottom:

1. Pick the mission settings — map, mission length, weather, experience level, and the seat (pod) count. Every dropdown is populated live from BTL4.RES, so anything offered is valid.
2. Set the seat count to roughly who you expect. It does not have to be exact — you can launch with fewer (see §4) — but a wildly oversized roster makes the staging messages confusing.
3. Choose the mode: Relay (internet) is normal — players dial out to you, so they need no port forwarding. Mesh (LAN) is the original cabinet direction for a local network.
4. Press Start Session. The relay comes up and begins accepting pods.

For internet play, you must be reachable. Forward/allow these TCP ports to this machine (default console port 1500):

Port	Why
1500/tcp	the console channel (hands out the mission egg, sends the launch)
1501/tcp	game traffic between pods
1501/udp	the fast update channel (position/motion)

Port 1507/tcp is the operator control channel — only needed if someone drives this relay remotely. Players give their client BT_RELAY=<your address>:1500; players/join.bat handles that.

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3. Watch the pods arrive

Each pilot row lights up as they progress. In order:

waiting → seated (claimed a seat, callsign and mech shown) → egg sent → registered → ready (mission loaded) → LAUNCHED.

You will see this in the log and it is normal, not an error:

console conn 1.2.3.4:5678: egg HELD (3/8 pods present)

The mission file is deliberately held until every seat is present, so that every pod's copy contains everyone's callsign and mech choice. If you are not waiting for the rest, just launch — see next.

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4. Launch a round

Press 🚀 LAUNCH MISSION.

• If everyone has loaded, the round starts within a few seconds.
• If some seats are empty, launching is still correct — the relay shrinks the session to the players who are actually here and starts. You do not need to edit the roster down first.
• The relay holds the start until every pod reports ready, so nobody loads into a mission already in progress. If one pod is slow you will see who, every 10 seconds; after 3 minutes it starts anyway rather than letting one wedged client hold up the night.

The mission then runs on its own clock (the mission length from the egg). ⏹ END MISSION stops it early.

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5. Running back-to-back rounds

When a round ends, players' clients relaunch themselves and reconnect. Once they are back, press LAUNCH again. You can change mission settings between rounds and press Apply first.

If LAUNCH looks dead — press ↻ Re-arm

This is the fix for the most annoying failure this console had. If a round has ended and the LAUNCH button is greyed out, or pressing it does nothing:

Press ↻ Re-arm, then LAUNCH.

Re-arm clears the finished round's state and re-opens the launcher while keeping everyone who is already connected. You do not need Stop Session / Start Session, which disconnects everybody.

Re-arm is for between rounds only, and the console enforces that: while a mission is running it is greyed out (and the relay refuses it with "press End Mission first"), and while a launch is in the middle of firing it is refused with "launch sequence in flight". So you cannot break a live round with it. Expect each already-waiting player's client to bounce once (a few seconds) right after a Re-arm — that is the seat re-sync, not a crash.

Why this happens: the console used to only consider itself ready for a new round if every player from the last round came back, or if all of them left. In between — the normal case when one person closes their window or their client crashes — it got stuck, and said nothing. That is fixed (an explicit LAUNCH now re-arms by itself), and Re-arm is the belt-and-braces button. If you ever see the old behaviour, it is a bug worth reporting.

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6. Known limitations — buttons that are not what they appear

Read this once; each of these is a control that looks live but does nothing in that mode.

Mesh (LAN legacy) mode: the mission buttons do not work. LAUNCH, END MISSION and Re-arm all log ">> operator … sent" and are then silently discarded — the mesh console has no command channel. Apply mission settings is also inert (mesh reads the mission file once at startup). Mesh launches its rounds by itself once the pods have the mission. If you want to control launches, use Relay mode.

Remote relay mode (driving another machine's relay) is now a full console — LAUNCH, END MISSION, Re-arm, Apply and Launch-local all work, and the pilot lights populate from the relay's own roster when you connect. Two things still differ: Stop Session only disconnects you (the remote relay keeps running, which is usually what you want), and Restart Session likewise just reconnects the control link rather than restarting that relay.

Running the relay PARKED (console from anywhere)

The recommended setup for a travelling operator: the relay lives permanently on the home machine, so no player ever edits join.bat, and you drive it from a laptop — cell internet is fine, since the console only makes an outbound connection.

On the home machine, before you leave — double-click tools\park_relay.cmd (or run python tools\btrelay_park.py --egg OPERATOR.EGG --port 1500).

That window is the supervisor: it keeps the relay alive, relaunching it if it ever dies and rotating the old log to content\parked_relay.log.1 so you can still see what happened. Closing the window (or Ctrl-C) stops the relay for good. To have it come back after a reboot, put a shortcut to park_relay.cmd in your Startup folder (Win+R → shell:startup) — no admin needed.

Leave it running.

If you log in from a second account (a dedicated remote-admin login over SSH/RDP), always park the relay with park_relay.cmd rather than typing python ... yourself. python only works for the main account here — it resolves through pyenv shims driven by PYENV* variables that are scoped to that user, and the one machine-wide Python entry points at a folder that no longer exists. The .cmd finds a real interpreter explicitly and prints which one it used; a bare python command from the other account just says "not recognized".

Note the port it prints for operator control (1507 = console port + 7) and copy content\operator_secret.txt — that string is what any console needs to connect, and it grants full mission control, so hand it out deliberately.

From the road: run python tools/btoperator.py, put the home address in Host, Console port 1500, paste the secret, and connect. You get launch, end, re-arm, mission changes (map / time / weather / scenario / temperature / length, applied to the egg on the home machine, effective next round) and live pilot lights.

Restart Session now really restarts the parked relay. In remote mode the button asks the relay to bounce itself; the supervisor brings it straight back with the egg re-read, and your console reconnects a few seconds later. It is refused while a mission is running (it would drop everyone mid-round) — press End Mission first. Use it to clear a wedge, or after someone has edited the egg on the home machine.

What still needs someone at the home machine: starting the supervisor in the first place, and editing the roster itself — seat count, callsigns, mechs, colours. Only the six mission settings travel over the control link, so a roster change means editing the egg there and then pressing Restart Session from wherever you are.

Two traps worth knowing:

• The secret depends on the relay's working directory. It is read as a bare operator_secret.txt relative to wherever the relay was started, and if it is missing the relay silently generates a new one. Always start the parked relay from the same folder (content\), or a console using yesterday's secret will just be dropped on the auth timeout with no clear error.
• Don't forward the control port to the open internet. It is plaintext with a shared secret. Keep the player ports (1500/1501) forwarded exactly as they already are and carry the operator link over a private tunnel (Tailscale or similar) instead.

Other sharp edges:

• Start Session overwrites your egg file on disk, without asking. Keep a copy of any mission you care about under a different name.
• Apply only pushes the six mission settings (map, time, weather, scenario, temperature, length). Callsign / mech / colour / badge / patch / experience edits need Save. Changing the seat count mid-session is refused outright — that needs a session restart.
• The Colour dropdown offers colours the game cannot paint. Only Black, Brown, Crimson, Green, Grey, Tan and White work; anything else silently comes out grey. The relay warns in the log.
• If the relay dies on its own, Launch local instances stays clickable and will start clients against nothing. Press Start Session first.
• Public host is used only when exporting player scripts; it does not affect what the relay binds or advertises.

7. When a player leaves

Their pilot light goes grey (waiting) and the seat's callsign reverts to whatever you had configured for that row — so a free seat no longer looks occupied by a departed player.

Their seat is held for them for 90 seconds. That is deliberate: someone who crashes or gets dropped comes straight back into the same seat with the same mech. During that window a brand-new player is given the next free seat instead, or told the roster is full if there wasn't one. After 90 seconds the vacated seat is fair game for anybody.

So if a new arrival can't get in right after somebody left, wait a minute and have them retry — or raise the seat count if you're simply out of seats.

8. Troubleshooting

What you see	What it means	What to do
egg HELD (n/N pods present)	normal staging — waiting for the rest of the seats	wait, or press LAUNCH to start with who is here
LAUNCH greyed out after a round	the launcher is still holding the last round	press ↻ Re-arm
LAUNCH pressed but NO players are seated yet	nobody has claimed a seat	check the players are pointed at the right address/port
LAUNCH pressed but NOT all seats have ACKed	some pods are still taking the mission file	wait a few seconds; if one is never coming, press Re-arm (between rounds only — it is refused mid-launch/mid-mission)
launch HELD -- still loading: PLAYER n	that pod has not finished loading	wait; it force-starts after 3 minutes
*** WARNING: ... EMPTY seat(s) ... the mission will STALL	can be a false alarm after the roster is trimmed	if the round starts and plays fine, ignore it
seat RECLAIMED by identity	a player who dropped got their seat back	nothing — this is working as intended
game[...] dropped: closed	a pod disconnected	normal at round end; mid-round it means they crashed or lost connection
A player gets ROSTER FULL	no free seat in the current round	Re-arm between rounds so the roster re-opens, then let them join
Console window stops responding	the relay stalled on a dead connection	Stop Session, Start Session; please keep the log (below)
A player says they cannot connect at all	ports, or wrong address	confirm 1500/1501 TCP + 1501 UDP reach this machine

The one thing to do before restarting a session

Copy content\operator_relay.log somewhere first. Start Session overwrites it — so restarting to clear a problem also destroys the evidence of that problem. If something misbehaved, save that file and hand it over; it is timestamped line-by-line and it is what makes these bugs diagnosable.

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9. Match reports

At the end of each clean round, every player's client uploads its own match report to you automatically (relay mode only). They land in matchlogs\ named by the sender's address. You do not need to ask players to send anything.

Exceptions worth knowing: a client that crashes mid-round loses its report, and players on solo or Steam have no relay to upload through. In those cases ask them for content\matchlog_*.txt directly. Their crash log — content\join_YYYYMMDD.log, one file per day holding every session (plus the tiny content\lastrun_<mode>.txt) — is never uploaded — ask for it explicitly when something went wrong on their end. Ask for the newest <stem>_*.log rather than "today's": the log day runs 06:00 → 06:00, so a session after midnight is still filed under the evening it started. Always ask for lastrun_<mode>.txt too, even when they say there is no log — that combination is how a launch blocked before WinMain is identified.

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10. Local test instances

Launch local instances starts game clients on this machine against your own session — useful for testing alone or filling a seat. Stop games closes them. In relay mode the session must already be started, or a local instance has nothing to dial.

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11. Which build everyone needs

All pods must run the same build as each other. Build 4.11.554 changed what pods tell each other about scores, so a mixed session shows disagreeing KILLS/DEATHS columns (nothing crashes — the remote numbers just do not move). When you hand out a new zip, make sure everyone takes it before the session.