Any news on MP'er with Harpoon ANW 3.10?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

ORIGINAL: mikmyk

ORIGINAL: Bucks

Mike,

Here or in general? I could pass on a msg and have him contact you. I think he's given this up. I spoke to him after I'd escaped the hospital recently and he said he'd had his "fill" for now.

Quickest way would be an email I think.

Cheers

Darren

Ha yeah that sounds like Dale! Just wondering hows he's doing. Haven't seen him in ages.

Dale is doing fine, we mail from time to time. He left Matrix forums due to HH. But not the sim itself IMO.

I´m pretty sure he´s watching this forum and monitoring how things evolve. [;)]

[Anonymous]

Hi Dimitris,

ORIGINAL: Sunburn

If all goes well, the MP server for Red Pill should be able to address the technical problems/limitations.

We are aiming for a mechanism that:
* re-starts automatically upon encountering any problem
* recovers gracefully from mid-game crashes and resumes from the last healthy point
* requires no firewall config
* can handle large scenarios

We are learning from the mistakes of those before us, and building upon their experience.

Sounds awfully good. Your last sentence reminds me of Kaizen which I´m just trying to implement in my departments: Continuous improvement. Sustainability. [:)]

GCB2 will have a nice MP feature, too.

[Anonymous]

ORIGINAL: FreekS

I have also hosted a server for a few hundred games, and in addition to Tony's points, two more are needed

4. Support to set up the server and get through the firewalls and port settings (roughlz the same complexity as the PEEK and POKE commands in BASIC on the Commodore VIC 20 were)

5. Either the host needs to be present when multiplay in in grogress or one of the players needs to have remote access to the server to reset the server after the frequent crashes and freezeups.

However, MP is much more fun than solitaire.

Freek

+1 in all aspects.

[FreekS]

Rumour is, theres a new server up somewhere in South America and a game is scheduled tonight.

[Bucks]

ORIGINAL: Vincenzo Beretta

I'm prefectly able to lose weight and live an healhier life: just don't ask me to stop smoking, to stop eating junk food, and to start a regular cycle of exercises. Everyone agrees that it would be a "congenial" plan! [:D] Pity that it will also not work.

That's all a question of personal motivation (will power) it has nothing to do with anyone but yourself. I would suggest congeniality is somewhat of a symbiotic interaction. It will not matter how congenial the atmosphere is if you simply don't want to be part of it.

Do you follow the laws regarding paying tax or driving on the road or just selectively?

Adjective: Congenial
Suitable to your needs or similar to your nature.
"a congenial atmosphere to work in"; "two congenial spirits united...by mutual confidence and reciprocal virtues"

Darren Buckley

[Bucks]

ORIGINAL: FreekS

Rumour is, theres a new server up somewhere in South America and a game is scheduled tonight.

Thx Freek,

In light of that, I'd like to ask Tony if "lag" upsets the way a MP game behaves itself? I've mentioned in the past my "obsession" with Counter Strike Source and almost without exception MP servers will have a 200 millisecond "lag or latency" limit. Meaning that, if you're lagging more than 0.2 of a second the server will kick you...

I wonder if we're not falling victim to servers that are simply outside of the optimal latency values to allow the MP version of ANW to function effectively? While playing CS I've only ever played on a server outside of Australia a couple of times and that server was based on the US West coast (California)with a lag time of approximately 120 milliseconds (luckily CS Source uses interpolation to keep everything happening "at once".

I've just checked the South American CS Source servers and with approximately two dozen servers showing up, I have latency times of between 453 milliseconds and 1936 milliseconds (almost 2 seconds!!!). I'm not a tech, but I doubt an ANW MP server will function as intended if one player is lagging 2 full seconds behind the current game time? I mean you only have to miss a server "update cycle" once and you can be dropped.

Tony, do you have any thoughts on this based on your extensive experience running MP games for ANW?

Cheers

Darren

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: Vincenzo Beretta

ORIGINAL: mikmyk
Vinnie!

Yeah agree and on the flip side the active community needs to be a little more congenial in their reporting and dealings with the devs. I think there is some give and take if you're interested in a getting/building a good game.

I fully agree. However, when providing a full, constantly up to date bug list, of bugs found using the original DB, with a save detailing the bug and the condition where it appears... when all of this makes someone UNCONGENIAL, I don't for them see many ways to go out the steel box they locked themselves in.

I'm prefectly able to lose weight and live an healhier life: just don't ask me to stop smoking, to stop eating junk food, and to start a regular cycle of exercises. Everyone agrees that it would be a "congenial" plan! [:D] Pity that it will also not work.

Sure Vince.

Whats gonna be nice is when Harpoon and all these projects take off a little bit and people are more focused on playing the games and not so concerned about the other stuff.

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: FreekS

Rumour is, theres a new server up somewhere in South America and a game is scheduled tonight.

If its real and not rumour look forward to hearing about it Freek.

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: koelbach

ORIGINAL: FreekS

I have also hosted a server for a few hundred games, and in addition to Tony's points, two more are needed

4. Support to set up the server and get through the firewalls and port settings (roughlz the same complexity as the PEEK and POKE commands in BASIC on the Commodore VIC 20 were)

5. Either the host needs to be present when multiplay in in grogress or one of the players needs to have remote access to the server to reset the server after the frequent crashes and freezeups.

However, MP is much more fun than solitaire.

Freek

+1 in all aspects.

and why is that Ralf. If there has **really** been a couple of hundred games played why is the developer still talking about help with testing. The community needs to be a little more interested in being honest about whats going on then self promotional. So maybe there might be a bug report/AAR or something tangible coming out of South America tonight other than rumours.

Just saying...

[Vincenzo_Beretta]

ORIGINAL: Bucks

ORIGINAL: Vincenzo Beretta

I'm prefectly able to lose weight and live an healhier life: just don't ask me to stop smoking, to stop eating junk food, and to start a regular cycle of exercises. Everyone agrees that it would be a "congenial" plan! [:D] Pity that it will also not work.

That's all a question of personal motivation (will power) it has nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

Exact. I cannot lend my personal willpower to someone else so that bugs will be fixed. I'm happy to see that you got it at the first attempt.

I would suggest congeniality is somewhat of a symbiotic interaction. It will not matter how congenial the atmosphere is if you simply don't want to be part of it.

Which is why developers should be "congenial" to paying customers, and not the other way around. But, as I often say, maybe it's just me.

However, if you realy want more "congeniality", fix the bugs. I assure you that this will make a lot people a lot more "congenial" overnight. Well, maybe not the dudes working on "Red Pill", but everybody else will.

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: Vincenzo Beretta

ORIGINAL: Bucks

ORIGINAL: Vincenzo Beretta

I'm prefectly able to lose weight and live an healhier life: just don't ask me to stop smoking, to stop eating junk food, and to start a regular cycle of exercises. Everyone agrees that it would be a "congenial" plan! [:D] Pity that it will also not work.

That's all a question of personal motivation (will power) it has nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

Exact. I cannot lend my personal willpower to someone else so that bugs will be fixed. I'm happy to see that you got it at the first attempt.

I would suggest congeniality is somewhat of a symbiotic interaction. It will not matter how congenial the atmosphere is if you simply don't want to be part of it.

Which is why developers should be "congenial" to paying customers, and not the other way around. But, as I often say, maybe it's just me.

However, if you realy want more "congeniality", fix the bugs. I assure you that this will make a lot people a lot more "congenial" overnight. Well, maybe not the dudes working on "Red Pill", but everybody else will.

Jeez sorry this has turned into such a thing although I'm glad you're spending time explaining that to everyone[:D]

I don't see anything recent that leads me to think the devs or publishers have been not congenial with you or Herman. Fact I see a whole lot of patience on their part including alot of putting their heads down, taking a bunch of cheapshots and trying to move the game ahead.

This would be beyond that fact that beating on them has yet to yield a positive result yet.

Anyways hope you're able to work all this out Vinnie. I'd suggest playing the game, or building a scenario or something. Might shift your perspective from trying to master the forum to the actual game.

[Vincenzo_Beretta]

ORIGINAL: mikmyk
I don't see anything recent that leads me to think the devs or publishers have been not congenial with you or Herman.

More than that: recently you don't see Herman at all... [8|]

Fact I see a whole lot of patience on their part

"Patience" is inherent in bugfixing when you talk about Harpoon.

including alot of putting their heads down, taking a bunch of cheapshots and trying to move the game ahead.

It comes with getting the money, you know: it is one of the perks.

This would be beyond that fact that beating on them has yet to yield a positive result yet.

Alas...

[mikmykWS]

Thank you Vinnie

I think we've kind of beat this subject to death and my first question was pretty much answered. Gonna spend tonight building a scenario.

[Bucks]

ORIGINAL: mikmyk

and why is that Ralf. If there has **really** been a couple of hundred games played why is the developer still talking about help with testing. The community needs to be a little more interested in being honest about whats going on then self promotional. So maybe there might be a bug report/AAR or something tangible coming out of South America tonight other than rumours.

Just saying...

Mike,

I do just about all my testing using the MP game type. That way the game plays itself and it's not a great technical feat to set it up to run in "loopback" mode. I started doing this to take out the human factor where I might have inadvertently interfered with something. By running a scenario in MP I'm nothing more than a spectator with zero ability to influence what's happening.

This is also a good way to test new scenarios since you are able to check mission performance, timings and literally anything a scenario designer asks of the units he's included in the scen. It's also a great way to check your alternate starting locations and the effect they will have on a scenario, as the Scenario Editor doesn't use these in editing mode.

Setting up MP on your own PC is relatively easy. Bring up a command prompt and type in "ipconfig". You will then have your computer's own IP address and you enter that into the ANW Launcher instead of the server you'd normally join. Start the Server component first and then the client and load the scenario you wish to test. Note: This does not mean you're running a server for others to use, it's just a way to make use of the MP capability for game testing or scenario design testing.

So Mike I use it often but maybe not as intended. [:)]

Cheers

Darren

[TonyE]

ORIGINAL: Bucks

Thx Freek,

In light of that, I'd like to ask Tony if "lag" upsets the way a MP game behaves itself? I've mentioned in the past my "obsession" with Counter Strike Source and almost without exception MP servers will have a 200 millisecond "lag or latency" limit. Meaning that, if you're lagging more than 0.2 of a second the server will kick you...

I've just checked the South American CS Source servers and with approximately two dozen servers showing up, I have latency times of between 453 milliseconds and 1936 milliseconds (almost 2 seconds!!!). I'm not a tech, but I doubt an ANW MP server will function as intended if one player is lagging 2 full seconds behind the current game time? I mean you only have to miss a server "update cycle" once and you can be dropped.

Tony, do you have any thoughts on this based on your extensive experience running MP games for ANW?

Cheers

Darren

My experience is that latency does not affect ANW MP games, certainly not latency in the hundreds of milliseconds. ANW didn't seem to handle dropped packets well (i.e. the ISP connection blipping and dropping more than a couple of game packets). Bandwidth was the bigger problem, the game at that time had a hard timeout to get the second of game time data to the client (it started at 30 seconds when I was running servers and I believe Russell increased that limit before I pretty much gave it up). With the larger scenarios it just took too long to send the game data and at a minimum the slow client would be dropped.

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: Bucks



Mike,

I do just about all my testing using the MP game type. That way the game plays itself and it's not a great technical feat to set it up to run in "loopback" mode. I started doing this to take out the human factor where I might have inadvertently interfered with something. By running a scenario in MP I'm nothing more than a spectator with zero ability to influence what's happening.


This is also a good way to test new scenarios since you are able to check mission performance, timings and literally anything a scenario designer asks of the units he's included in the scen. It's also a great way to check your alternate starting locations and the effect they will have on a scenario, as the Scenario Editor doesn't use these in editing mode.

Setting up MP on your own PC is relatively easy. Bring up a command prompt and type in "ipconfig". You will then have your computer's own IP address and you enter that into the ANW Launcher instead of the server you'd normally join. Start the Server component first and then the client and load the scenario you wish to test. Note: This does not mean you're running a server for others to use, it's just a way to make use of the MP capability for game testing or scenario design testing.

So Mike I use it often but maybe not as intended. [:)]

Cheers

Darren

Well that's good to hear Darren.

I was on team that originally tested multiplayer up until Harpoon 3.7 and have a good recollection of how it worked. My day job also lends itself to knowing about it as well. I've never used it to test scenarios though but think its a great idea.

My point is if you guys are using it to test every scenario and playing hundreds of games why was is Don still asking for testing/help and saying that more interest needs to be generated to work on it further? Sorry to say my bs-o-meter is ringing off the charts with this one as something is not exactly on the up and up around here...

Anyways.. thanks again for the things you have done too help move the game forward. I look forward to the next release and hope the good times come back with it.

For now I'm outta this snakepit[;)]

[Bucks]

Mike,

I think Don would like more testing of the "real thing". By that I mean people playing each other over the net rather than myself simply testing scenario performance through my network card.

I don't think it matters how many times I run my server/client setup here, unless people are actually playing each other issues with, connectivity, ease of operation and any bugs that simply wont show up when I'm using it in "loopback" mode. Tony's hinted at what the main issue is and that looks like the size of the scenario and the data transmission required to keep everyone connected.

Now I suppose we need to look at scenario size/complexity and attempt to develop some guidelines so people can play MP trouble free. Sorry I'm no Tech, just looking at reasons why the problems exist and what we can do about them.

Cheers

Darren

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: Bucks

Mike,

I think Don would like more testing of the "real thing". By that I mean people playing each other over the net rather than myself simply testing scenario performance through my network card.

I don't think it matters how many times I run my server/client setup here, unless people are actually playing each other issues with, connectivity, ease of operation and any bugs that simply wont show up when I'm using it in "loopback" mode. Tony's hinted at what the main issue is and that looks like the size of the scenario and the data transmission required to keep everyone connected.

Now I suppose we need to look at scenario size/complexity and attempt to develop some guidelines so people can play MP trouble free. Sorry I'm no Tech, just looking at reasons why the problems exist and what we can do about them.

Cheers

Darren

Great! Develop some guidelines, make some posts, do whatever you need to do Darren.

I'll cya when there's a good scenario, game and time around[:)]

[Anonymous]

Hi Mike,

I think there is no snakepit any longer [:)]

The forum improves, guys are coming back.

[mikmykWS]

ORIGINAL: koelbach

Hi Mike,

I think there is no snakepit any longer [:)]

The forum improves, guys are coming back.

Hope so my old friend. Till then...adios.