New KaM Remake Demo r2411

[pawel95]

I like it, too. It would be awesome to design your own flag!
But as you said Krom and Lewin (and Danjb right? I can't seem to remember who's contributing) shouldn't be in a hurry implementing this (if possible at all, it doesn't seem easy to me).

Bring into the game maybe is for me possible (in a not short time). But Im not sure how works the moves of the flag. Because I don?t like my Polish village with flags, if the flags dont wave in the wind but moves like to a scarry song On the next weekend I can maybe make a little test! Maybe i will wait to the impression from Lewin and Krom. If they want to say something about the idea!?!?

[Ben]

idea!?!?

Lol, this cracked me up... (not saying why )

Anyway, I think those flags are pretty ugly, no offense. I like KaM's flags more.
Come to think of it, I really wish the black flags didn't have grey in them. Is this going to be fixed (because I think, "fix" is the right word)?

[The Dark Lord]

idea!?!?

Lol, this cracked me up... (not saying why )

Hehe I think I know why.

[Lewin]

Come to think of it, I really wish the black flags didn't have grey in them. Is this going to be fixed (because I think, "fix" is the right word)?

There's a problem with that, because is only one true black, anything slighty off black looks grey If we made the entire flag black then it would look strange and not appear to flutter nicely. The shades are meant to show the light reflecting off it which makes them appear grey. This is the same as all the team colors though, and we might improve the way it shades them again later on.

I agree that the flags do look a bit ugly and some of them would end up being especially ugly (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) when your country's flag is not just some boring stripes of color
This is not impossible, all it would require is someone to spend days looking at the original sprites and creating a "remap" that stretches a flat flag over the bent surface of the fluttering flag. This would take a huge amount of work to get it right, but once it's done we could write a script that generates the sprites for ANY country flag from the remap by painting the correct pixels at each position (e.g. when it folds back the remap would skip out some parts of the flag) Making this look good would be a lot of work.
It's very very very low priority but we could look into it once everything else is done.

That is practically impossible as the player you are waiting for has lost his connection and won't receive the save. If I'm correct they will work on a 'automatic reconnect system' though and that should pretty much do the job I guess.

Yes the player who disconnected would not get the save, but I agree that it would be useful for the other players to create a save. There are other issues too for example we can't grantee everyone is in-sync unless the game is running and they all save on a certain tick.
However as you say, once we have auto reconnect, file transfers and "return to the lobby" options this won't be at all necessary. (it will happen behind the scenes)

[RiT4LiN]

If if the host could just automatically send the map to the other clients that wouldn't be a problem too right? I mean a map is less then 1Mb and a save is around the same size. Relying on all clients having the same data seems kind of retarded although I do understand you did that for this release.

[Lewin]

If if the host could just automatically send the map to the other clients that wouldn't be a problem too right? I mean a map is less then 1Mb and a save is around the same size. Relying on all clients having the same data seems kind of retarded although I do understand you did that for this release.

Yes file transfer will be added, it's just a lot of work to implement and will put additional load on our network code which already needs improving in places. (e.g. we don't even have a send buffer so large packets of data won't get through) 10 months ago we have zero network code and multiplayer was still just a dream for the distant future. We didn't expect it to happen so fast and so there is a lot of things left to be added. Please look upon this game as beta.

If we did not ensure all players have the same map/save, then you will get all sorts of errors after starting. My save might be from 2 minutes ago, meaning a unit wasn't in existence that you can see on your screen. Your client tells my client that the unit is moving, but my client does not know about the unit and crashes. Same with maps, sometimes it would work (e.g. if you just moved some terrain around the game might not crash unless one player used the changed terrain) but if you added new units and ordered them then it would crash. Actually our random seed checking system would probably detect the mismatches before crashes started occurring, and the game would stop with an error on all clients.
I do not see how that is retarded.

[Siegfried]

Well, Lewin, this sounds like it's a task for the host.

If a player crashes and wants to re-join immediately, let him be synchronized by the host, i.e. let him create a savegame at the time the crashed client wants to re-join and since the synchronizing takes some time, send him the actual progress data as well. As soon as the client is fully synchronized, let the host join the player again.

This would meana huge lag for the re-joining player at the beginning, but that's no problem.

Btw, I played around a bit with delphi2cpp and found, that it's an easy way to learn. Unfortunately delphi2cpp isn't free and the demo version can't open files, so dependencies cannot be resolved. But still it's nice to see.

[Lewin]

If a player just disconnects then they will have only missed a few packets, so sending the entire save won't be necessary. We can just get clients to repeat the last 30 or so command packs when the player reconnects, and they can fill in the gaps then continue processing the game simulation from where it left off.
A player disconnecting does not mean there's anything wrong with their game simulation.

If we want new players to connect then I think people can return to the lobby (the host will have a button to do this) and the save file will be automatically transferred there.

Well I can read C++ and Pascal so I reckon you could learn It's a lot easier to learn actually because there's more text and less symbols.

[Siegfried]

Did you ever analyze how the disconnects happen? Are these game crashes or desync?

[Siegfried]

Btw, small feature request:

-> commandline commands

Something like kamremake.exe 192.168.0.1#2

to connect to server#room.

[Lewin]

Did you ever analyze how the disconnects happen? Are these game crashes or desync?

No but I've experienced them and talked to people. They are neither, they are simply disconnections. 99% of the time game crashes will happen for everyone because it's a deterministic game. And I am yet to see desync happen in a game. (it would show the message "Random check mismatch for tick %d from player %d" on EVERY clients screen and I've never seen that in r2411 games) A deysc would require either a flaw in our system, or a command packet to be corrupted. As we are using TCP, corruptions shouldn't happen, it will ask the other person to resend if the packet arrives corrupted.
The deterministic nature of the game makes it very hard to become out of sync. Each client will not execute a tick unless it has received a packet for that tick from every other client. And they continuously compare random seeds so if someone did become out of sync it would be identified immediately.

I'm wondering what you want the command line commands for... but we could implement that if you think it's worthwhile. But I'd probably add "-join" in front or something in case we add other parameter options later.

[Siegfried]

I'm wondering what you want the command line commands for... but we could implement that if you think it's worthwhile. But I'd probably add "-join" in front or something in case we add other parameter options later.

Make it be able to start+join a game directly out of the browser window, thus improving kamremake.com/servers and make it a central place for players.
To have this working you need one registry key (can be included during install) and a working commandline.

[Lewin]

Ooooh cool, now I'm interested We could even integrate chat from the game to the server page... but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Please don't work on the master server code right now as a guy named Oliver is rewriting it to use MySQL and generally be better structured. I'll talk to him about including details of server rooms too as we'll need that for what you are suggesting.

[Siegfried]

OK, I'll do nothing for now

Btw, regarding the re-joining discussion. It happened by chance that some days ago another open source game (0 A.D.) implemented a rejoin function into their game and postet a news about that.
-> http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/

They've done it in the same way we have discussed.

[BlueMagician]

Hi Krom and Lewin,
You did an IMPRESSIVE JOB. I've spent hours reading your project progress since its very first post in the old topic. SO IMPRESSIVE. Thanks for your effort. K&M is my most favorite game.
Btw, I have some ideas for improvements:
1. Army/building shortcut: like other rpg game, we can assign an shortcut key to a building/army. That's should be pretty convenient.
2. Army search: when we press a particular key (e.g. ',') it sequentially focus to the leader of each group of soldiers. I once had a group of axe man stayed on the upper edge of the map and had no way to gain control of them. Another occasion is that a single archer stay behind a tree, it could be done by watching closely at the map but not easy.
3. Fishes: I think that having unlimited amount of fish should be better. One way is to increase number fishes overtime.
Hope you understand me; my English is not really good.