Messages

2201

Multiplayer / Re: Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 22 January 2010, 20:34:18 »

Ok I believe the problem is an existing oversight in the networking code (in otherwords there are cases where clients / servers would have major problems if the network connection was sluggish).

I will send another patch perhaps tonight where the socket code checks for EGAIN when sending / receiving socket data AND also checks for a disconnect. The existing code doesn't properly check to see if a socket has disconnected in some cases, so I'll add that in too. This update will ALSO include code for doing file synch checks and downloading content..BUT the file synch etc.. code won't be enabled since its not ready yet and I cannot back out those changes at this point since I have made lots of infrastructure changes.

Once I have sent the patch you will see in the console and/or log output info messages when/if the suspected EAGAIN socket state is detected and the code will try to cover by re-trying the socket send or receive action for a max of 5 seconds.

Thanks

2202

Multiplayer / Re: Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 22 January 2010, 19:26:03 »

Ok I'll take a closer look at the code to see where the problem lies. I  didn't really change the principle by which the network code was based on, so its likely there is a check missing somewhere that is causing this.

2203

Multiplayer / Re: Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 22 January 2010, 06:29:47 »

Glad to hear that the multi-player fix is working well. The slowness on the server during game config is due to needing to handle new possible client connections. I may look at tweaking that a bit to make it less choppy at some point. On another note I have roughed in the main chunk of code to handle checking and downloading of missing content. Now I need to test and refine it (taking one step at a time).

Eventually I have a good solution in mind to separate the reliance of the network communication from the video rendering (this is the main cause of synch errors and choppy video play) but that will not come for a while (and someone else may beat me to it). For now this multiplayer fix makes it much more useful than it was in the past at least in a short period of time.

Thanks

2204

Multiplayer / Re: Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 16 January 2010, 18:02:52 »

If I have some time over the next few weeks I'll be looking into adding the following features for glest:

1. Adding a check for clients that connect to a server to see if they have the selected map,tile and factions for a network game.
2. If clients do not match exactly what the server has (even if an xml file has a small change) then the client will be given the option to auto download the new contents from the server.

This should make sharing new factions, maps etc.. easier and less problems with crashing on installations with different data.

2205

Multiplayer / Re: Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 16 January 2010, 15:45:27 »

Attached is an svn diff of some network improvements to make 4 player work better (no longer choppy).

seems like ioctlsocket (ioctl in linux) is evil as it creates a bug performance hit. I essentially made more use of select() on the server side of things BEFORE calling ioctl to see if there is anything to read before calling any other socket functions and it seems to have helped.

Thanks

P.S. Titi, I ported my network changes to your beta 3 code and created a tar with the name beta4

To get the diff file for glest 3.2.1 or to get the modified code for Titi's beta3 (called beta4) goto:

http://www.soft-haus.com/glest/code/

2206

Multiplayer / Re: Join Game dos not work

« on: 16 January 2010, 04:11:18 »

One instance must create a "slot" with type of "Netowkr" then the other one can join it.

2207

Multiplayer / Performance improvement for Glest multiplayer... 4 player is now practical

« on: 16 January 2010, 03:17:15 »

I've spend a little while looking at the performance problem behind the standard glest 3.2.1 codebase. After trying a lot of different things voila, I found out why the server slowed down gameplay for 4 player multiplayer. Thus far I have tested on Linux but I am using regular sockets so win32 shouldn't be a problem. I tested this evening with Elimnator, Tiger and an un-named other along with myself and the results were good.

At this point what should I do to get this code into svn for regular glest 3.2.1 (I had problems compiling gae so I reverted back to normal glest).

Thanks

update (by titi):
Its all in megaglest now: https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=4930.0

2208

Mods / Re: Mod Packs - vbros pack 1 and 2 released

« on: 18 November 2009, 01:49:31 »

Not likely, I use a large hosting provider who has tons of bandwidth and speed. Could be the server is busy at the moment?

Thanks

2209

General discussion / Re: Current state of GAE?

« on: 13 November 2009, 00:46:04 »

Ok so I found the link on sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/glestae/develop) but a few things to note:

a) this checks out all the branches.. each branch has a copy of the "data" which is large. Probably a good idea to have the "data" in a separate module from the main source?

b) is there a specific forum / place where dev's only can discuss dev items? A place to co-ordinate what everyone is working on and share ideas / problems etc?

2210

Linux and other ports / Re: Is your Glest sluggish? Solution available! --Linux--

« on: 13 November 2009, 00:41:32 »

Integrated or not... Linux (out of the box) usually does not come with propietary drivers.. at least in Ubuntu you must explicitly pick it whether you have a dedicated card or Integrated card.

But your comment will likely help a lot of linux users who didn't know to turn on the "restricted drivers" package.

2211

General discussion / Re: Current state of GAE?

« on: 12 November 2009, 21:39:50 »

Ok I have downloaded the source code from sourceforge and compiled fine in Ubuntu 9.10 but...

but where is the actual source repository and what branch is the right one to work with? I assume we're using SVN here?

Thanks

2212

Linux and other ports / Re: Is your Glest sluggish? Solution available! --Linux--

« on: 12 November 2009, 21:16:52 »

In otherwords use the proprietary drivers from nVidia or ATI, not the default built-in drivers in Linux. That applies to all 3Dgames, but especially 3D accelerated games which work much better using native drivers.

2213

General discussion / Re: Current state of GAE?

« on: 12 November 2009, 18:48:35 »

What i'd like to do is really get the networking (multiplayer) stuff working well. I had looked at the old code in Oct 2008 and tried some things to improve performance (and made some progress).. but I got snagged by the whole "world, Graphics frames synch with network packets" problem. That was a bad design since a slow network, or more multi-players would eventually make it completely unusable (as can be seen when you try 4 players).

We have a large family network here and would like to see glest playable by the whole family if possible (up to 8 players). While that many may not be possible in the near future (due to other issues like map size... etc...) I would like to get at least 4 player working well. In general I could work on any area that really needs it to assist getting a rock solid release to give more time for the other (shall we say... lofty) ideas mentioned on a todo list.

I'll snag the source and try to compile today.

2214

General discussion / Re: Current state of GAE?

« on: 12 November 2009, 04:12:36 »

Good evening gentlemen. Would it be worth me trying to get multiplayer to perform better in the 3.2.2 codebase or is there something I can look at in the GAE codebase? If the GAE codebase is the way to go.. where can I get info on getting the code and building it (in Linux of course).

I've got two modellers here in the family (Elimnator and Tiger) so we could help out where it makes sense.

Thanks

2215

General discussion / What is the development status of Glest?

« on: 11 November 2009, 05:38:54 »

Now that our family is mostly done moving, I'd like to know what the development status is of Glest? I did a little work last year fixing a few bugs and noticed:

a) there is the main glest games which was in need of some re-design to allow more concurrent multiplayers (> 3 players makes everything crawl due to a bad design of network and graphics synchronization).

b) there is this GAE spin-off (I know very little about).

Where should developers focus their attention and where is the "feature" list request from people in these forums?

Thanks

2216

Mods / Re: New pirate faction.

« on: 19 May 2009, 01:35:05 »

Hello everyone this is Softcoder, just a heads up that Elimnator and Tiger are my sons. They have some really great ideas which we are exploring. Currently Glest seems to support only air and land type surfaces, eventually I'll look at what it would take to add water (and other types). I'll do the coding and they'll do the models / xml. Be patient with the models, these guys just started working with Blender a short while ago and are learning about the impact of vertices, etc. They are learning both static and skeletal animations and their skills are getting refined slowly but surely.

Anyways, all of their work will be posted on our family website for download as time progresses at:

http://soft-haus.com/blog/free-software-downloads/

Thanks

2217

Bug report / Re: Glest in twinview

« on: 29 April 2009, 14:28:03 »

Same problem in Ubuntu. I'm not sure if this problem is specific to Glest or if it happens in other opengl games too. I'll play around with it a bit and see what I can find.

2218

Mods / Re: New Farmer Faction

« on: 13 April 2009, 05:28:24 »

Yes there will be lots of things to learn about models and real world application. Can anyone point us to any good tutorials or links that address the kind of finesse mentioned above? We have already seen some of the glest specific tutorials for blander but what we'll need now are tricks and good practise type info to minimize vetices / polys while still getting good detail.

Thanks

2219

Mods / Re: New Farmer Faction

« on: 12 April 2009, 07:02:00 »

I have a support ticket open with my ISP (powweb.com) as they didn't seem to have .7z files added to their servers as binary file downloads! Hopefully will be fixed soon. Till then right click and select SaveAs.

2220

Mods / Re: New Farmer Faction

« on: 12 April 2009, 06:11:23 »

The files are all good... not sure if its my hosting provider (powweb.com) but this is the first time i FTP'd 7ZIP files.. if you right click on the links and select SaveAs it will download the files and you can decompress them. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why the links don't pop-up the browser download dialog.

2221

Mods / Re: New Farmer Faction

« on: 12 April 2009, 05:54:37 »

Ok here is our first official release (the boys have been hard at work learning blender and the glest map editor etc).

Farmer Faction is packaged as its own tech tree (with our own originally designed ants_nest faction as well) and is available for immediate download at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/tech_trees/V-Pack.7z

(we used 7zip instead of regular pkzip format as the download would have been 177MB instead of the 7z which worked out to be 51MB.

The original Blender files for the models are available at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/tech_trees/blender_farm_faction.7z

And a few good maps are available at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/maps/maps.7z

All feedback would be appreciated, feel free to modify further and enjoy / share.

*UPDATED: The links should be fixed now.

2222

Bug report / Re: Found the reason why network play can be very slow

« on: 6 April 2009, 22:27:22 »

My original hack did not work. While the threading part worked nicely the game progresses on and eventually everything gets way out of synch for some reason. (I watch server and client on a 2 player game and over time things go their own direction). I'll need to understand the whole world / frames / networking parts before a real fix can be realized. I'll look at it when I can but I'm off vacation and back to work now so my time is more limited than the past week.

2223

Mods / Re: New Farmer Faction

« on: 6 April 2009, 22:24:48 »

No worries, the faction WILL be uploaded for everyone to enjoy. We are working on our modelling skills (my son has quickly picked up on doing more accurate models and skeletal animations in blender). Not only will we post the faction, we will post the raw blender files for anyone else to modify as they desire. We believe in free software, and I appreciate the openness of the Glest.org project, you have some excellent talent here but also a community that is open, this is not often the case in open source projects, especially good ones like glest.

2224

Mods / New Farmer Faction

« on: 5 April 2009, 01:45:55 »

This is a work in progress, we are learning Blender and Glest source code all at the same time! A few basic models of our new faction can be seen here:

http://www.soft-haus.com/glest

The xml configuration is quite fair when playing against the tech faction. We are fine tuning models and xml configuration as we go. I realize this type of faction may not be for everyone but definately fun to use and great the younger crowd!

Thanks

2225

Bug report / Re: Found the reason why network play can be very slow

« on: 31 March 2009, 15:07:24 »

I'm not sure how to make a patch as I never have done so before, perhaps someone could point me in the right direction? I run on Ubuntu 8.10 as my platform but have the option to dual boot into XP (which I haven't done in over 2 months now). Once I learn how to make a patch I'd be more than happy to post something.

Thanks