Messages

2651

Feature requests / Re: Multiplayer Enhancement Idea

« on: 28 August 2010, 18:40:56 »

If everything is implemented correctly, the average player may not need to use the IRC anymore (only the devs and testers). If the average player is allowed to join active servers and spectate as well as chat with other players in game (like in scorched3d), then there won't be much need to log into the irc to organize a game anymore (unless it's a tournament or some other special event).

Observer mode
 

Furthermore, in scorched there are several public main hosts that are always online and any player can join them. If this feature were to be added into Glest (official hosts that are always online), MANY people would play online; I'm sure players would rather fight against real people than computers.

Headless game server

2652

MegaGlest / Re: integrated irc client for megaglest

« on: 28 August 2010, 16:04:56 »

How about activating the IRC client in one of the upcoming releases? I think it should default to on and to auto-connect, but it should also be possible to either disable the chat interface entirely (and have the interface we have now) or to disable auto-connecting to IRC: it can be a matter of privacy, and using the IRC protocol is disallowed by policy in some environments, such as some companies. If those requirements are met, then I consider having an in-game IRC client a nice improvement.

NB: This thread should probably be moved to 'feature requests'.

2653

MegaGlest / Re: Feature request: Different color circle around friendly/co-op units

« on: 27 August 2010, 01:18:43 »

I just saw it working today, that's really nice, and has already helped me distinguishing what's my and what's other players' units, and who is friend and who is foe. Thanks!

2654

Feature requests / Re: Multiplayer Enhancement Idea

« on: 27 August 2010, 01:15:06 »

I agree, and you explained it very well, too.

2655

Feature requests / Re: Allow for disbanding units

« on: 26 August 2010, 22:25:22 »

If this feature were to be implemented, however, I wouldn't suggest that the user be able to regain the full amount of resources used to create the destroyed structure/UNIT.

Actually, when I originally suggested this, I had 'no refunds, ever' in mind. And I think that's really the way it should be. Otherwise it would be a matter of time until people start to delete units which were badly wounded in a fight and won't recover quickly. And it's also not how life works. 

Seeing that peoples' opinion on the matter whether or not there could be a disband units feature at all is somewhat diverse, IF this gets implemented (which I still hope), it should be implemented as an option, set on the game server.

2656

Closed bug reports / Re: Some Bug. ( rain problems / memory usage / performance )

« on: 26 August 2010, 19:41:29 »

New bug: Today I compiled the latest svn code inside, get glest3.3.7-dev,When I enter the game, press the Customize button, the game crashes.

Softcoder fixed this in r877.

Please remember to start a new thread for every new bug. Please also provide all the details required (as listed in the sticky thread about bug reporting).

2657

Closed bug reports / Re: Pathfinder error

« on: 24 August 2010, 23:25:39 »

guys when i play glest version 3.3.6.  in the game after a while it said

the new pathfinder lie.   it kept on showing up after i click ok

Hmm, I not sure what you mean to say. Are you saying that after playing MegaGlest 3.3.6 for a while, the game displayed an error message window or printed an error message to the game console (chat area), and that this error message was (literally) the new pathfinder lies?

Please provide more information in general if you'd like this to be treated as a bug. Please see the sticky thread on how to file bugs for further information on which data is needed from you so that developers can determine what may have gone wrong.

2658

MegaGlest / Re: Getting the Code

« on: 24 August 2010, 19:00:45 »

I haven't tried myself, I run Linux.

I guess the fact that the knowledge base article hasn't been edited for a while could possibly be considered as some indication what the patch hasn't broken too many installations. The first link I posted does provide a possible (no-patch) workaround if you prefer this, though.

2659

MegaGlest / Re: Getting the Code

« on: 24 August 2010, 17:34:19 »

It's a bug in your operating system.

Its vendor decided to introduce a new bug feature in its newest OS version which, in combination with such rare applications like subversion repositories (and possibly other applications), nicely corrupts the newest version of its file system. This vendor binds file systems and file system versions to operating system and kernel versions for whatever reason - possibly to prevent bugs?  

Anyway, there is a patch available, download access to which can be requested in exchange for your email address since it's a "not fully-tested" patch for this pretty serious issue which is known to the general public since at least late last year and to the OS vendor since at least February this year.

2660

Bug reports / Re: Extremly slow framerates!

« on: 23 August 2010, 22:48:52 »

The only drivers available from Via for Linux are outdated and basically worthless.

I'm not sure how fluid you are with Linux. If you'd like someone else to take another look at what hardware you have and whether there may be better drivers available I can do this. If interested, please PM the output of:

Code: [Select]

lspci -knnOr you could paste it into a spoiler message on this board.

2661

MegaGlest / Re: new max_unit_count limit, how to display in user interface?

« on: 18 August 2010, 13:16:52 »

I'd just add a new section below the existing 'requirements' section called 'limits' and add it there. Since there could be additional limitations in the future and it is not really a 'requirement' I think it should not be listed in the same place.

2662

Feature requests / Re: Feature Request: Extra Resource Space

« on: 15 August 2010, 12:46:43 »

I think what this feature request, as well as a couple others, really asks for, is a general text and UI processing library which will render text, message boxes and UI elements on screen, using positioning and wrapping based on the currently configured resolution. This is probably not easy to do, but could make all UI look nicer and (more or less) ensure we don't have ugly presentation on lower resolutions. Some of this code can possibly be copied from GAE which I've been told has something like this already.

2663

Feature requests / Re: Allow for disbanding units

« on: 15 August 2010, 12:35:48 »

I had 3 Acolytes (workers) trapped in a recent game where we were playing the Dark Magic faction. So it does happen.

2664

MegaGlest / [DONE in 3.3.7-dev] Different color circle around friendly/co-op units

« on: 14 August 2010, 11:07:03 »

Currently, when you click/activate one of your units, you will see a green circle around the unit. Equally, when you select an enemy unit, a red circle will show around it. Other than for red-green blind people, that's good as it is in my opinion.

However, when you play cooperatively with other players, it would be nice if their units, when selected by you, would have a different color circle around them than the enemy. Currently, this circle will be red, but I find this non-intuitive. I suggest to change the color of the circle drawn around selected friendly units to yellow.

2665

MegaGlest / Re: performance test

« on: 12 August 2010, 09:32:34 »

I like the idea. Ideally, this test could be invoked through a command line option, in a similar fashion to 'autotest', but with the extra LUA script and FPS + game time logging to a certain log file (either performance log, debug.log or a new log file), and automatic exit after 5 minutes or so. This way, it could be (shell, not in-game) scripted.

2666

MegaGlest / Re: Game Reconnection

« on: 8 August 2010, 14:51:18 »

I think replacing disconnected human players by AI is a good idea - if it is an option (which can be deselected when setting up a new game).

I also like the idea of making it possible to reconnect to a runnng game when you got disconnected. It does seem technically challenging to me, though. All the network games I know don't offer this feature, so I wonder whether they have their reasons or whether just nobody came up with this good suggestion, yet. And I wonder whether this would introduce new problems (yet another opportunity to cheat).

2667

MegaGlest / Re: Megaglest developer information

« on: 4 August 2010, 15:22:42 »

Note that additional developer information is now availabel from the MegaGlest wiki.

A little information on external services and resources which can help with further development of the game:

• Performance analysis:
  
  • Intel CPUs: Intel Performance Tuning Utility (PTU) (free for Linux and Windows), requires VTune Performance Analyzer (free for non-commercial use on Linux but not on Windows)
    
  • AMD CPUs: AMD CodeAnalyst (free for Linux and Windows)

Building on Windows console (i.e. non-GUI, i.e. less slow):

we can build the windows binary from commandline now. no need to open visual studio:
install sliksvn - this gives you commandline svn tools

then from the trunk folder you just type:
svn update

to build, goto mk/windoze and run the following:
"\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\vc\vcvarsall.bat"

then:
msbuild Glest.sln /p:Configuration=Release

and voila mg builds - compiler info shows in the console.

2668

Closed bug reports / Re: Major lag & 100% CPU usage in 3.3.5

« on: 2 August 2010, 09:42:33 »

Rylar22, first let me say I experienced the same as you did with 3.3.5. My CPU resource consumption went pretty high and a lot of RAM was being used and/or swapped to disk.

I do, however, not have decent hardware on the system I was testing with, and I had not played much with previous releases  so I concluded that the high resource consumption had to be related to my hardware (and I still think it is to a high degree). I also started a related thread on Intel GPU performance. I should note that those GPUs are known to perform badly because of their lack of dedicated memory - having to share memory for graphics processing with RAM means a lot of front side bus bandwidth gets dedicated to memory management, transfers take considerably longer than on dedicated GPU RAM, and when there is much FSB bandwidth in use, less remains for other concurrent processes - as well as for offloading calculations to the CPU, which even more so reduces available FSB bandwidth and slows down GPU calculations (but then, being directly mounted to the GPU instead of being an add-in card makes things faster again, but not enough to compensate). For office work this doesn't matter at all, and not that much for 2D games, but it sure does matter for 3D games like MegaGlest is one.

But then, based on what you wrote, you are probably not actually using a shared memory GPU but some dedicated one. And, more importantly, you are comparing how two different versions perform, the old one of which you say performed good, and the new one which does not. I think this should make it unnecessary to further inspect your hardware for now (other than for determining the reasons of the slowdown if it was unique to your system setup), though it would still be of interest to me.

I can confirm that on Ubuntu 10.04, which I run, too, the 3.3.5 release was rather slow and resource hungry. Luckily this has improved measurably since (in development builds), and while the game still increases my overall CPU load to up to 100% (of 200% possible on this dual core system), this is less than before, and memory resource consumption has decreased a lot (no more than 512M now), and at the same time, FPS has increased by about one third over 3.3.5.0 for me.

I think there will soon be a 3.3.5.1 (actually this may get renamed to 3.3.6 instead since it also introduces new features) which fixes this and several other issues. Until then, there will be at least one more alpha release (probably sometime tonight in terms of central US time), so I recommend you give those a try - or wait for the next release/bug fix (which may take some more weeks - and that's just my personal guess, not being one of the core developers).

2669

Closed bug reports / Re: Megaglest 3.3.5 graphics jerk and uber slow on Ubuntu 10.04

« on: 31 July 2010, 10:00:56 »

Which hardware do you have there?

Please list your:

• graphics card or chipset
  => run lspci -knn, then copy + paste any entries containing 'VGA', 'display', 'graphics' or just all of it
  
• mainboard chipset or mainboard
  => run lspci -knn, then copy + paste any entries containing 'Host bridge' or 'controller hub' or or just all of it
  
• CPU
  => run cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -E '^(model name|cpu MHz|physical id|flags)'
  
• RAM: how much RAM you have altogether and how much you have typically free, allocated and cached before starting the game
  => copy and paste the output generated by LC_ALL=C free
  
• disk drive: tell us whether you a have hard disk drive or SSD, which file system(s) you use, which one MegaGlest is installed on and how much free space you've got left there
  => file systems: cat /proc/mounts|grep -E '^/dev/'
  => free space: LC_ALL=C df -h|head -n1;LC_ALL=C df -h|grep -E '^/dev/'
  

Finally, what's the output of (when run from your MegaGlest directory):
bin/glest.bin --opengl-info

2670

MegaGlest / MegaGlest on Ubuntu

« on: 26 July 2010, 20:31:02 »

Thanks to http://playdeb.net you can now install MegaGlest from a package repository (an APT source). To do so, starting Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 - the latest Ubuntu release), you can open a terminal window and do this:

Code: [Select]

echo 'deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu lucid-getdeb games' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list && wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

More information as well as instructions for older Ubuntu versions are provided on playdeb.net:
http://www.playdeb.net/software/megaglest
http://www.playdeb.net/updates/Ubuntu/all#how_to_install

The packages on playdeb.net are kindly provided by bojo42 who also runs a PPA here:
https://launchpad.net/~bojo42/+archive/megaglest/+packages

2671

MegaGlest / Re: 3.3.5.1 alpha is available - please test

« on: 22 July 2010, 08:59:53 »

This will most likely change when the game has reached a development stage where it makes sense to also maintain a dedicated server (software).

2672

Closed bug reports / Re: MegaGlest not working on XP

« on: 22 July 2010, 08:54:41 »

We (kingnothing + tomreyn, and later kingnothing + softcoder) did meet on IRC yesterday and the plan is now that kingnothing will update XP to SP3 and try then. SP2 will no longer receive security updates anyways. If the problems persist we can take another look.

2673

MegaGlest / Re: 3.3.5.1 alpha is available - please test

« on: 21 July 2010, 10:31:28 »

The 3.3.5-alpha2 and alpha 3 have a bug:when i enter the internetgame menu and return again without Interent connection ,it crashes sometimes.Can you tell me why this happen?

This may be a known issue, but we should verify it's not something different.
Please activate debug logging. Edit glestuser.ini (in the main MegaGlest directory) and ensure it says:

DebugMode=true
DebugLogFile=debug.log


Then reproduce this issue and send a zipped copy of this log file to softcoder or me, accompanied by a detailed description on what you were doing when the game crashed.

2674

Closed bug reports / Re: MegaGlest not working on XP

« on: 21 July 2010, 10:23:31 »

This differs a lot, but there are often people around their computers, you just need to talk to them. Try addressing softcoder and me next time you're around (just mention our nicknames in the channel), and have the URL of this forum thread handy. I read up on Lebanon on opennet.org and it says Internet access is expensive in your area. So if you cannot remain online for half an hour or so then IRC might not actually be the media of choice and the forum may be better suited. However, _if_ you can, then IRC surely is a good idea. If you're having trouble with the web chat then please consider installing an IRC client such as XChat from http://www.silverex.org/

2675

Closed bug reports / Re: MegaGlest not working on XP

« on: 19 July 2010, 15:37:22 »

@ softcoder
the glestuser.ini was not found so after comparing the installation folder between 7 and XP
i found lots of files missing so i copied the entire folder from 7 to XP
and then enabled debug mode in glestuser.ini.......

If you have very different files in your Windows XP and Windows 7 installation from the same installer then something must have gone wrong when you installed on XP. 'glestuser.ini', however, isn't required to make the game work (you should use/create it to setup debugging, though, as softcoder suggested, and as you did).

but the game is not reaching there at all
the cmd is not reading or unpacking any file or command
it just opens stays black n then opens the error

How have you verified that glest_game.exe does not read any files before it crashes? Also, is it safe to assume you have verified that the debug.log file is not created? The game would already write to debug.log in its startup phase, while not generating any output on screen, yet.

@ tomreyn
here are the errors from event log
[..]
And if u want i have the info log with the help of DrWatson......lol
from the error event ..........but way big....then i have to upload

Thanks, but no, thanks, since this info is actually much less useful than I hoped for (thanks M$).

redownload thought of that but the same file worked on windows 7 why not on win XP
as for reinstall tried it.............didn't work
will redownload.......hope it works

What exactly did not work when you tried to reinstall? Did you receive an error message, if so, what did it say? If not, how did you determine reinstalling failed?
Please try the following (on your Windows XP system):

• uninstall the game
• make sure you remove (or rename) the %SystemDrive%\%ProgramFiles%\MegaGlest directory (this is probably "C:\Program Files\Megaglest" in your setup) including any files it contains.
• check and report (here) how much free disk space you have
• run the game installer, tell us what the file you are running is called exactly (filename)
• check and report (here) how much free disk space you have now
• Create or edit %SystemDrive%\%ProgramFiles%\MegaGlest\glestuser.ini directory (this is probably "C:\Program Files\Megaglest\glestuser.ini" in your setup) using wordpad (not notepad, not Ms Word) and ensure it says:
  
  DebugLogFile=debug.log
  DebugMode=true
  
  
• Option 1: Run the game as you usually would, report to us whether the same error occurred again
• Option 2: Click Windows Start button, then 'Execute' (or 'Search' on Vista and Windows 7) "cmd.exe". A console window will open. Enter this to start the game (press return at end of line) - you can copy & paste using context menu:
  
  cd %SystemDrive%\%ProgramFiles%\MegaGlest
  glest_game.exe
  
  Next, copy and paste any output generated by the game there to a spoiler section on this board or to http://megaglest.pastebin.com/ (providing us with the URL you end up with there) or send it to softcoder or me by email or personal message (note this is a one-time, not a general invitation to do so).
• Copy and paste %SystemDrive%\%ProgramFiles%\MegaGlest\debug.log (this is probably "C:\Program Files\Megaglest\debug.log"  in your setup) to a spoiler section on this board or to http://megaglest.pastebin.com/ (providing us with the URL you end up with there) or send it to softcoder or me by email or personal message (note this is a one-time, not a general invitation to do so).

On a side note, I would appreciate if you could use complete words such as 'have' instead of 'hv' or 'are' instead of 'r' since it makes reading and understanding your reports easier. So please help us to help you.