Four 2.1 Tidbits

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But,what causes the netcode to not work? Unable to connect? Lag?

i guess im gonna get a grammar and spelling warning

I'm guessing it's crashes and sigsegvs. Though, lag and connection issues could also play a part in it, I guess. Especially consistency failures.

And your grammar wasn't too bad in that post. o,o Certainly not bad enough for a warning.
 
犬夜叉;729309 said:
If it was a game crash we'd have fixed it already.
Then what exactly IS it? The new lua system? Various things we shouldn't know about? BOB?!
...Or is your guys' lives getting in the way? If that's the case, then I understand.
 
Then what exactly IS it? The new lua system? Various things we shouldn't know about? BOB?!
...Or is your guys' lives getting in the way? If that's the case, then I understand.

I highly doubt it's the new lua system, the netcode breakage was long before that.
 
Then what exactly IS it? The new lua system? Various things we shouldn't know about? BOB?!
...Or is your guys' lives getting in the way? If that's the case, then I understand.

Um, Bob...? Okay, I think the devs can only do their job in spare time, so well, remember that.
 
This post is pretty much directed toward the devs.

(1) Do you guys know what's causing the netcode to break?

(2) If not, do you know how to find the cause?

(3) Are you sure there's even a way to fix it, or how broken it is?

(4) Who said there's only one thing breaking the netcode?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but I just was just curious.
 
1, 2, and 3 being yes would mean you'd be playing 2.1 by now, or the fact that they found a solution would be breaking news already.
 
(1) Do you guys know what's causing the netcode to break?
No.

(2) If not, do you know how to find the cause?
Yes, wading through all changes that were made to the netcode since 2.0. This obviously takes a while and is rather tedious, which is why they haven't fixed it yet.

(3) Are you sure there's even a way to fix it, or how broken it is?
There's always a way to fix it.

(4) Who said there's only one thing breaking the netcode?
I don't think anyone is saying that.

Bear in mind that I'm not a dev. What I'm saying here is just what I've been told, which might be wrong and/or outdated.
 
SpiritCrusher has pretty much summed it up.

There have always been problems with the netcode, by the way. This particular issue just happens to be huge enough to warrant a halt on any sort of release until it's fixed.
 
It seems like there is a lot of misunderstanding in what is wrong and why it's a pain to fix it. The problem is that the game has a bunch of consistency failures, frequently at join. A consistency failure is essentially when there is a disagreement as to what's happening in-game. For example, if two players' viewpoints show someone in different locations, that's a failure in consistency (as the game world is supposed to be consistent at all times) While we don't know exactly the things that are causing the problem THIS time, I can explain an old bug along the same lines to hopefully help you guys understand how these kinds of bugs can happen.

Way back in Demo 4, we added CTF mode. One of the bugs that kept happening is that the player would join the game, and then just get kicked immediately for consistency if they tried to move very far from the spawn point. Back in Demo 4, we didn't have a spectator mode, so when you joined the server, it would assign you a team and you would immediately spawn. By testing this with two computers in the same room, we found that the issue was caused by the server and client having a disagreement on where the player spawned. The server assigned the player a team and spawned the new player at a team spawn, but the client hadn't received that team assignment before spawning the player, so it spawned the player at a deathmatch spawn (the backup). When the player tried to move, he'd cross a sector line and the server would check what sector the player just entered and the client would give different information. Since there was a conflict, the server would kick the player for a consistency failure.

While it's easy to think that this is obvious in hindsight, when looking at it from the player's perspective, it's basically impossible to know what caused the bug. You just see yourself getting kicked for moving, which isn't actually the direct cause of the problem. In the Demo 4 example, it happened every time so it was therefore easier to find the problem, but most times the thing that causes the disagreement doesn't happen 100% of the time, or possibly requires a lot more players than just 2 to occur (both issues in our current problem; two player netgames work fine, and higher than that it doesn't ALWAYS fail). This is why these problems are a nightmare to debug.

Eventually it will get solved, but please understand tracking down the original source of the problem is a lot harder than you'd think. We literally have to test revisions over and over again to narrow down the changes (because it's probably not just one change) that caused the problem, and we can't even just test it once and be sure we've got the data because it's not a problem that happens every time.
 
So, from what I understand, you have to make revisions repeatedly just to see what they'll fix and what'll remain broken, then work from there? And then the newer revisions sometimes break the things fixed by the older ones? Seems like a total pain in the neck.

As for the consistency failures, do you have any idea what's causing them this time around? I heard from somewhere that Player 2 joined just fine but every node after would break the whole server. Is it spawn-related, does the server recieve the wrong information from Player 3, or does the server send the wrong information to everyone?
 
It could be, since Demo 4 was the last release where Doom Legacy was used as engine...

Then again they probably have already double-triple-quadruple checked that.
 
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