hifi

Hello Commanders! Our ISP has notified us about a network maintenance that will take place 19th June (like, now) 11.30 pm BST and will take approximately 30 minutes. It means CnCNet and Command & Conquer Communications Center will be unavailable during that time. For Europeans, this shouldn't mean much as it will happen very late and all good Commanders go to bed early, right? Everything should return back to normal once they sort out their network. Let's all hope it will be quick and painless! Here is the full email I got and includes more information how to follow their progress:

Good day, commanders! I thought it would be nice to use some spare resources I have to host a small Mumble server for the community to use. Those who do not know what Mumble is, it is a voice-over-ip program just like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, but free and open source. Host: mumble.cncnet.org Password: cncnet You are free to create public and private channels. This service is not hosted on our main server but instead in the Netherlands so the quality is unknown at this point. If you want to be free of abuse, please make a temporary password protected channel for you and your friends. Download the latest Mumble client: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mumble/files/Mumble/1.2.3a/mumble-1.2.3a.msi/download More about Mumble at http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

I'll look into adding this back again someway. Thanks for the feedback. It wasn't actually supposed to ignore the timeout setting, I even made the configuration option but forgot to actually use it. I will update the client during next week to honor the timeout. Thanks for the report.

Out now! New features since 3.2: * Full peer-to-peer support is back * Tunneled ("3.2") mode is the fallback if fast p2p is not available * Automatic p2p test on first launch * Automatic server connection test before launching a game * Client (cncnet.exe) code was completely reconstructed which helps adding new features * Updater has a progress bar! Removed: * Direct ip connection (if someone really needs this, drop me a line) * US server in favor of p2p mode and money savings Additionally the server is now on the same server as the site, so tunneled mode might be little bit slower than it was before (still in UK though). Use p2p if at all possible. All 3.2 clients should automagically update to 4.0. The MOTD bot is currently offline and needs some tweaking for 4.0, everything else works normally.

It's been a long time, Commander! Finally, CnCNet 4.0 is at least partially done. So what's new? The main focus of 4.0 was to rewrite the network so it can have p2p and tunneled clients side-by-side. This now works and anyone without the possibility to forward a port can keep using the tunneled mode like 3.2 was but those who can forward a port can now enjoy the speed benefits of p2p connections. Playing from the same ip (same LAN) is limited to one p2p client only, others needs to use tunneled mode. Better than v2 where you couldn't play from the same ip at all, aye? 4.0 will also discontinue the US server and will focus on a single server only. This was done to save money and simplify the server and client software. Fast games far away from the UK are possible by using p2p connection so I'm not pulling the rug from under your feet completely. The client software doesn't have much changes. The settings dialog was cleaned up from old features and a new checkbox for the p2p mode was added. More features will come after the initial release (like automatic port checker). Now, we need to test this. I've only done limited testing on my own but it doesn't yet show how well it will scale and work with mixed p2p and tunneled clients. TL;DR Download the 4.0 development client from here: http://cncnet.org/files/cncnet-dev.exe and place it in your game directory where your current cncnet.exe is. The beta client does NOT AUTO-UPDATE. So when the beta period is over or a fatal bug is found in the client executable or dll, a new one needs to be downloaded by hand. New cncnet-dev.exe does auto-update to the latest development release. When you go to p2p mode, remember to forward your UDP port 8054. There is no welcome message yet so the only way to know if it works is to talk to people in the lobby. Any feedback can be posted to this thread. Thank you! EDIT: The client was updated with these changes: * completely rewritten UI (not much visual changes though) * p2p auto-detection * server online detection, it doesn't launch the game if the server is down * auto-updater is now also available in the "development channel" (cncnet-dev.exe)

The service provider that hosts the US server had to do some maintenance and the server was taken down for an hour or so. Sad part was, the auto-start script for the CnCNet server had the wrong port number in it so the server was down for additional 7 hours, sorry about that. Now everything should be back to normal.

Ah, sorry, I don't follow the forums that much. I suggest applying nocs and noam patches if you don't want them to appear ever in the menu (http://hifi.iki.fi/cnc/ra/patches/). 4.0 is actually pretty close now, I'll look into adding your mod directly into the first release!

When your mod is ready we can add support to 3.1 if it's before 4.0 release.

Heya folks, I pushed an update today trying to address that pesky "Couldn't replace wsock32.dll" error. When I packaged the update I mistakenly slipped in a broken cncnet.dll that was auto-updated to everyone. Naturally no one could not connect anymore. Got it fixed pretty quickly after discovering. Sorry for the interruption. It will auto-update hopefully when you run cncnet.exe again. If it doesn't, redownload the client from our site. Working towards CnCNet 4.0, new fancy things are coming this year!

First, all the changes that has been done to the redalert1.com package is in the package documentation. You should read it if you're modding so you know what's in it. Also, we're using 3.03 version of Red Alert. This is the version of Red Alert that runs with "wsock32.dll" as the IPX networking and not "thipx32.dll" which was the case of 2.00 and earlier. CnCNet doesn't detect the game version and always expects 3.03, so it only creates wsock32.dll for the game if it is RA. This 3.03 also has CCHyper's -LAN patch that allows it to go directly into Network lobby with the -LAN parameter. It is possible to use older versions if you rename CnCNet's wsock32.dll after you've run cncnet.exe once to thipx32.dll. That way the game will probably connect fine but will miss updates as cncnet.exe will keep creating wsock32.dll. You also don't need necessarely to use ra95.exe, you can set the exe in cncnet.ini and it will use it no matter what. I don't recommend using older than 3.03 because of the on going projects to improve it. If you want separate stats and lobby for your mod later, it might be possible to modify the game like we did with Tiberian Sun mods so the protocol would be incompatible with vanilla RA and that way we can detect it in the stats and you'll have a clean lobby and incompatible game with vanilla RA. Happy modding!

If you downloaded Red Alert from redalert1.com, open up ddraw.ini and set maxfps lower. If you didn't download Red Alert from redalert1.com, download cnc-ddraw from http://hifi.iki.fi/cnc-ddraw/ Remember to enable Back Buffer in rasetup.exe.

Instead, I could host a Mumble server, http://www.mumble.com/

Hi all! Thank you all for your generous donations, we have enough money to run for a good while now (including C&C Comm!) so the acute money shortage is sorted now and we can guarantee a good service. Though, our US server host notified me (a good while back) about a server maintenance they are going to do today and it will affect all players connecting to the US server. I'll quote the email I was sent: Sorry for the late info, I totally forgot it was 1st and not 4th.

Hi and thanks for the bug report! This should be fixed in the latest version and it should auto-update when you launch cncnet.exe the next time!

Time for yet another release! 3.1b has the following client updates: * Allow setting the timeout in .ini (cncnet.exe) * Pack the dll to cncnet.exe so it can extract the dll when you run it (cncnet.exe) * Add -CFG option to force cncnet.exe to configuration only, hitting [ Ok ] will exit in that mode. (cncnet.exe) * Fix custom exe mod support by skipping game check when .ini already has an executable set. (cncnet.exe) * Add automatic updater so updating is easier (cncnet.exe) * Fix saving direct ip opponent host, it saved the dedi host instead (cncnet.exe) So from today forward, if everything goes well the client will automagically update on launch if an update is found. cncnet.dll is included in the exe so it will not be distributed separately anymore. Updating your client is not required, 3.1a is fully compatible. EDIT: I should've named the release 3.2 from the beginning as it clearly started a new era of automatic updates. The latest client is now 3.2 and will keep updating without news posts unless something major is changed. The changes can be monitored at https://github.com/hifi/cncnet-lite-launcher/commits/master and the hex value on the right is the commit number, it matches the one shown in client settings (though it's a bit longer).

Shilor just donated enough money to kick start Australian mirror so if there is demand I need to work on the dedicated to support linking more than two servers together. That means we can't start the AU mirror until I've done that so I need to start working, lol.

Currently, Germany is not a high priority target for a new server as it's very close to the UK and you should have quite good pings to it. However, if you DEMAND a server located there and donate enough money to fund it, I don't see why not.

Holy crap, we are surprisingly popular! Our all-time high is now 38 connected players which we hit very early today. This also seems to be the first time we've had full 24 hours with players connected! As we get more popular, more people will come from areas that are not close to UK or live in the US. This means latency to the dedicated server increases and might render the game unplayable for local games. The donations will help us expand to new areas with faster local servers, just tell us where you would want to see a new CnCNet dedicated server hosted if we get enough players and funding for it.

ddraw.ini, change maxfps from 0 to something else, like 120.

Fellow Commanders, CnCNet has taken one big step forward today! Some history first. After we got those first donations (big thanks to ehy and killa57) I thought we could start playing around with a US based server as we have increasing amount of players from there. Testing was successfull speed-wise and we now have a full month contract for it. The problem was that the US players are separated from the main UK one so it split the scene for one night. This left us with the decision if we should go forward with splitting CnCNet or not. In the end no decision was made and it was just left at that. Today, when riding a bus to work I got the awesome idea of linking the servers. What that means is that the servers send necessary data to each other about the players on both sides. This has the additional benefit of US<->EU optimization as it cuts down the traffic going over the atlantic when there are more than one player on each side. I'm not going to the technical details but that is how it is. Later at home I started working on a quick linking hack and it didn't take too long to have a working prototype. Now, for the pleasure of everyone I updated the live server at both sides to link to each other using the new untested code. I hope it goes well. So, the bottom line is, if you are located in the US, change your server by starting cncnet.exe and quickly hitting [ Settings ] button: us.open.cncnet.org My final words are that if you want to keep the US server alive, please donate. It's not free. We might also relocate it to the coast line for better over seas ping for linking purposes.

There is now a donation thread to claim your prize. http://www.cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=1750

Hello all, When you donate trough PayPal and want to be on the front page donations list, post to this thread stating: 1. Date and amount of your donation so we can confirm it's you 2. Name you want to show in the top list This way we can keep track of the donations and can give proper credit.

ehy did the first donation, can you beat him

First of all, I just put it up there to cover the server costs. I will show a top contributor list when there are more than 0 donations. I thought about just keeping the total donations and running costs somewhere visible and a counter how long will CnCNet run with the current amount of donations. The worst case scenario is that cnc-comm will also need to be funded trough the CnCNet donations in the future so we need to be prepared for that (thus, having some extra money). Can't promise automatic ladder at this point, it might be possible to do but it WILL require a new external app to work, launcher of some kind, as the necessary information who wins/loses is not in the game network stream in any clear way and need to be dug out of the game memory. The external app would also need handle logging in to the ladder. The CnCNet site will be moved out of my personal server making it completely independant and donation driven.

We now also have a nice statistics page that shows a 24 hour graph from online players at CnCNet broken down by game. http://cncnet.org/statistics The online list at the top now updates automagically while you view a page, no need to hit F5 anymore. Also added DTA to the list for the upcoming release!