6 player game update

[FunkyFr3sh]

I just updated the game and hopefully 6player games are working now.

I also noticed the game went Out Of Sync often on game start during my tests, hopefully this is fixed now too. I also fixed a crash that happened on game start.

The reconnect timeout has been lowered slightly and the recon dialogbox shows now quicker.

There is also a new patch to lower the CPU usage, but that is still WIP...

 

Please let me know if there are still problems!

[Tore]

Yay 6 player games has returned!

[cn2mc]

I managed to play one yesterday and it ran quite smoothly. The other one I tried OOS-ed though. I assume that's going to happen often because of geography et al. It also happens often with 4-5 player games, especially when players are all far apart, like one is in Canada or USA, another in the EU, a third one in Asia, etc.

[ore_truck]

I like this update.

[FunkyFr3sh]

I managed to play one yesterday and it ran quite smoothly. The other one I tried OOS-ed though. I assume that's going to happen often because of geography et al. It also happens often with 4-5 player games, especially when players are all far apart, like one is in Canada or USA, another in the EU, a third one in Asia, etc.

 

Yes, the bug was related to bad timing. I did another update 2-3days ago, does the OOS still happen with this version?

[Nyerguds]

Oh? So what exactly was the bug? I'm curious now.

[AchromicWhite]

Yeah, seems to work fine, I mean, it's less stable with more people in it, but that's always been the case.

 

Also good to hear that you maybe knocked another OSS bug out, too. Those things are annoying. Good update.

 

"Keep 'em coming!"

[weaveR]

Yeah it goes out of sync quite a lot still but I managed to have one successful p2p 3v3 game some people always play tunnel games for some reason and that doesn't help when playing with people all over the world.

 

Can't wait till I get fiber internet that should help.

[FunkyFr3sh]

Oh? So what exactly was the bug? I'm curious now.

 

I'm not too sure yet either since they are still reporting problems. I could fix it on my end but I didn't play games over the net, I had no delay at all... I just checked it again and it looks like the host is sending the GO packet too quick, sometimes 2-3 players were not connected at that point. The host only checks if he is connected to all players, but he doesn't check if all the others connected to each other too

 

Yeah it goes out of sync quite a lot still but I managed to have one successful p2p 3v3 game some people always play tunnel games for some reason and that doesn't help when playing with people all over the world.

 

Can't wait till I get fiber internet that should help.

 

I will do another update now, this one is mainly for testing. It should raise the chance to connect, let me know if things got better with this version

[weaveR]

It always initially connects it just randomly goes out of sync after playing for a while.

[Nyerguds]

That's just related to having a lot of people in one game, connected from possibly pretty far away, as far as I know. Don't think that's a specific 6-player issue.

[weaveR]

Yeah I managed to have another successful 6 player game earlier it probably is a latency problem p2p seems to work better than tunneling 6 players traffic through a tunnel close to the host but not necessarily close to everyone else it would be cool if all the players could ping all the tunnels or do that distance calculation and cncnet worked out which tunnel is the best for all the players and suggested for the host to switch for the hosts that want to always play with tunnels even when it would work better with p2p. 

 

It's a shame fast internet is so expensive in New Zealand though but I'm sure that would definitely help I'm stuck with VDSL at the moment - oh poor me.

 

Why is it so much more latency tolerant in Red Alert? Is it because it was officially patched?

[FunkyFr3sh]

It always initially connects it just randomly goes out of sync after playing for a while.

 

Oh, I thought the game connects and goes out of sync within a few seconds. That's what happened to me during my tests, I tried to fix that up

 

Yeah I managed to have another successful 6 player game earlier it probably is a latency problem p2p seems to work better than tunneling 6 players traffic through a tunnel close to the host but not necessarily close to everyone else it would be cool if all the players could ping all the tunnels or do that distance calculation and cncnet worked out which tunnel is the best for all the players and suggested for the host to switch for the hosts that want to always play with tunnels even when it would work better with p2p. 

 

It's a shame fast internet is so expensive in New Zealand though but I'm sure that would definitely help I'm stuck with VDSL at the moment - oh poor me.

 

Why is it so much more latency tolerant in Red Alert? Is it because it was officially patched?

 

Red Alert with default settings doesn't work well with high pings, it can't handle pings over 250 too well, with 300 it was almost unplayble. We tweaked the sendrate settings and iran found a way to change the netcode to a older version that works fine with pings up to 600 and more

 

here are  some test videos I recorded with all the settings:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXk2ncRN1Z5LmIsb6F0F7FNExR7SOPvlO

 

Protocol 2 and FrameSendRate 3 are the original settings, currently we use Protocol 0 and FrameSendRate 6 as default on cncnet

 

Not sure if cnc95 also has different netcode settings, I only know about the FrameSendRate

[weaveR]

Oh that's interesting the money seemed to go up much smoother to me on the FrameSendRate=6, Protocol= - I guess that's because it's sending more frame data? The click delay doesn't seem much different to me on any of them.

 

Looks like I'll be upgrading to at least 100mbps fibre anyway now I finally got a call today I thought they forgot about me lol it'll be the same price as what I'm paying now if I go for that so it'll be interesting to see if the oos errors still continue I couldn't even download a map off Manu yesterday which is what a few kilobytes when everyone else could except me? O_o this connections got to be upgraded.

 

I don't think the update to c&c95 is very wifi friendly either c&c95 has started flashing up with reconnection dialog boxs for a second every so often so I've switched to a ethernet cable now but the wifi still doesn't explain not being able to download a few kilobytes I don't think the wifi was dropping THAT many packets.

 

Might be an idea to look into if c&c95 has different netcode settings if it's still unstable with 100mbps. I probably should go for 200mbps up and down just to be on the safe side unfortunately that's the max for me I can't get gigabit like White can in "Gigatown".

[Nyerguds]

As for why RA2 works better... they kind of had a bunch of years to optimize that stuff by then

[weaveR]

Yeah it always lagged like crazy on money maps though especially with dialup but it was playable on regular maps with 6 players I can't imagine playing with that many players on the original westwood C&C games with dialup. I think I did try with Red Alert but it was unplayable probably because everyone else had dialup too and was overseas and of course it wouldn't have been optimized being it was working via the LAN lobby over the internet.

 

I remember always using my windows firewall to block my ping to stop people from kicking me on RA2 lol its like the only game I've ever seen that does actually get affected by windows firewall everything seems to be able to bypass it these days even if you tell it to block but Windows 10 still does complain when you turn it off.