Late Thursday night status update

By Frogboy on May 1, 2009 2:41:58 AM from

We got a really good new build from GPG this evening that has a cure for those people who have experienced in-game disconnects along with some in-game exploits and a few other things (favor points, achievements, etc.). So we spent a lot of time this evening working on that.

Meanwhile, I turned over the Proxy server setup to the enterprise team at Stardock to speed that up (for those of you not familiar with Stardock, we’re 70% an application company, 30% games with very distinct development teams). Basically I turned over the Proxy server work to the Impulse development team since they already have built the infrastructure around Impulse.

The connection servers, which is one of the areas some people (and we have reproduced this) are having a lot of pain with is something we’re still working on (2:30am as I write this) but we’re nearing the end of productive work on this. Basically, it’s a problem of scaling. The classic what works for 500 people falls apart when used by 5000 people at once. But a lot of progress has been made there as well.

Anyway, we’re going to call it a night and come back tomorrow to continue on the integration.

Now, as some people have heard, we are going to release this update as a “beta”. Impulse has an option for users to be able to try out pre-release software on it. Warning though, if Demigod MP is already fine for you, don’t mess with this.

Here’s how you make use of this feature:

We expect to have this up tomorrow. But I’m not making any promises as we don’t want to take a chance of putting something up that leaves people stranded (or having to re-download the whole release game again).

Update: Friday afternoon

We've finished integrating GPG's changed with the Raknet changes with the CVP changes. But we have still not resolved the issue of why it takes so long for 2 people, after being connected, to get into the lobby when there's a heavy load as the database seems to now be able to handle it (we set up a bunch of new servers) but there is still a random several second delay between when it says someone is connected and when it actually even attempts to insert them into the game lobby.

+912 Karma | 81 Replies

Hi Brad.

The game will be in retail stores in Singapore officially on 15th May. Any chance the proxies will be up then?

Disregard my IRC post;

I have COX, and stardock irc is stuffed up for COX for some reason. http://forums.wincustomize.com/326700

Update is live!

Quoting Scyle,

reply 2

Disregard my IRC post;

I have COX, and stardock irc is stuffed up for COX for some reason. http://forums.wincustomize.com/326700

...hmm COX is ur ISP? Cox is also my ISP. Which IRC do u speak of?

Warning though, if Demigod MP is already fine for you, don’t mess with this.

How do you define..."fine"? I mean I can play MP, but not perfectly. Like most of the time when I do Skirmish once the game starts I hear "Player has left the game" a bunch of times and I find myself alone. Or with Pantheon, I find the same thing or I get the 2v1 situation. So I'd say 50% of the time MP works and with Customs, if I have the patients and I don't get booted trying to get into a lobby, it works as well. Will this beta update help my situation or is it meant for those that get disconnected while trying to play with me?

In the new beta update, I have still experienced the 0 Favor points bug and hence being unable to buy any Favor items; in both Custom games and in Pantheon. I was also having problems identical to this before installing the beta update.

Ergo I must conclude that this beta update did not fix the Favor problems and therefore would not solve the Favor problems even if it was made official either.

Please make a new, additional update to fix the Favor problems.

Please disable favor items until this is solved... This is getting not funny at all.

Or unlock em all so we can play-test em all.

Don't be selfish. Can we drop with the favor stuff being borked? There are still many people who can't play Pantheon or Skirmish.

I'd say fix the Favor LAST.

Beta report:

Just tried Pantheon with the new patch. The first time I got in really fast, and I thought: great! It's fixed! Then I checked the player list and everyone was an AI. Next game, it started off as a 3-player game, but at the loading screen I got "a player has left the game" and it was 1v1 with 3 AIs per team. (huh?) After I stomped them, the game locked up at the victory scoreboard: a dialog appeared behind that scoreboard that appeared to have something to do with connectivity, but I couldn't read it through the scores. Everything else in the UI was nonfunctional, so I had to Alt-Tab out and close the game from the taskbar.

(EDIT: I should say that I'm trying this mostly out of curiosity. Before this patch I'd estimate I got into a match 30-50% of the time, and it generally took me 4 tries or less to get into Pantheon...but people often dropped out of my match, and occasionally I got kicked)

just tried to get a 3v3 custom game going on beta and it proved unsuccessful.. pretty much the same results on non beta patch

i tried it with 2 other friends of mine that got connected to me immediately so i thought "great!" but then it was a revolving door of people trying to connect and failing or connecting and having 0 pings to each other

tried rehosting and then my friends couldnt connect to each other.. after we got that resolved while other people were trying to connect to us it was the same as the first scenario..

i guess i'm not sure what group of people i fit in to here with this patch.. the game would work "fine" for me prior to beta sometimes but most of the times what I wrote above is a pretty good representation of what my friends and i experience when trying to get customs going on retail version

during pantheons i have the same problems as other people .. 2v2s, 2v1s, 1v2s, AI players... blah blah

i'm going to try the beta version more tomorrow but if i run into the same results i guess i'll go back to retail where at least i have some favor and there are more people playing..

here's hoping to them figuring it out..

Beta Testing patch update:

We have 4 of us on a LAN and we are trying to play a custom game on the internet. The last person to join can't connect to anyone, and causes the host to ping yellow to everyone. It always happens with the last person to join. 3v3 is fine, but once the last person who is on the LAN try's to join(and it happens to everyone, its not because someone has something running in the backgound preventing a connection), there are connection issue. Often the 4th person will not be able to join at all. It will stay at the connecting screen even though that person shows as being connected to everyone. Even the chat sounds can be heard. Can't figure out why 4 people on the LAN can't connect to eachother on a internet custom game.

Quoting VoodooKing,

reply 9

Don't be selfish. Can we drop with the favor stuff being borked? There are still many people who can't play Pantheon or Skirmish.

I'd say fix the Favor LAST.

How much effort would be needed to just merely diable favor feature?

I agree connection first but this favor can be disabled until fixed LAST.

Beta didn't seem much better yet. When people couldn't connect to another player it didn't seem to activate the proxy or whatever it would just sit idle for a long time without saying the player couldn't connect. And i have still seen plenty of Failed to Connects...

Quoting VoodooKing,

reply 9

Don't be selfish. Can we drop with the favor stuff being borked? There are still many people who can't play Pantheon or Skirmish.

I'd say fix the Favor LAST.

And their $40 to buy the game carries more clout than the same $40 of those of us like myself who want our Favor fixed, why, exactly?

Besides, the OP of this thread implied that Favor would be fixed, but it isn't.

Seeing as this is a competitive game and Favor items not being bugged plays a huge part in it being an even playing field, not to mention Favor is a fundamental feature of the game, it should be fixed first. The connection issues have gotten a very disproportionate amount of attention already...that is what should be fixed last, and only after Favor is fixed.

Quoting fixmyfavor,

reply 15

Quoting VoodooKing,
reply 9
Don't be selfish. Can we drop with the favor stuff being borked? There are still many people who can't play Pantheon or Skirmish.

I'd say fix the Favor LAST.

And their $40 to buy the game carries more clout than the same $40 of those of us like myself who want our Favor fixed, why, exactly?

Besides, the OP of this thread implied that Favor would be fixed, but it isn't.

Seeing as this is a competitive game and Favor items not being bugged plays a huge part in it being an even playing field, not to mention Favor is a fundamental feature of the game, it should be fixed first. The connection issues have gotten a very disproportionate amount of attention already...that is what should be fixed last, and only after Favor is fixed.

Well I'd say F*** Favor because I can't play a Skirmish or Pantheon. The new patch hasn't fixed it for me. So until it does otherwise, Favor is damn f**king far from my mind right now. You damn selfish pig.

Beta Testing patch update:

I grabbed the patch around midnight (ET). First two games, I found that I could not host a custom game (no issues prior). I received the nat error message. One of my buddies was able to host a custom game and I was able to join at around 12:10AM ET. Game had quite a bit of slow down about 30 minutes in. At around 1:30AM ET, I tried to host a game and was successful, so no more hosting issues that were initially a problem with this build (or whatever the configuration you have going on in the background).

New issue - after finishing a game that I hosted (3 person custom game over internet), only 1 player would be able to exit the game without the game freezing up. This happened about 2-3 times, but I did not experience it myself directly. Not sure if it was just taking a bit and they jumped the gun by killing the program or if it was truly frozen. Someone had the theory that it was because I exited the game (by clicking main menu) after the game was over first. So, the next game, I stayed in after we finished playing and they exited first. The guy out 1st has no issue, the guy out 2nd froze, and I got out without problem.

Favor points - these still bounced all over the place for me (but no negative values - THANKS! ). I'm under the impression that these aren't currenlty addressed by this build, but just fyi in case not.

I only ran custom games tonight, so I can't speak to pantheon or skirmish results.

Frogboy or other devs - can we see a changelog posted? Thanks!

Heh yah where are the patch notes, those are always so freaking hard to find.

Just hosted a 2 games.. 1st game went fine, no issues

2nd game, host screen everyone appeared fine, but in game one of the guys lagged like crazy, but said he had this issue before with game, but wanted to see if patch fixed it. In game connection screen did not appear till after he disconnected, although his ping was over 2000, we played several minutes while he tried to fix it, with no luck.

When he finally left, the game went the connection screen, counted down 30 seconds, then split the game into different games. 2 where in my game, 1 was by himself, and not sure about the other 2.

FYI.. release notes are available by click game and selecting view history on impulse menu..

Demigod BETA 1.00[b].061
------------------------

Please note that after updating to the beta, you will only be able to play
with other beta users. Games hosted by users with the current release
version of Demigod will not be visible.

- Reworked the saving and restoring of achievements to differentiate
between online and offline.
- Added tournament ID to each achievement when posting achievements.
- Reduced the width of of the header in the disconnect dialog to accommidate text.
- Resolved issue where players who report network issues with other people were causing
the disconnect dialog to remain up after problem was solved
- Fixed a crash that occurred during skirmish games.
- Fixed citadel upgrade bug/exploit where users could click quickly to buy more than
they could afford.
- Resolved issue where one person disconnecting or lagging would cause the networking
to disconnect and spawn multiple games. This applies to all matchmaking setups
(LAN, Skirmish, Pantheon, Custom)
- Introduces a cumulative tolerance timer of 30 seconds for each player, allowing
slower connections better opportunities to stay connected.
- Added dialog for players that lets them know who is having a connection problem, and
displays their cumulative timer. This dialog is not interactive, merely informative.

Thanks for posting the release notes BigBad! I usually check the history in impulse, but for some reason, I just get a blank pop up on this build.

Quoting VoodooKing,

reply 9

Don't be selfish. Can we drop with the favor stuff being borked? There are still many people who can't play Pantheon or Skirmish.

I'd say fix the Favor LAST.

???

Stardock is working on the connection trouble, GPG is supposed to work on favor and the other related game bugs... I don't see what's the problem?

Achievments are STILL broken. I am starting to lose a bit of patience with this issue.

2 online games, both give me an award for being an initiate. When I go to achievments, it shows all my single player achievments except the initiate achievment is now gone lol.

Hi guys,

I don't know how many of you 'partook' in the official beta, but during these testing releases, a great way to help diagnose problems is to send over your logs for us to scan and analyze.

There are two important files, the DemigodLog.txt and ImpulseReactor.log, both located in your 'documents/my games/gas powered games/demigod' directory.

Send those to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] ...it give us some nice weekend reading

Thanks!

Logs sent!

Favor is now stuck for me at 735. I only get AI in Pantheon, and for some reason half the acheivements on all characters show completed when I haven't unlocked them yet (Reset so I can get the favor once it works! lol!).

BoogieBac

Do these files only record the the last game played?

If so, I lost the one with bad connections.

I assume you only want to read the bad ones..

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Late Thursday night status update