Demigod: Saturday’s status

By Frogboy on May 9, 2009 4:58:45 PM from

Greetings!

Last night we released an update to Demigod and marked it as beta. The results have been very encouraging with a massive improvement in connectivity plus a fixes to a wide range of issues that users had reported. We’re getting a great deal of very good feedback that we can use to update for a Monday release.

Here’s a summary of what beta testers have found along with what the solutions are:

1) You have been disconnected because the NAT has failed. There appears to be a logic error in the new connectivity system. If you fail to connect to someone who enters the lobby, you won’t connect to anyone subsequently. This is basically a case of a very late night if/then logic needing to be tweaked.

2) Some people are getting massive favor points values. Obviously way better than not working at so those of you who are getting it enjoy it while you can and I hope I don’t get into any games with you. Should be relatively easy to fix on Monday.

3) Sound settings not saving. (https://forums.demigodthegame.com/350188/get;2195602). This will have to be looked at.

4) Scattered reports of people getting into the lobby fine but not able to connect to some of the other players. This is not going to get fixed by Monday (except for those affected by problem #1). If you can run ImpulseReactorOptions in the bin directory, mark the ports say 6000 to 6200 as ones to use and then on your router port forward to those. See http://www.portforward.com/ for more on how to do that. Now, we don’t expect people to know how to do that, this is simply a quick way to solve it for most people.

So what’s the plan?

Well, based on feedback, I think the 108 hour week we put in last week won’t need to be repeated (and yes, I mean literally we clocked in 108 hours in the past 7 days at the office). Everything else from here on out is relatively easy comparatively. I am going to ask our architect to write a paper when things calm down explaining the rather impressive new technology of proxy sockets that we designed that allowed us to let Demigod to see all players with 1 socket without GPG needing to modify 1 line of code in Demigod. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

So here’s the basic outline of what I see happening:

On Monday, we’re going to take care of item #1 above and item #2 above and then release this new build as a public version and eliminate betas. This will recombine the communities back together.

Late next week we will likely release an update (probably less than 1 megabyte) that adds in support for the Proxy servers and improves NAT. The developer of Raknet is visiting us this next week.

Is it safe?

So is Demigod safe to play online for normal people? In my opinion, the Monday release will probably put it there. The beta we have works pretty well other than issue #1 above which, admittedly, throws a big monkey wrench into custom games right now.

After Monday, it’ll be diminishing returns as we add in proxy servers for people who just can’t connect and lots of other things. Then we’re going to start focusing on Demigod: Clan Wars (free expansion) and lots of in game tools to let people filter who they play with.

+912 Karma | 72 Replies

Awesome, love the beta and can't wait for the community to be one again

awesome, any word on the new demigods?

Yeah, the community looks small. But its just divided in two factions ( Beta and normal players )

thanks for the new update, I was finally able to play online today.

I don't know if this has been caused by the beta update or not, but since the update I've been dropped from every game that I've played.

Much easier to get games going now atleast, even if I never get to finish them...

But, but...I my 2M Favor Point Beta Upgrade present, don't takes it away from us, preciousss!

thanks Frogboy,

couple things -

1. Seeing massive slowdon/freeze when victory conditions are met - can take 2 minutes for endgame stats screen to pop up. This is for all players in a given game

2. I wanted to make sure you guys saw that Reg's mines could explode infinitely in the last Beta (previous to this one) because that will break the game

THanks Kestrel

Quoting Ke5trel,

reply 7

couple things -

1. Seeing massive slowdon/freeze when victory conditions are met - can take 2 minutes for endgame stats screen to pop up. This is for all players in a given game

2. I wanted to make sure you guys saw that Reg's mines could explode infinitely in the last Beta (previous to this one) because that will break the game

THanks Kestrel

Odd haven't seen either of these in my games Ke5trel. Will look out for them, but it may be isolated. How repeatable is it? Have you verified your patch?

quoting post

I'm geting this alot this evening. In fact I would say I'm finding it harder to get a game going than before moving to the latest beta. At least the game doesn't hang with every failed connection, but it does seem worse than it was a week ago overall for me. Seems like I've been getting more filaed connections over the course of the week for some reason.

The reason for my post is I want to ask. If I set up port forwarding in my router, will it help with this particular issue?

Quoting Ke5trel,

reply 7

thanks Frogboy,

couple things -

1. Seeing massive slowdon/freeze when victory conditions are met - can take 2 minutes for endgame stats screen to pop up. This is for all players in a given game

2. I wanted to make sure you guys saw that Reg's mines could explode infinitely in the last Beta (previous to this one) because that will break the game

THanks Kestrel

I have noticed problem #1 in every game I've played since Beta - as well as 3 other friends who play along with me. The game completely locks up for a good 2 minutes before stats, and will continue being unstable until you are out of the game.

A couple of other things I've noticed:

-The movement bug fix, as reported by a couple of fellow players, has not been completely resolved. A good hand full of people have told me they are still witnessing a freeze or pathing problems when trying to use any ability (i.e. Erebus's bite).

-I have been one of the players affected by the sound optimization problem which was stated as a fix in the patch notes. I am still seeing some real system problems with sound on low quality. I have tried all other fixes announced by GPG. My system (core 2 duo and 8800 GT, Vista 64, 4GB ram) is not THE most up to date system, but it runs other games on high settings with no problems so it is a bit frustrating to sit around 1-2 sim speed. With no sound I run a constant 4-6.

-We had what I'd describe as a "server split" where half of the players in a 5v5 got replaced by AI. It was reported the other half of the players continued playing with AI, similar to our half. This game was around 8:15, and the title included US East (I apologize for not being able to provide more detail, I didn't think to jot down the information at that time).

Otherwise, we are all entering the lobby and connecting much better than before. It's a good update and hopefully we can all move on with a lot more success from here.

Edit: I think I got fooled into believing the connecting was better due to the lobby being easier to get into - but it just seems it is a mirage 40% of the time. Still spending a good amount of time playing match maker in games, trying to eject and mix and match players to get yellow pings to disappear. There have been a good amount of posts posted after this one detailed the problem. Has a few times I just couldn't get a game going for a good while = /

Good stuff again. Great communication as always.

Monday can't come fast enought!!!!

sounds good

Great can't wait (still)!!

I am also experiencing these long hangs at the end of games. Custom game connection is great....pantheon and skirmish seem to have issues. Favor is like off the charts (I'm on of those with like 265 million) and a bunch of my acheivements are unlocked when they shouldn't be. I can buy favor items, but they still don't seem to save. Not really a problem though considering I still have 200 million or whatever!

Just thought I'd let you know. Patch works great low, the low end audio optomizations have really helped. I can now run the game on high settings with a little anti-aliasing at a sim speed of 5-6 in a 4v4 or 5v5. Nice!

I've had the 2 minute stall at game end.

And also, much to my disappointed, stood in place picking me hole while trying to land the final blow on a fleeing enemy.

I also got a sound loop of the Unclean roaring in the lobby once which I guess is some by-product of the sound changes so I just shut-down DG and re-entered the lobby.

I'm also one of the lucky folk with a couple billion favour points.

Love the new lobbying though, got into the two games I played today and got started within about a minute. Compared to the previous time frame of ~20-30minutes.

Please fix the movement bug, it's a major flaw in what is otherwise a very solid release (gameplay wise).

Thanks again for the journals though.

Yeah other than the NAT issue that I had, everything was not a big deal. GW.

I'll admit the beta has been a huge improvement on getting into Pantheon/Skirmish games but a man can only take so much of "after the weekend it will be better" before he grows skeptical. The patterns has been "After the weekend" followed by "It didn't work out so well." I know you've all been working hard to get the game running but pardon me if I remain skeptical until I can continuously play and enjoy the game.

mark the ports say 6000 to 6200 as ones to use

FYI: You can't go lower than 6002, it has to be ">6001".

108? 108 minutes does not seem all that much

Seriously, wow, I thought 60 was pushing it here. For those who might have seen my posts earler, I have convinced my friends NOT to buy Dow2 still. I thought for SURE they'd have it by now, but I keep telling them "please wait just a little longer for DG to get fixed". They are (Shew). Please make DG work so they will play too.

Quoting lordkosc,

reply 12

Monday can't come fast enought!!!!

Why wait for monday? just download the beta now!!

A 5vs5 btw is impossible with this build. I have tried a few times and it seems it is always someone who can't connect. Also, it seems that the kick ability (as they are connecting) does not work anymore. Some players report seeing someone come in as "Impulse Player <number here>" then the impulse player will change to a name. The other thing that happens is that people will connect and then disconnect to everyone in the lobby. The player being disconnected doesn't sense anything, but he will time out, leave lobby and about 1 second later reconnect.

I'm getting a bunch of different results when I try to start a Pantheon game with the beta patch.

1. Sometimes everyone connects almost instantly, the game loads, and everything is great. Unfortunately this happens only about 5% of the time by my estimation. Sometimes there's a bit of a delay and then it works.

2. Sometimes everyone connects almost instantly, the game loads, and I get "a player has left the game" and find myself playing with AIs and no people. I think this happened about 50% of the games.

3. Sometimes there's a long delay and then the connection info dialog gets weird -- it starts randomly hiding and showing names. I can never get into a game when this happens.

4. Sometimes there are a few people who can't connect to anyone, or even just one pair of people who can't connect (even though they can connect to everyone else, and everyone else can connect to everyone). My estimate is that this was about 20-30% of the games.

5. Sometimes the connection info dialog says "waiting for connection data" forever.

6. Sometimes the game crashes.

7. Sometimes the "finding a match" dialog stays there forever -- I left it like that for at least fifteen minutes once. It was like it wasn't being assigned a match by the server.

8. I'm pretty sure there are other cases I forgot about.

5% man you must play a buttload of games!

You guys work tremendously hard for your games and you support them past launch, which can't be said of many other studios! Don't let EA gobble you up.

Great job!

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Demigod: Saturday’s status