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

Downloaded the beta this evening. Major thumbs up. Once the favor bug is fixed (and there are more people online than the standard low beta population) I can see MP being finally worthy of the awesome gameplay Demigod has.

I just want to give my 3 thumbs up for this beta! I played 3 Pantheon games in a row and it never took more than 10s from when I clicked Fight! to when the map started loading! Connections were lightning fast! This is what I was expecting when I bought the game! Now I can play during my limited time instead of begging for a good connection!

thats not a third thumb !!!

Out of interest, with these new connection methods you are implementing - does that mean it is now technically possible for you to add the ability for players to join an existing game?

Quoting Sheezwack,

reply 4

Out of interest, with these new connection methods you are implementing - does that mean it is now technically possible for you to add the ability for players to join an existing game?

do you mean game in progress ?

Out of interest, with these new connection methods you are implementing - does that mean it is now technically possible for you to add the ability for players to join an existing game?

You mean after the game already started, say as replacement for a dropped player or an AI? I don't think thats possible. You would have to transfere all gamedata (think savegame) to the new player and then synchronize the game. I think its unlikely that this can be done with a reasonable amount of engineering cycles. Not to mention that they would probably have to rewrite the game engine.

Yeah I mean as game in progress, why can't you just connect to the existing people, then update the new player with the necessary data which is what you have to do for everyone in the game anyway. To keep the games in sync you have to be sending that data to everyone anyway... it's not like there would be much extra to send that isn't being sent already.

Heres my experience. Straight after installing the beta patch things seemed to be working well. I got into a 4v4 custom game quite quickly and easily and the game went well noone dropped and favour seemed to be working, as I had a sensible amount of favour like 420 and I could buy a swift anklet. Possibly 2 games went well like this I can't remember exactly as time goes fast when you're having fun! At the end of a game though there was a long delay before the final scores came up as described by others. After that I don't think I've played one game without problems. Constant NAT connections problems and people with green 0 pings that I can't connect to and if a game gets started I had a silly huge amount of favour and people started dropping from the game straight away.

It seems to me that after you got many things working on saturday, pretty soon something has gotten broken.

Keep up the good work anyway!

Edit: Just tried to get a Pantheon game and I had the 'unhandled exception' error/crash lock up the game. It seems that problem is back in the beta as well.

Aaaawwww don't nerf my 2 million favor points! I will whine to the end of days if this happen!

Just kidding, the beta is very enjoyable atm. The overall experience with this game is fun for the first time. Take that as a compliment

Quoting Dahkar,

reply 15

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!

Yes this happened to me once as well (long freeze followed by game working again at the end of the game) but it doesnt happen every time.

good:

- players get into lobbies and connect to each other plenty faster

- favor point issue is fixed even if it's still bugged (had 2 billion points i think)

- seems the "chasing" bug is gone from my 4-5 games played

- the 30 second grace period worked well the one time i've seen it needed

- connectivity is better in terms of identifying people who can hold up a game or won't be able to play

bad:

- targeting bug still in (guess it wasn't intended to be fixed yet)

- some people still have connectivity issues. friend keeps getting a NAT error while trying to join games

- sometimes, a person(s) will display fine in the lobby (green numbered pings) but not on connection info, and upon game launch, said person(s) will D/C.

hopefully proxy servers help the remaining issues.

I can't wait till all the connection issues are fixed and such, but at least we have a lobby to complain in while we wait for people to join.

My biggest issues at the moment are everyone being called ImpulsePlayer, it makes it impossible to tell whats going on in chat when its all ImpulsePlayer, ImpulsePlayer1, etc. Also It seems if I sit in a lobby too long the pings turn yellow and I need to quit and rejoin to make them green so we can start the game. Not sure if thats a NAT issue or something else entirely. I've been able to play 5 games or so since the patch and the majority were really good matches so I'm happy so far

Just kidding, the beta is very enjoyable atm. The overall experience with this game is fun for the first time. Take that as a compliment

I'm glad to see you can finally play online Usling.

Quoting Sheezwack,

reply 7

The engine doesn't work like this. The data you transfer during a game is basically a bunch of commands you gave. Like: Oak moves there, casts shield, attacks Unclean Beast.

A new player joining an existing game would need ALL the data. Every creep, minion, Demigod, tower, arrow fired, catapult ammo, their position, direction they are facing, speed, their orders and all effects like slows and stuns... We are no longer talking about 600kb to 1mb of data (replay) but several dozen megabyte, a complete savegame. During the time required to distribute the data the game can't go on of course. So you have 8 people waiting maybe several minutes on one new player to join and probably the same thing 2 minutes later for the 10th player.

Obviously this is not really a desireable solution.

Yeah okay if that's how the engine works. So it's not really anything to do with it being RTS or P2P, it's just because the engine wasn't designed for it. I was going to suggest something like a pause while a new player joined - it would be fine for lan games etc, and when friends are playing together.

It's really annoying having a lan game and someone drops half way through, I really wouldn't mind waiting a minute or two while they reconnected. You could even do this online where the same person that disconnected can reconnect.

Ah yess and since its based on a SupCom engine Save games get HUGE with more units - I have supcom saves 250+ mb so while they wont become that big we are talking about 10+ that possibly go to 50+MB in very late game ... who the hell will wait for that long to download?

I doubt it would go to 50mb, there is considerably less data than supcom since there are way less units

just try to play a 5v5 with a curious result.

we had 9 players all connected (green) with <100m/s connection but the final guy could never get in.

It seemed like the final 10th player would get overloaded by trying to connect to the other 9.

hopefully all this goes by the wayside from monday

FYI ImpulseReactorOptions doesn't support enabling port 6000 or 6001.

Been trying to play custon games with this patch all evening, and managed to get a couple going minus 2 of the players.

All sorts of stupid things happening, like for example player x joins the game and we connect fine, green pings.

Player y joins, disconnects (times out), player x leaves rejoing then im stuck at trying to connect. (just is stuck at trying to connect, gets nowhere). Why? I connected to him before instantly at 80 ping. What the hell?

Spent about an hour having people come and go and couldnt manage to start a game.

Please just do us all a favor and recode the game as a client-server model the same as all other rts game are.

If money was more of an issue for me id be asking for a refund at this point.

Not impressed.

timeouts and 0 ping in the game lobby are the most pressing problems at the moment, in a 4vs4 game earlier we had 4 people timeout trying to get everyone in.

Can I suggest that as soon as you are clear that favour points are working again - Wednesday at the latest that you reset them. Until you do that games re favour points are not viable because of the huge discrepancies between peoples favor points

still heaps of problems with this patch... 5v5 games were just impossible, 4v4 almost got working... we got one or two going.

hopefully they can put some more fixes in

Quoting Mixairian,

reply 18

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.

I agree. I have no faith in this company to deliver on any of the promises they make week after week. Working 108 hour weeks just goes to show how inaccurate all previous promises and estimations have been.

Stardock and GPG should learn from their mistakes and stop claiming to have fixed these issues until they have working proof that they have done so. Judging by the comments made in reply to the OP so far, it would seem that many issues are yet to be solved, with new issues being introduced.

IMHO this 50% discount offer should not be off another copy and should be given directly as a partial refund to all the players who have put up with a terrible experience so far.

Perhaps the staff at Stardock and GPG need to realise that they're not out of the woods yet, and that making statements that allude to problems being resolved can cause more trouble than they're worth.

Actually, it's precisely because it's P2P and RTS.

RTS requires a P2P peer computational (if not networking) model; everyone has to run everything locally, because the bandwidth required for the server to continuously update is enourmous and unsupportable. And because the engine has to do the computational stuff P2P, it only makes 'sense' to use a P2P networking model on top of it.

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Demigod: Saturday’s status