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

Yeah but you could technically make a rts p2p game that allowed joining mid game if the engine was designed for it... like people have said it's similar to save games.

And as others have pointed out, the cost in terms of playability would be unnacceptable.

The beta has indeed improved overall but i'm still getting some nasty bugs:

- People will still randomly time out when in lobby for too long

- Freezing at end of game

- Waiting 30 seconds for rage quitters. It's one thing if the person times out and drops connection, but the game should be able to recognize when someone has quit the game properly as opposed to suddenly dropping. I doubt people are turning their PC's off with the power button like an Xbox or something. Also, chat messages and access to menus/skill tree/attributes should be available during these connectivity screens.

- I've ran into a desync error more than once. It's particularly annoying because it will continue to pop back up every 10 seconds after you've clicked OK.

- Had a really strange sound glitch for the first time yesterday, everything was garbled and strange. It eventually cleared up but was very weird.

Just had an odd experience, playing with mostly europeans.

One player had for a time a huge ping (1100-1600 to most) which calmed down in a little bit, and let us play, with him only occasionally spiking.

A few minutes later, out of nowhere, the connection window appears and blam everyone ejected. No timer, just seemingly auto eject. I had the tab open at the time of this, and there wasn't anything to me above 260, so I have no idea what happened, it didn't appear to be a connection problem between me and any other players, unlike when similar things like that happened in prior versions. (Both seeing this happen, and occasionly having it happen to me, it would usually be proceded by some lag.)

Can you still refund to my credit card? I thought this was a multiplayer.

Great cali DSl, open ports 6100-6200 UDP, latest XP, latest drivers (nVidia 256mb), latest sound drivers, tried both release and beta.

Pantheon nigh impossible to get, and if its a non-bot game the sim speed is slow as hell. I gave you time to bring this game outa beta, out of respect for your other great games, but I can't sit and let you run off with my $40 just because you posted a daily journal and made patches that didnt do shit.

Of course someone like me is the exception and im sure it works for the majority of people. I'm probably just some Russian with 56k to you guys. Whatever flirts your ego, just give me a refund.

Quoting Sturmmann,

reply 5

Can you still refund to my credit card? I thought this was a multiplayer.

Great cali DSl, open ports 6100-6200 UDP, latest XP, latest drivers (nVidia 256mb), latest sound drivers, tried both release and beta.

Pantheon nigh impossible to get, and if its a non-bot game the sim speed is slow as hell. I gave you time to bring this game outa beta, out of respect for your other great games, but I can't sit and let you run off with my $40 just because you posted a daily journal and made patches that didnt do shit.

Of course someone like me is the exception and im sure it works for the majority of people. I'm probably just some Russian with 56k to you guys. Whatever flirts your ego, just give me a refund.

Rather than posting in a dev journal, if you want your money back, try sending an email to customer service. I mean, at least that's what I would do if I were actually interested in a refund rather than just posting for the hell of it :shrug:

Quoting Sturmmann,

reply 5

Make sure to use that refund money to upgrade to real internet.

Btw, the "I can't cast anything unless I move first bug" is still in the game.

Yep, just posting my comments to the update and beta, and saying that i found a solution: refund. Maybe others are sending the wrong idea with the "great work" and "take a break". Sorry if I've just kind of sat here until now with my jaw dropped at the typical comments. I think the only thing that has really changed for me is favor points are stuck around 650, while my opponents typically have 2k or more. Oh, and more crashes, less connections with the NEWEST beta.

Quoting Sturmmann,

reply 8

Speak for YOURSELF because the others that are sending the RIGHT idea with "great work" and "take a break" have experienced things progressing very well. Regardless even if it wasn't progressing too well they are working hard to fix issues and pacify all the consumers with great transparency. Just because it's not working for you personally please don't try to dictate other peoples experience's by mocking their comments as if they were complete lies. It's a shame the product isn't working for you so go ahead and get your refund you will be missed dearly im sure of it.

Everything has been working OK for me, but the beta patch made things work much better.

Not throwing it in your face, just saying theres progress, even if it wasn't for you.

Further to the note about peoples pings not going green although everyone is indicated as being connected in the connection info window. It appears to occur when the host kicks a 'problem' person who other are having trouble connecting to. Although it eventully clears the 'problem' person off the connection info screen, the pings in the lobby are still yellow indicating there is a problem when there is not.

Quoting BenderB,

reply 24

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.

I don't think working proof applies here. Such is the difficulty of developing games on modern PCs. For consoles, you're only developing on a single hardware configuration so chances are, if it's tested to be working during QA, the customers should see the same. On the PC, there are countless possible hardware configurations and specs, it's impossible to make sure you test on them all.

I'm very sure they've done their internal QA and found things to have worked on whatever configurations they can afford to test on. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess, and that's only for offline PC specs. Imagine how hard it might be to make sure things work online, where the unknown variables are even more immense. Now throw in the requirement to accomplish all this through the limitations of budget and schedule.

Sure, as customers we have a right to a working product and all, and what was delivered had been less for a lot of people. However, I just find it hard to not cut them some slack when I know the massive difficulties involved in the development of such a product against the odds of the modern competitive industry.

Quoting Rocah,

reply 11

Half the time, rejoining fixes it. At least that's what I noticed.

- I've ran into a desync error more than once. It's particularly annoying because it will continue to pop back up every 10 seconds after you've clicked OK.

Which is exactly what it should do, it's not like the game can re-sync!

Quoting Ron Lugge,

reply 14

- I've ran into a desync error more than once. It's particularly annoying because it will continue to pop back up every 10 seconds after you've clicked OK.Which is exactly what it should do, it's not like the game can re-sync!

And why not? Pause the game, re-sync, and get on with it. This is a terrible response. What is the purpose of the error if it offers no solution? You might as well get a message that says "game cannot continue", because it's impossible to continue playing anyway.

After the patch hits on Monday - will you be increasing the size of Pantheon and Skirmish games above 2v2? Personally, I find 3v3 games much more gratifying than 2v2 games, and I think that having pantheon set to 3v3 as the new standard (for now) would be awesome.

Quoting MABManZ,

reply 15

The problem is that there is no clear "expected" way to handle this. The reason it desyncs is because one game client thinks one thing happened, and the other thinks another. It's usually something big too, like a DG dying. It's not like one client can just say "This is what happened." It really is a fatal error, that you shouldn't continue playing with anyway, and it shouldn't shut the game down like it does, but that's why you can't just "resync."

This is a terrible response.

No, that was me not realizing that I had to explain what I'd explained a hundred times in a hundred places already

I was saying, "given that you can't resync, what would you expect it to do? / What should it do?"

And why not?

Why can't games be resynced... oh God, this one is ugly, lets see if I remember it correctly.

Regardless of your opionion of a host / client or P2P networking structure, the use of P2P computational structure is a necessity in RTS's. There is too much data to constantly update every single unit and position from a single host computer, the bandwidth requirements would be excessive and unbearable. Ergo, a P2P computational structure is used, and all computers calculate all actions, with only commands transfered.

Normally, this isn't a problem. However, if a packet gets dropped and the system doesn't notice it (missing command) or one computer somehow does something another does, you're going to run into a desync error. A desync error represents the computer telling you that it's detected something wrong, that something has arisen that indicates that the two games are no longer in sync. This may be something small and simple, like one computer having a critical hit kill a minion in one strikes rather than two, or something major like the same crit being the difference between a demi living or dieing. It doesn't matter, though. The simple fact that you've had any desync screws the game up, as the rand() calls are no longer syncronised, and thus the synchronization is going to progressively worse (degrade).

This means you now have two seperate games running, however closely related, rather than one unified game. The only solution to this would be to re-load, but you run into problems past that. There are no guarantees that whatever caused the desync won't repeat (and, in all likelyhood, it will repeat). Additionally, re-syncing the game is a non-trivial feat, and given the assurance of a repeat desync it's not really worth trying. First off, how do you resync it? Does one computer suddenly assume the role of host in a host / client relationship, and upload a new 'game state' file to every single computer connected? (If that makes you think 'wow, might be easy to get a working cheat that way!' you're right...) Or do we somehow poll the computers involved using a 'tell me thrice' algorithm so the majority rules? No matter what you do, you have a massive multi-minute pause as first the entire game state is transferred between computers (the majority rules compounds this one because rather than one host uploading to all clients, everyone hands everyone else their 'version' for comparison). This not only sucks bandwidth, but you're effectively talking about a second loading screen.

I've played the new beta a lot this last weekend including a 5v5! so I will note my observations about existing bugs etc...

1.) Connection issues still are quite abundant. Getting into the lobby is as easy as connecting to the host, so this is an improvement. However once in the lobby things are still pretty much the same. The biggest problem I see is that when people all connect at the same time to a lobby nobody can connect to each other and it never works. I also noticed by closing all open slots except one and forcing people to join one at time greatly increases the chance of being able to connect and play... of course this also dramatically increases the time spent in the lobby. It really seems like your best chance of success is playing with people who forward their ports.

2.) There is another lobby bug where if too many people have left/been booted, the newly created 'empty' slot now becomes a secret hidden 'full' slot and the host needs to remake the lobby to fix it. This is quite annoying considering how long it can take to connect everyone up in a lobby.

3.) Another huge character bug is with Sedna's heal. It seems to work about 50% of the time when trying to cast it on another player. It works fine for self cast, but God forbid if you try healing a teammate.

4.) Favor points are obviously still an issue. I had a few matches that didn't count my favor points and some matches I received double. My buddy sitting next to me was receiving about 2000 favor points per game. On Saturday I was one of those who had 250 million favor points, and now on Sunday I had less than 500.

5.) Alt-tab is still very risky for crashing the game, you have about a 20% change of crash on an alt-tab.

Some small features worth adding quickly:

1.) Add a vote kick feature to the game. We spent 15 minutes setting a 4v4 only to get in and find out some jackass has -3 sim speed. The game was virtually unplayable lag spiking about every 3 seconds. He finally ended up leaving after experiencing some unfriendly verbal abuse from the other players... (even on his own team).

2.) Perhaps add a lobby queue so people can't join at the same time. Have a little number on the screen saying you are "5th in queue to join this lobby" and then automate the process. I can't tell you enough how people connecting one at a time improve the connection rate ten fold. The 1 minute of time it would take to queue a lobby of 10 people is a lot less than screwing around in the lobby for 15 minutes kicking people, making them re-join, opening/closing slots, remaking the lobby etc...

Either way things are still getting a bit better and I'm still optimistic that the connection problem will be resolved. This game is too damn good to fail

HAd about the same problems as listed before.

-Desync error popping up when host ragequits and pops up only seconds after it is closed and repeats.

-Waiting 30 seconds in a connection information screen just because of someone leaving.

-Somehow Sedna heal will not cast at all until demigod is moved to new location and then casted again. Have had alot of teamates complain I had not healed them because of this.

-Have not been able to get into a single Skirmish or Pantheon game since installing beta. It took long before to get into these games, now it is just impossible. This may be partially due to the split in players on different builds (beta/non beta)

I also in no way know about networking, but getting stuck in a game of AI where no one can join existing games is awful. If it was something that needed to be written into the game engine during development then shouldnt it have been thought of during development? I am positive there are other multiplay games that have this feature.

Above all I am addicted to this game and would love to see it taken farther. Cannot wait to see if new demigods get added.

Quoting Colonel_Jessep,

reply 14

Quoting Sheezwack, reply 7Yeah 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.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.

Actually, it's the SupCom engine that can do joining games in progress. See GPGnet's "Live Replays". Making a join-in-progress would have quite a waiting time for the players already in the game attached, but it could be done, especially with this engine.

Basically, the player joining mid-game would be sent the replay data (which is tiny), and his game would then play out the match so far at increased speed (also possible with this engine - see above). This is where the waiting time comes in. The faster your CPU, the faster you can catch up. When you have caught up, the game is resumed for everybody - bang, you're in the game.

Hey Frogboy, a logistical question. I see a LOT of people posting bug reports here on this forum, and it's kind of a lot to digest. Would you prefer that people post on current/new threads, and forward you (being the Stardock/GPG team) over to the thread where there's already discussion about it? I know this probably won't happen, but a question that I figured warrented asking.

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Demigod: Saturday’s status