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Re: network improvements


As Jim mentioned we did some network debugging in the last few days and
tracked down the cause of one more problem: the double-click out of sync.
This was the last remaining sync error affecting the intro game, so it (and
probably the standard game as well) is now fully playable both manually and
under ai control. Jim and I played several games to the end to verify this.

Some other games still give sync errors for different reasons, but after
looking through the relevant parts of the code, I believe they can be
fixed, too.  Another issue is the warnings about references to dead units.
It turned out that at least some of them also are caused by double-clicking
on the same unit. Our latest fix does not solve this problem, which is what
Jim was referring to, but the warnings themselves are harmless. You can
therfore just ignore them if you wish to test the game.

For the technically interested, the problem with double-clicks on the same
unit was that the second click would cancel out the action set up by the
first click, but only on the client, thus causing sync errors. This was
easy to fix once we understood what was going on. The cause of the
remaining problems is that if the unit dies in the attack that is executed
after the first click, the host correctly interprets the second click as a
command to a dead unit. It seems that some kind of command filter is still
needed here, but I'm not sure that the current client-side filter in
advance_into_cell (which only stops some double-clicks) is the best
solution. Perhaps we can just let the host ignore invalid commands instead.
A problem with this approach, however, is that commands to dead units also
can be generated by bugs in the kernel. I found and fixed some of these,
but there may be more of them. Filtering out these warnings may therefore
not be such a good idea, at least not until we have done some more
debugging.

It is my intention to make a binary release as soon as these remaining
problems have been fixed. Those of you who are working on game modules that
you would like to have included should therefore send them in soon. Bug
reports about serious problems that need to be fixed before the release
(crashes etc.) are also welcome.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se



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