Ok, I take everything back I said in the last post.
While I have no problem connecting to games (10-20 seconds and I’m in a lobby or the game starts) performance is still abysmal for me. :/
I can’t imagine what that would be, or how to turn it off, or why it doesn’t affect any other game (either P2P or client-server). Also, when I put myself in a DMZ, it never showed anything in the logs.
I know it’s tempting from your point of view to blame it on my router, because the way you understand how your code (and GPG’s, and Raknet’s) code works, it should work. But it doesn’t. And I can assure you that:
a) I’m not exactly a noob that doesn’t know his way around his computer or router. I have SPI turned off, NAT endpoint filtering set to its loosest possible setting, and so on.
b) I don’t have connectivity problems with any other game with my current setup, and boy howdy, do I play plenty of 'em. That’s right, I said “boy howdy.”
After doing a bunch of searching, I’m going to expand my forwarded port range to include 6000-6200 and see if that affects anything. I have a D-Link router and in one specific place in one specific post you say something about some D-Links blocking that port and it causing some NAT problems. (And here I thought I opened up the right ports based on a previous post of yours…)
Jason, let’s try to get a game going. Mike and I are in the QT3 Steam room.
Got into a game just fine but a player didn’t like how the game was going, left, and suddenly everyone disconnected.
I just discovered the same thing. One person leaves and the entire fucking game goes to hell. Seriously, guys, just re-write the whole fucking thing from the ground up.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a massive improvement. It just failed to address the biggest problem; connectivity.
I know the ‘problem’ at my end is that people who haven’t configured their firewalls, routers, stockings & high hats, haven’t a hope in hell of connecting to me. I can’t do anything about that, because I can’t kill all security at my end. I’m simply not allowed.
I don’t know how you can address the problem of people with bad setups trying to connect, and in doing so, holding back everyone else. Personally I’d make DG check and sign up the associated email addy for massive volumes of horse porn if the network isn’t configured properly. OK, maybe not. I don’t hate horses or anything. But the problem needs to be addressed somehow.
If you are really having that many problems, Disconnected, I would recommend getting a full refund from Stardock.
I really am having those problems. I wouldn’t have mentioned them otherwise. But I don’t want to return DG, and I wouldn’t feel right doing it. Not because the online MP bit is working great, because it really isn’t. But because the LAN bit is working great and my colleagues and I are playing the hell out of it.
I always get really confused when that happens :p
What Demigod does wrong - horrifyingly, dramatically wrong - is transmit creep data between clients. Since creeps are out of player control this is an extra step that shouldn’t ever have been needed if you think about it a bit longer and design the Peer-to-Peer code that way.
Sorry, I gave up and went to eat dinner and play some PvZ. :)
That’s not a “hybrid” anything, that’s a straight-up client-server system. Quite a lot of games do that (most Xbox 360 games, for example). In the old PC shooter days they would just call that a “listen server” though I never knew why. You have the option of doing that with games today like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead. You can run host a game from withing the game, running the server and being one of the clients (effectively), or you can run a “dedicated server” that doesn’t run the game client at all, it just lets everyone else connect and play. But there are tons of client/server games with no dedicated game server software, especially on consoles.
I wonder what Halo Wars uses?
DDB
1570
Boy I bet you’d be a great project manager. “Well, we got 90 pecent of the way there but there’s a few bugs left to squash and one of our third-party libraries isn’t working right, we’ll be flying in their top guy next week to work on this.” “Fuck that, cancel everything and start over!”
Reldan
1571
Sigh.
Tonight I realized that I’ve spent 20 minutes playing Demigod and 40 minutes sitting in lobbies and/or watching the system look for matches to join that it never seems to find.
My refund request email just went out. I’d love to like this game and I’d really like to love it, but it spurns me at every turn. I’m sorry Brad. I’ll keep an eye on this thread and if it sounds like humpty dumpty gets put back together again you’ll get another sale from me.
DDB
1572
Yeah the game is still Not Ready for Prime Time. Hopefully next week’s visit from the RakNet guy will get everything in order.
Jorune
1573
I’m one of the lucky ones.
I had big Pantheon problems with the beta, so I scaled back to non-beta. Played 8 or 9 Pantheon games tonight. No more than 5 minutes to connect. 2vs2. I would say only 2 of the games were players dropped before game started (so I played pantheon vs AI).
Jorune
This. This is people’s enemy number one now.
It seems like with some minor to major patience you can get a custom game going, but once someone drops from an active game, then the whole game is toast. Demigod just never seems to be able to recover and starts dropping people in mass (and you get the Max Headrom “player dropped from the game” sounds).
In a dota like game, someone is always going to get killed a bunch, and most of the time that same person will bail. In this game, this seems to send massive ripples out that creates connectivity Armageddon. One rage-quit to undo them all as it were.
Quitch
1575
Tournaments seem off to me, Normal is waaaaaay too easy while on Hard your allies seem to die every five seconds (if the original Dawn of War taught us anything it’s that people hate you crippling their allies, hell even in X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter this was a pain in the ass) and the difference in gold income between the two levels is very noticeable. Most annoying is the lack of description as to what each level of difficulty represents in a tournament, and tooltip descriptions such as “Hard: Sets difficulty to Hard” are the kind of thing people should be shot for.
The problem is much bigger with some game types, such as demigod kills, than others, say destroy four fortresses. In fact in the later it’s very tense and exciting and each time I feel I could have won if only… yet with demigod kills my team is so busy getting themselves killed that my efforts seem to pale by comparison.
The tournaments look like the meat of the single-player, but the lack of meaningful description for levels along with the astoundingly noticeable change in difficulty between Normal and Hard is really a fun killer. In addition the entire system is based around favour points but the manual completely omits to tell you how these are awarded leading to mystifying situations where you’re playing a round to kill enemy demigods, then get less favour than the guy who got no kills and the most deaths and cost you the round.
Finally, as there’s no officially supported replay function (you can access one, but it’s very limited) and at the end of a round it’s often a total mystery as to what caused you to lose it’s pretty difficult to improve your game. No graphs, no view of the enemy citadel, just demigod stats and the knowledge that for some reason you were suddenly against the wall and losing.
EDIT: And the most important question: is the guy who narrates the intro the guy who narrated the Total Annihilation into?
It’s more like “Well, the house of cards that is a Demigod multiplayer game all comes crashing down if so much as one person has a bad connection or leaves the game. Maybe P2P networking for this kind of thing really isn’t the best idea, after all.”
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort that’s going into Demigod, but this is a band-aid applied to a gut wound. Granted it’s a particularly big band-aid, but it’s not going to make things the way they should be. The two games that I got last night were preceded by attempting (and failing) to join three times as many different lobbies. When one person connects, your connection to other people goes kaput and you need to wait and pray that it goes green again. Some people who have bad connections prevent anyone in a lobby with them from being able to play.
Demigod’s been out for a month (thanks, Gamestop) now and the sheer amount of work that’s gone into patching it is impressive. At what point do you recognize that the underlying system is broken, though?
EDIT: And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this sort of talk, either. Even Brad’s mentioned re-writing the connection code from the ground up.
Playing with the beta patch now and still loving the game despite its problems.
Like others, I’ve found favor to be completely borked, but last night I experienced something new. A friend and I played several online matches against AI, and in the first game, we each had enough favor points to buy the first one or two favor items, which was expected. But then we played again, and each of us suddenly had a near infinite number of favor points – enough to buy any favor item. Third and fourth games, same thing. It was alright for me because, assuming a functioning favor system, I’d have probably earned nearly that many favor points by now, but this was my friend’s first few times playing the game.
Given that I’d just explained to him how he’d have to work to unlock favor items over time, which he thought was a rather compelling feature, this glitch dulled some of the thrill for him.
Hope this is on the list to get fixed in next week’s patch(s).
-Vede
Edit: According to Brad’s latest blog, this is a known beta bug that he expects the team to solve next week: http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/351280/Demigod_Saturdays_status
Agreed. Was wondering if it was just me. I can dominate against Normal AI, making it not terribly fun, but on Hard, my fellow AI Demigods start to become a real hindrance. Having said that, I think playing on Hard is making me a better online player, as compensating for the “n00b” players on my team is forcing me to optimize my builds and react quicker. UNLESS I’m playing the rook, because no matter what I do, I’m not getting any better with him.
Anyone else notice that very few “experienced” players seem to use him online? From a concept standpoint, the rook is my favorite character and I focused on him to the exclusion of all other demigods for the first couple of weeks, but no matter what I did, no matter how many different builds I tried, I couldn’t get beyond “just okay” with him, and as the other players on my team continued to improve with their UBs and TBs, my progress seemed stunted. I died a lot and couldn’t ever level up fast enough to compete.
Now that I’ve moved on to other Demigods, I’m finding that several of them are much easier to play and that I’m doing much better in far less time. Does my experience mirror everyone else’s, or are there players out there who totally rock with the rook? (If so, please tell me how!)
-Vede
From the second game I played with Mike last night, the Rook was an absolute beast with some backup. The Rook + Sedna, or as we encountered, the Rook + QoT is utterly ridiculous. With Queen’s Bramble Shield up, there’s just no way to damage him. They locked down half of the map between the two of them and we got steamrolled.
Hmm. Perhaps that’s it then. The Rook LOOKS like an independent contributor, he FEELS like he’s supposed to be a one-man battering ram, but maybe he’s more dependent on his teammates than his looks (and description) suggest. If so, he’s definitely not always going to be a good pick unless there’s a healer or shielder on your team willing to work with you. At least this gives me hope that I’ll be able to go back to him from time to time. :-)
-Vede
