The issue isn’t US v Euro, I regularly play with US guys - Wonderpug/Hark/Rotc etc. The lag appears to occur from either poor connectivity of a player or something else (Torrents!) occuring in the background.
I don’t have a lot of time either - 2 kids etc etc. But i’m not too upset if I go to game and the session falls flat on its face - although lately that is pretty rare.
I think disconnected summed up my own thoughts better - the game is definitely going in the right direction, 2 weeks ago I wasn’t touching this game it had so many issues. Last week I played it everynight.
Tals
1.01 is now up. I’m not sure exactly what is in it as I can never find their release notes however this was intimated
* Bandwidth used reduced by 35% (more people with marginal connections able to play). This should reduce some of the “stutter” some people run into when they play with someone with a marginal Internet connection.
* Updated the way stats are submitted to make stat reporting significantly more robust.
* If a player loses connection with another player (or one player with a group of players but not all) only 1 user is disconnected instead of multiple.
* Demigod is better at detecting the difference between quitting and a disconnect (no connection dialogs when someone leaves).
* Significantly better handling of users who have shaky connections to keep them in game without adversely affecting in game performance.
* Favor Points, Achievements, Items stored on server more reliably (thanks to the updated stats system).
Libra
1943
If you right click the game within Impulse and click on the “View History” option, it will show you all of the update notes. Here’s the 1.01 notes.
Demigod v1.01
- 1.01 update
- Added underlying code to attempt to rehost when players quit
- New automated handling of in game disconnects.
- Optimized upstream bandwidth to reduce load. This should help most on 128-Kbs conections.
- Connection refresh updates on player creation
- Changed disconnect back to 30 seconds.
- Single player games are now single player. Previously they were passing in the flag to be lan games.
- Bug fix for launching a game before it was ready when removing automatch players
- Disconnect dialog is no longer modal. It now allows player to access the menus and chat while it is showing.
- Modified exe version checking code so that both players need to use the /allowmismatch cmd line param in order to have mismatched exes play together.
- Fixed chat history and announcement text overlays interference with mouse clicks.
- Updated overlay text for localized versions
- Removed the Exit to Windows option in MP games. You have to quit the game first.
- Switched order of data calls after hosting.
- Teleportation effect failure handling.
- AI Players display AI instead of ping 0
- AI
- Adjustments to caution and hazard detection and avoidance.
- Adjusted health level flee percentage.
- Demigods do not use minions when fleeing, may summon minions in combat.
- Improved teleportation
- Increased Demigod planning frequency
- Improved item usage when endangered.
- Tower tag improved.
And last but NOT least:…
- Moving targets in Ability task now properly handled (the famous ‘Sedna bug’). A special thank you to bman654 for going beyond the call of duty and isolating the portions of script that were being problematic. Cleanup of this area of script.
It’s just not quite that simple.
A lot of connection types won’t allow the kind of traffic a MP game needs to run between them. Some of those restrictions can be eased by easing network security, but again, in a lot of cases the people who can do that are under legal contract to not ever do it. It’s part of what they get paid for.
Proxies can alleviate, but not eliminate the problems. They avoid running afoul a lot of traffic restrictions, but not all possible restrictions, so even with the most fantastic system of the most perfect proxies, there may still be a need for one or more people to get off their asses and configure something. Further, proxies aren’t a good solution because they serve everything up with an extra helping of lag-sauce.
Somewhere in all that, there’s a line between reasonable and unreasonable expectations. It might, for example, sound unreasonable to expect me to figure out what’s required to play the game and forward the info to my network admin. In reality it isn’t, because there is no way a MP game - any MP game - can work on a connection like mine, if I don’t do that. At least, not unless the game does something seriously criminal.
Also, just to clarify: I wasn’t implying there’s a EU vs. US problem. There’s a EU vs. not-US lag issue when using proxies, possibly because the proxies aren’t anywhere near the EU. I typically have a ping around 250 playing against Americans via proxy (non-issue), and in the 500-1000 range when playing anyone not located in the US (barely- to un-playable).
With 1.1 my Demigod randomly freezes while pressing menu buttons.
The onboard sound-bink conflict that is the reason for terrible performance drops on my machine (and those of some other player’s) is neither solved nor acknowledged.
You can’t filter online games. The friends system is useless. Connectivity was (until 1.1 at least, which prevents me from trying the game) still bad.
Stardock is great, the support is admirable, but Demigod is simply a badly handled game (Gas Powered Games gets much less coverage so their influence and effort is much less visible, despite Demigod actually being their game).
The effort that went into fixing Demigod deserves an award.
However, forgoing such an award and simply delivering an MP game that was designed to work in an MP environment from the very start would have been preferable.
re the sound issue. They did acknowledge it - but I thought they fixed it, certainly did for me.
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/348232/#2157005
Anyway if you have issues that is the thread to post to re sound problems
Banzai
1947
I had time for two multiplayer skirmish games last night and was able to get into each of them in about a minute. Favor was recorded for both of them. In other words, the game worked! That’s good news for me - now if they’d just figure out how to make it launch without me having to unload my logitech webcam drivers.
As Tals said, if you are experiencing a specific problem, please do report it via the forums or support@stardock.com.
An issue might sound similar to a previous one, but it’s best to verify. :)
Banzai
1949
There’s a thread on the stardock forums about the game not launching due to the logitech webcam drivers. I set up a batch file to unload those drivers and launch demigod. It works fine, but was an unexpected step to have to take to get a game to launch (at least in 2009). It also gave me the chance to fondly remember loading my mouse driver into high memory back in the day ;)
Jab
1950
So far the game seems to be stable for me since the new patch (knock on wood) however my achievements are still bugged which is killing me for favor points. According to it I have at least 20+ achievements that I’ve never achieved and never got favor for.
Also I’ve been playing as erebus and have been really kicking ass with him, to the point I’ve caused 2 rage quits in a custom game.
As some of you know, the Impulse team took over the connectivity code a couple weeks ago. That’s where the proxy servers and such came from.
They are in the process of implementing intelligent proxy server choosing where it’ll pick the proxy server closest to you (right now, it just goes to the USA).
Once that gets in, we are evaluating just hosting all the games for players.
There’s an update going out tonight that makes the connectivity better between people who have proxies and people who aren’t using them.
We also got an update from GPG tonight that won’t go up today but possibly tomorrow that improves some of the commanding of demigod in game (in terms of issuing lots of commands quickly). I haven’t had a chance to play it much to see how much difference it makes. I don’t tend to play very hard core so I haven’t had any issues previously.
It works pretty great. I’ve had trouble connecting to perhaps a total of 5 people after you got the proxy service up, and I’ve been dropped from one game. That’s as good as any MP game, in my experience.
I do have a weird bug’ish sort of thing though: maybe 20% of the time, the game fails to try to connect me with anyone when I try to join a game. A re-join attempt fixes it.
They are in the process of implementing intelligent proxy server choosing where it’ll pick the proxy server closest to you (right now, it just goes to the USA).
That’s fantastic news. The biggest problem with using proxies, is it destroys your ping for anyone outside the US. The slightly smaller problem is that even when playing people in the US, they still add something like a 100+ms delay, so a number of players won’t play people using proxy.
We also got an update from GPG tonight that won’t go up today but possibly tomorrow that improves some of the commanding of demigod in game (in terms of issuing lots of commands quickly). I haven’t had a chance to play it much to see how much difference it makes. I don’t tend to play very hard core so I haven’t had any issues previously.
How about fixing it so that DGs won’t have a nice relaxing sit or otherwise space out, when the player doesn’t input as many commands per second as he or she is physically capable of? To my mind, that’s a rather bigger problem. I mean, In a less polite forum, I’d probably write “FIX THE [censored] PATHFINDING, YOU [censored] [censored]-OFFSPRING OF [censored] [censored]” or something, and I wouldn’t censor it. It really is that annoying.
Yeah, I’m in HK and so getting games is tough. Sometimes an Oz/ NZ game is OK, but saw pings of 3500 to US.
Doesn’t help that my current wi-fi is unstable as well. We’ve got TV via internet, which probably acts like a torrent. Seriously looking at another, computer only, connection (pretty cheap, 20 USD month for broadband)
Disconnected - apologies I couldn’t make play last night - just finished some very nice games with Kossack. FYI when you contacted me is around when I play. Sometimes I play an hour before and then for an a couple of hours after that. Was a long day so I was bushed :( Out of interest do you do voice chat and if so how - I can either use xfire or Vent.
Brad’s posted a minor update on Impulse for DG regarding lobby connectivity
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/354870
No need to apologise, I don’t aim to be around that late myself. Today was the exception.
I… eh… suppose I do do voice chat, but I’ll need to find out if my mike is working (and find another if it isn’t), and have someone explain to me how to go about it.
Even if you’re not planning to use Steam for your voice communication, I like using their mic setup menu to make sure I’ve got everything hooked up ok. Makes it really easy to test connectivity and volume levels.
We managed to get together and then used xfires voip - not sure if it has been improved but worked very nicely. Maybe because it was just 2 players.
Had a very enjoyable game - first game I can remember where we would be pushing forward to have them knock us back and then they would have map control for it then to change back to us. It may have been prison map which seems a better design of the 2 3v3’s. All went wrong when we had a lag spike which kicked disconnected and our other team player out. Game melt down was almost instant after that - AI still is very poor.
Tals
Anyone else happen to have a code for DG? I’d love to play it, but having been laid off I can’t afford 50 bones. I can squeeze 25 out of some part of the budget…
DDB
1959
The codes have all expired, friend. Sorry.
(Sadly: I gave my code to a friend who sat on it until it expired. Moron.)
That’s okay. When I finally rejoin the ranks of the employed, it’ll be among the first games I pick up.
