Thursday 24 December 2009

Sync Error 2

I fail at network programming. Sync errors, buffer overflows, goodness knows what is going on. I may as well just declare this to be a single-player game.

I envy Vic Davis having the balls to release a game that handles multiplayer by just saving turns to a file and asking you to email them between players yourself. It doesn't do anything for you.
Maybe not the best idea though. Don't know how his sales are going, but I'm having a hard time finding anyone to play Solium Infernum with, so that's probably not a good sign. And there was really positive press about that game too. I guess indie multiplayer games are just a bad idea. Even Multiwinia did poorly apparently. Sucks.

Sync Error

The network code is mostly in working order now, which is great. I've been playing some multiplayer against my wife. I just win with no effort in a one-on-one game, but if we add in some AI allies it can make it fairly balanced - she gets a Hard AI on her team and I only get an Easy one.

But it sometimes gets out of sync. And I have no idea why. Sigh.
I can detect it when it happens, so I could just send the entire game state across to get it back in sync, but I want to try to fix it so it just doesn't happen at all.


Also, Mouse Maze 2. Tomf has been at it again! Now with achievements and thinner walls.

Tuesday 22 December 2009

Christmas

I managed to get a couple of other PhD students at my university interested in Mouse Maze - they've been running variations on my genetic algorithm method and Andy's gotten his score up to 34,188, which is fairly impressive. My best is only 20,158. (Tomf did fix the 200 visits bug; first he just pushed the limit up to 1000, which we then proceeded to achieve, but I think he's fixed it properly now.)

Need to get around to beating Andy sometime, I think it's mostly just a matter of CPU time spent, but more important right now is Vertex Dispenser. I've been saying for a while that I only needed to spend a few days focused on it to get things like the multiplayer working properly, and now I am trying to do just that. So far I've managed to get the netcode back into the state it was a year or so ago - so it basically works, isn't jerking about wildly and constantly throwing error messages, but will probably get out of sync occasionally still. Plus there are going to be problems with sounds that get started, turn out not to have ever happened, and never end up being stopped. Still, progress!