Online multiplayer is now working.

[loki1950]

Welcome CLoneWolf and a thank you for the review of MP i am sure ace123 will be happy to have it

Enjoy the Choice

[ace123]

Thanks for the review.

Actually, as to why you're having problems with the bases, it's because they aren't supposed to be Rlaan. Yet for some reason the server tells the players that the bases are rlaan. That's one of the first bugs I'm going to try and track down. It might be related to the faction id numbers being different in Subversion.

Here's the output from the server:

NPC 272 klkk Serenity (MiningBase), 'Base' 2

Apparently the server knows it's owned by klkk. But indeed it always shows up rlaan when I login. That's just weird.

The mission problem might not be worth tracking down in full--I think the mission system is due for a redesign anyway.
nothing.mission is a remnant of the outdated mission system (back before things were auto-generated)--I see that in single player, too.

I think the main source of the problem is the ordering of the missions--it might be that the server thinks something is mission #1 when it is mission #2 on the clients.

The shields in spec I have seen myself--The client does tell the server that you are flying in SPEC, however I think the code that drains the shields may only exist on client-side, so at each periodic update it thinks it is full.

The movement of bases shouldn't have happened... There are some fixes for orbits in single player, but since orbits of Units are handled in the server, the error may add up over time, causing jerks on each update.

One solution for now is to turn off orbits of units in multiplayer (planets should still be fine).

For crashes, have you seen any in Single Player?
It would help a lot if you ran vegastrike in gdb.
Make sure you are not in Fullscreen--it will hang your while X server (run "vssetup" to change away from fullscreen)

$ gdb vegastrike
GDB version 4.2 ...
...
(gdb) run
Vega Strike version 0.5
... play normally until it crashes ...
program received signal SIGSEGV, Segfault
Some function name
(gdb) backtrace full
... You get a lot of output that you should post ...

Hopefully that will help narrow down the crashes. unfortunately it might be caused by memory problems. Just wondering, did any crashes happen after getting disconnected and reconnecting?

I think this post should be moved to the MMORPG forum... what do you think?

[lano]

First of all : It's nice to see you people taking the things seriously.

For the mission problem : I had an issue like this one in single player mode.

I take a scan mission (patrol), but when arrived to a needed jump point (can't remember wich one), I couldn't scan it. I really try, passing and reppassing througt the jump.

But I remember what I did next. Seeing that I will not be able to scan this jump point, I took another mission. And then, in another space position (and system), approching another jump point, suddenly the point was scanned...

I didn't understand, but I imagine that the scan point mention wasn't well defined on mission order.

is there a way to retrace the mission?

Hoping that will be helpful.

[Deus Siddis]

Also I haven't had all too much in the way of interest expressed towards multiplayer--you're one of the first people to respond to this topic since 0.5 was released.

I don't at all think people are disinterested in VS' multiplayer. You just don't see people's interest yet for two reasons:

1) No Lobby. This makes a massive difference in ease of use, so without it alot of people won't bother to set up matches at specific IPs at specific times.

2) Poor Balance. This of course has nothing to do with your work with online play, but it keeps people from getting hooked on multi, since there the weapon imbalances become inescapable in human versus human matches. Especially glaring is that missiles are supremely powerful and unavoidable which leads exclusively to M.A.D. conflicts.

So I wouldn't fret, once you have remedied the first problem people will start playing online and leaving commentary, you just have to make it to this point.

The second issue is both someone else's responsibility and an issue that must be dealt with for the game in general. Actually one of the great side benefits of multi that I have been REALLY looking forward to for a while is that it is the best way to work out the weapon and ship balancing of the game.

[ace123]

Balance of stats is definitely a problem--and a hard one to fix at that.

it might be possible to make a simple lobby system based off IRC, and have it connect to irc.freenode.net#vegaserver (probably don't want it the same place as technical discussion).

The accountserver system might be a possibility for chatting, but I don't know if sourceforge would like all the HTTP requests hammering their web servers :-p

One issue is that there is a very strong possibility for security holes in the server. I tried to design it without that in mind (especially, I made the sacrifice of not allowing the server to run arbitrary python code), but there is a lot of legacy code or data types that aren't so well tested..

[lee]

One thing that keeps players off the servers may be that they are told too much that it's in a testing stage and not supposed to work. It might help to change this to something more inviting, like "Hey, we would like you to play online so that we can fix the bugs ..."

I would prefer to play online if there were more other players. It's just more interesting when you can talk to other pilots and eventually do stuff together.

Weapon balance? Nobody would want them balanced in RL. Everyone would try to have better weapons and a better ship than others. It comes down to how much money you have. Once you give everyone the same amount of starting money, you have it automatically balanced.

Is it possible to build an IRC server into the server and/or an IRC client into the client? People running a VS server could also run one of the available IRC servers, so you wouldn't have to put one into the server. We could have configuration files for IRC servers to be used for this on the wiki to help people setting things up.


Playing online, I can't seem to jump to other systems at the moment. I respawn at a jump point when logging in. Activating the jump drive does nothing but eventually brings the server down. It says "error 115" then.

[Moses]

there's nothing in the theory of how it works preventing the use of that first 'M'. I have been able to spawn a number of AI ships before (whose positions all get sent to every client) and have it work.
I haven't tried much in the hundreds range because the server starts to send out too much data every frame.

The only limitation will be bandwidth, and that happens because the server sends positions of all the clients in a system every frame.

u could reduce this by sending only ships in view/radarrange to the clients ... worstcase will be when each client got all the others in range ...

(this concept could aso be well applied to zone/system-less concepts like a huge universe-octree for evrything ...)

[ace123]

That is the idea. It will have to be tweaked and tuned of course so that it works even on slow connections.

I'm thinking it would be nice to make the server do periodic updates (kind of like the physics priority queue)... maybe do ships just in your radar range 1/8th as often as ships you are fighting. And have a priority where ships far out in the universe get updated once every 20 seconds or so.

I think the main problem was because a ship spammed CMD_FIREREQUEST over TCP for every bullet fired... and so every ship in the system that was engaged in battle was sending a lot of messages. Also, I think the client waits a loop between processing each message, so if they come in too fast it will sit there processing messages one by one without ever dropping them.

[Jazz]

What is the error 115? I get it when trying to connect to server
[quote]Error: NETWORK ERROR in recieving socket (error number 115)!!![/quote]

[loki1950]

Welcome Jazz not sure what err 115 means hopefully ace123 will be by later and illuminate us on it's meaning.at least it's not err 0 which seems to be the most common one according to the posts here so far.

Enjoy the Choice

[Joe B]

Which version is this?

[Joe B]

Which version is this?

[Joe B]

Which version is this? I like the hud.

[loki1950]

If you are referring to the screen shot on the first page that is the older HUD without pyramid's additions

Enjoy the Choice

[Gaston]

Each time I want to connect myself it's mark error number 36

I am on mac bone 10.5

[loki1950]

welcome Gaston it is quite probable that the server is not on-lone ATM so not an issue on your end hopefully it will be up soon.


Enjoy the Choice

[Gaston]

On wich server must I go so that I can connect myself

[loki1950]

There is no server online ATM that i know of that is as it is possible to set up your own so there may be one that one of the guys is playing with and since he has not posted about it most likely not ready for prime time and i gather that actual game play is very limited to basic Death-match and a few patrol missions so you are not missing much that should improve but not for awhile as ase123 the main network coder has been busy at insuring he can pay his way at uni next semester Real life has a tenancy of commanding priority.and being a volunteer project that is something we have to live with

Enjoy the Choice

[ace123]

I finished up my internship Friday so I might be more free depending on schoolwork.

And I just moved into my apartment today and so I might be able to host a server on my desktop machine. I'll set that up tomorrow.

I was also hoping to add some more modifications to make the game interesting, like some persistent universe data, and allowing players to place bounties on other players.

[goddard]

4 some reason i cant get online no matter what, i keep getting this message saying network error in recieving sockets. error "0" some1 plz help as i have been looking forward to vs online soooooooo much!!!

[www2]

@goddard

It look like that the game server is offline.

[Caydel]

Just to throw my $0.02 in here...

I never knew this was being worked on. However, I am quite excited as I read this. I can't wait for this part of the game to be fleshed out.

If there is any reason why this hasn't stirred up much interest, it's because it isn't really mentioned anywhere in the main game documentation, or the site frontpage. If it is, it is really downplayed.

I think there is a lot of potential for this - look at how many players EVE Online attracted?

If you ever need any testing done, let me know. I would be happy to help where I can!

On another note - what type of hardware requirements would be necessary for setting up a full time server?

Seems you have a fair number of people who post that they wanted to try the MMO portion, and couldn't connect. That means 10x that number of people have have tried, experienced the server being down, and never mentioned a thing.

I am super excited about this. Would love to see it made a higher priority!

[ace123]

Sorry Caydel, it looks like your user got deleted by accident. You might have to sign up for a new one again.

I've been running a server on my desktop machine. The multiplayer is really still in alpha quality: AI ships don't work too well, missions aren't very fun (same as single player ones), and you can't have turrets.
It feels pretty lonely because usually only one person is online at a time.

My server's not running right now--I can start it again this evening

[dividenot]

Guessing the server's down.

If it helps here's the output when I try to register a handle.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/groups/v/ve/vegastrike/cgi-bin/register_submit.py", line 77, in ?
conn = db.connect(settings.dbconfig, mod)
File "/home/groups/v/ve/vegastrike/cgi-bin/db.py", line 408, in connect
return MysqlDB(config, mod)
File "/home/groups/v/ve/vegastrike/cgi-bin/db.py", line 292, in __init__
import MySQLdb
File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in ?
import _mysql
ImportError: libmysqlclient_r.so.15: failed to map segment from shared object: Cannot allocate memory

[loki1950]

That looks more like more problems with permissions with sourceforge as it can't seem to connect to the user data base here on the web site you don't have to register a handle your forum name does double duty

Enjoy the Choice