Online multiplayer is now working.

A forum for online playing, administration, bugs and feature requests
ace123
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Online multiplayer is now working.

Post by ace123 »

I've eliminated most of the bugs with online multiplayer.

It works in Linux (and Mac) if you compile from source. Windows has compile bugs related to recent graphics changes so I can't build a binary yet.

I'll reply when I get windows building or I make progress on some of these bugs.

==== TO JOIN ====
First, go to http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/register.py
Register with your forum login and your favorite ship. Do not use a capital ship with turrets, and do not get milspec ships as there have been recent upgrading problems with those.
Anyway, if you just want to play, get a Llama.begin as you don't need to upgrade anything if you don't want to.

Next, start up vegastrike, click Multiplayer, and then type in your username and password. Keep the URL the same. Then click Join Game.

You should then be online. hit "t" to target units or look for other players. Hit "]" to talk. Everything else should be the same.

To save... it will autosave sometimes but don't rely on it if you get killed. You want to save after upgrading for example.
Click on the "Net Play" button in the corner and then click the "Save Progress" button in the bottom middle.

==== BUGS ====
There are of course many things that don't work. (And don't try them either as something bad will happen, and you won't get serverside credit for them)
Missions of any sort will not work for this release.
Buying a new ship will not work. But of course you can just register with a different ship.
Turrets do not work.
Do not dock into small little fighter bays. The orbit will make the station crash into you.

==== THINGS YOU CAN DO ====
I'm planning on adding AI ships for release.
Trading cargo works.
Upgrading works.
Attacking/killing other people works.

==== AVAILABLE SYSTEMS ====
I'm running 5 servers right now:
Crucible/Enyo
Crucible/Agea
Crucible/War
Crucible/Cephid_17
And one other system... but the generic server only accepts one at a time, so don't rely on this.

==== Multiplayer needs hand-crafted, balanced systems ====

I would be interested if some people could design some good, balanced multiplayer systems. All I need is some ideas for what units/planets should be there. Also, which systems should connect to each other with jump points?
If anyone has ideas, reply.

One idea I'm thinking about is two opposing sets of systems (one or two on each side, and two neutral ones in the middle). You can each faction have one resource (i.e. cargo) that the other doesn't have.

You don't need to design a whole .system file but it would help if you do that. Make sure that all units are in static positions without orbits.
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Post by Draken Stark »

How about sometime making a Peer-to-Peer Lan Co-op multiplayer mode? Or... is that what this is about? From all I know there's only been a deathmatch worked on...

I've always thought this game already had some sort of MMO feel to it, just needs a "patch" to allow other players to join a game that another player already started. Here's the general idea that I had come up with:
Example: John, Jack, and David want to have some fun playing, say... Privateer Remake in general.

John gets a call from his friends and they want to have a PR lan party. So John heads to a nearby planets bar and activates a new special multiplayer*1 menu from a consule on the countertop or something. John activates some sort of network monitering menu awaiting David and Jack to join the game once they got to the house.

Once Jack and David arrive they also head to any *random* bar and go to the same multiplayer menu and finds that John's session is open to join. Once they saw that the join was successful they all cheered and awaited their first task together for the day.

Now Jack and David have already completed the PR campaign, while John has just started the game for the first time.

David and Jack are amased at how far 'behind' in the story arch John was. David was fine and just happy to be playing his favorite game with his friends for the first time, Jack... was not so happy.

Once they get together John heads to Detroit to start his first mission while Jack and David patiently waited around the system doing their own misc. missions getting a little extra cash for their own ships from their old save games.

After John was finally done at Liverpool and started heading back to Detroit, Jack desided to be an ass and blow John out of his pants. Jack thought it was funny while it just pissed off John and David.

John restarts with his old equipment from where he last saved his game, but keeping the story's progress since the session has not ended. John got a brief restock and bought some better weapons, with much thanks to David for loaning money via docking at the same planet and using a new trading*2 menu at the bars.

After some yelling, John and David had Jack admit that he had his fun and it's now time to continue the game's plot instead of wasting time.

Shortly after a long fun gaming session and completing the legendary painful Palan missions together, John and David decide together it was time to have the final laugh and together blow Jack away.

Jack gets a little on edge, but likes the sudden change of a real challange.

John and David do a few missions via the ol' mission computer while waiting for Jack to make a counter attack.

Jack gets ready with some fire power not yet available in the session with an old save game file that has Fusion cannons on all four slots of his Centurian*3.

Jack finds John and David fighting along some milicia*3 against some pirates, a perfect time to perform a sneak attack. To much of Jack's uncertain demise, John had saved up some missiles and intercepted Jack as he was closing in on David.

David quickly took out the last pirate as Jack was blown away with some of John's over use of missiles.

Jack admits that he's an asshole and sucks up to David and John to make sure that he can play with them next time they decide to have a lan party... Perhaps another good game on WCU next time.

The End *4

*1 The Multiplayer menu could be something easily put together GUI like in most Peer-to-Peer FPS, i.e. Unreal Tournament 2004 (Screenshots to come in near future to show what I mean.)

*2a Something interesting like for everyplayer docked and in the bar at the same time on the same planet, show an extra clickable pilot with their name* (Should be something specified in the MP Menu when looking for or hosting sessions.) above their head. Both players click on the corresponding placeholders/characters at the tables to open a trading menu.

*2b The menu itself should work something like Final Fantasy XI/WoW or Sid Miners' Alpha Centuri trade menus. (Screenshots to be posted in the future.)

*3 I know it's spelled wrong, it's late right now, will fix later tomarrow maybe.

*4 Lan parties rock and never end thanks to all the sequals!!!
That was just an attempt at getting a good picture of what I'd like to see in a Co-op sort of MMO Lan type of play. When I say MMO, I don't so much mean the online play for the Vega-Strike engine, but the ability to do a free-form open-ended game in multiplayer. This I think, everyone would love to see no matter how it comes up as.
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ace123
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Post by ace123 »

Right now there are two options: a LAN-based deathmatch server or an MMO server that in the future could be a campaign.

At the moment, multiplayer does not support missions yet. However that is one of the more important features for the following release. So at the moment, it's just killing, trading and upgrading.

As to what you are suggesting, that would bring up an interesting idea. Bascially that would be a server mode where it trusts clients to load a saved game.
Everything beyond that should be handled serverside as soon as we get missions working, then the server will save them back to the clients so that everyone gets a newer saved game.
So basically, that will replace the account server with individual saved games.
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Post by ace123 »

Also, I hear that a new windows EXE is out...
Windows users, feel free to join the server if you want.

Also, when you register at:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/register.py
do not download the config file.

Just start vegastrike, click multiplayer, type in your username/password and join.
Last edited by ace123 on Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Draken Stark
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Post by Draken Stark »

I wouldn't trust so much an online play, but that doesn't mean don't do it. It's very easy to hack the save games right now to have like 93288472381759872784.98 dollars. I think just haveing a Lan playability for missions would be good enough. :D
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ace123
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Post by ace123 »

I don't want to release something like this that's buggy. Sure it could be more fun, but that fun will wear off quickly when you do a lot of campaign missions and suddenly you realize that it corrupted your saved game.

The biggest reason that it's online at the moment is that for most people, it's confusing to properly set up a LAN server, at least the way it's done now.

Considering that school started yesterday for me and this would involve much work in addition to fixing the bugs that already exist, I would say that it probably won't happen yet. But I will see if I can start on this after this release and then forum people can playtest it and so on.
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Post by Draken Stark »

Cool that'd be awesome. I'll look forward to that :D
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Post by Moe479 »

plz work on the persident universe server, that doesnt exclude quests on an epic scale, nor does it exclude pvp, it can contain all!

tranferring sp-chars into an persident online-enviroment, can screew up tha balance/traiding-system cause u transfer items form a saver enviroment (sp) into more dangerous, u could sell them for a higher price ...


ace,

"Error when joining the game! NETWORK ERROR in reciving socket (error number 0)!!!

system is winxp sp2
ace123
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Post by ace123 »

I believe that means your account hasn't been initialized yet.

Really, that error should say that the account doesn't exist... rather than "Error 0". I need to change that before release.

I just realized that it would be much simpler to give your ship a default ship rather than make you return to the registration page.

I'll fix that tomorrow so you can play on the server.
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Post by Moe479 »

still same error, recreated my account ... still bugged

since its a socket thing thats reported, could it have somthing to do with some ports arent forwarded from my router? what ports do i need to open/forward?
ace123
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Post by ace123 »

Sorry... Tomorrow has become 3 days later.

But the account registration/joining process should now be smoother... it will automatically start you off with a Llama.begin from a forum account, even if you haven't gone to register.py.

Of course, one way this could be made yet easier is to allow anyone to register an account just by joining... but it is nicer to have some verification behind individual accounts.

I'm going to commit in SVN a fixed login process that gives a reasonable error message if your account has an incorrect password (rather than a connection error 0 or whatever).
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Multiplayer considerations (article)

Post by Mr. Fahrenheit »

I thought that this article might be of vague academic interest. It talks of the problems associated with MMOs and the resources necessary for truly large campaigning.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19378/?a=f

The fact that VS has an online component now is neat enough, Those wishing for a true MMO type experience though might have to temper their thinking unless a) a lot of dedicated hardware shows up or b) an amazingly cool new way of doing things is dreamt up!
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Post by ace123 »

Those games are pretty impressive.
But I don't see this being the money-making type MMO with 10000's of players.

I'm pretty sure we could get the existing engine to handle up to 50 players in a star system...
As far as handling an indefinite number of players, I don't see why we can't expand to use all the systems...

For server processing, if the client can handle it, then the server can also handle it. The server doesn't do much more than relay messages, handle collision, and load player ships.

I don't think we need huge load-balancing clusters of servers right now... I could be very wrong, of course.
ace123
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Python.

Post by ace123 »

Python support is in!

I'm trying to debug a few crashes and things... It doesn't do much yet.
But now there are the endless possibilities that come with python support.
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Post by hellcatv »

wow amazing work!!!! I thought cs61a was keeping you busy---apparently not :-)
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Post by www2 »

Good work ace.
And i hope that soon come tools for game admins/masters.
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ace123
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Post by ace123 »

Missions have been added.

So far it's just patrol missions but later on I will try to add other types as well.
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Post by hellcatv »

the patrol missions are really quite fun with others in the system---now we need bounties on computer AND human targets ;-)

maybe plunder missions too--where attacking a human causes cargo to spill out of him (if tractoring works alreadY)
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Post by bobbens »

seems pretty kick ass! must try, once it works well maybe it would be a good time to do some propaganda, I'm sure people would flock. Vegastrike has always needed a good marketing department :)

I see you have good taste, flying an Areus in your screenshot :)


EDIT:
I've noticed i can't connect to the server, gives me an error:
g/lowlevel/vsnet_sockettcp.cpp:327 NCinit_timedout : Warning: disconnected
g/lowlevel/vsnet_sockettcp.cpp:73 enter virtual VsnetTCPSocket::~VsnetTCPSocket()

I've tried running local servers and it seems like the default system has just a planet named market and nothing else, should it be that way? :)
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Post by ace123 »

Yeah, my computer is off while I am home for the weekend.

Something we are going to need in the long term is dedicated hosting... but I plan on leaving my computer on all the time after the release... I'll see how it goes.
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Post by bobbens »

ace123 wrote:Yeah, my computer is off while I am home for the weekend.

Something we are going to need in the long term is dedicated hosting... but I plan on leaving my computer on all the time after the release... I'll see how it goes.
Here, i'll offer to host while main is down with my less then reliable isp, so if it doesn't connect try again in 10 minutes and/or poke me on irc. It's a bit barren, so either tell me how to fix that or tell us guys on irc to get a playing :)

Independent Server
bobbens.ath.cx:6777
username: whatever you want
password: not needed
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Post by ace123 »

It's barren becuase the standalone server is meant to be a deathmatch server.

It's actually very easy to set you up to use the main account server:
I just set you as the primary server on vegastrike.sourceforge.net

Then, if you go into your vegaserver.config, look for a line "useaccountserver" in the "server" section near the bottom, and change it from "false" to "true".
Right now there's no authentication (security's pretty bad at the moment... If it gets popular enough for security to become a concern that I will be happy.)

So after enabling the accountserver, restart your vegaserver and you should be set. You can still connect via independent server, but that way you don't get such a barren system.
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Post by bobbens »

ace123 wrote:It's barren becuase the standalone server is meant to be a deathmatch server.

It's actually very easy to set you up to use the main account server:
I just set you as the primary server on vegastrike.sourceforge.net

Then, if you go into your vegaserver.config, look for a line "useaccountserver" in the "server" section near the bottom, and change it from "false" to "true".
Right now there's no authentication (security's pretty bad at the moment... If it gets popular enough for security to become a concern that I will be happy.)

So after enabling the accountserver, restart your vegaserver and you should be set. You can still connect via independent server, but that way you don't get such a barren system.
Ok, thanks. Got that working. A few of us were playing, at least i can also kill progeny now, but there's a few issues i've noticed:

a) advanced torpedoes destroy all ships in one-hit (even big ones)
b) sometimes it won't launch missiles at (1)

Anyways it works, and if my server cuts out, reconnect in 15 minutes, i've got a bad isp. Thanks alot.
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Post by kung »

Hey, I tried the server today. Nice to see, that mp is now starting to work in vs. Where can I report bugs or strange server behaviour?
I tried a Franklin_hunter but each weapon I bought just disappeared. So it can not be equipped with any. Hope this game will further develope :D. THX so far 8)
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Post by ace123 »

Hmm interesting. Are you using Windows?

If you are using windows there's a recent bug that's been fixed but not compiled into the EXE... To buy weapons basically click "Save" in the "Net Play" menu, then hit "Die and Reload" and you should have it...

It will be fixed when someone commits a new executable.
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