Paul Snively

8PM EST = 6PM PDT, does it not? I might actually be able to make that one! Yay!

I quit for a while after encountering a lot of issues with a chain of releases in campaign mode, but I think the most recent release I've downloaded resolved those issues. A lot of good stuff got added... especially infantry... but honestly, I've not learned how to use them. So pretty clearly, I'm going to be a n00b again. If y'all promise to be patient with me, I'd love to battle with you guys.

Wow. This makes a difference, on my machine, of a factor of about 4-5X, turning excruciating loads into perfectly reasonable ones. Couple this with the overall performance improvements in 1.2.1, and you can bet that I'll be spending a lot more time in DropTeam. Thanks a million, Clay!

Hey Clay, Wow. I dunno what's responsible, given that it looks like 1.2.1 updates all of the code, but I can actually play this at 1280 x 854 with distance and terrain detail cranked all the way up, steering at half, and all options on except high-def rendering, at really excellent frame-rates on my 1.67 GHz Powerbook 15" with 128 M VRAM. This now plays the way I had hoped/expected it to when it was first released. Job very, very well done. I'm now downloading the DDS textures since other Mac OS X players are raving about them. I'm also thrilled to see a nearly-full server this Sunday afternoon, and although I didn't help my side a bit when I joined, I had great fun apart from seeing lag of 125-166 ms, which may just be net conditions or may mean that with 12 people on your server, you need more CPU and/or bandwidth! In any case, DropTeam continues to evolve wonderfully, and I'm having a great time with it. Thanks for all the excellent, hard work.

Thank goodness the good players haven't told me to take a hike! No one should feel too shy to jump on a server for a game that's been out for, what, a whole month? Besides, the group that's drawn to games based on realistic physics and tactics is quite different from the group that's drawn to FPS deathmatch or even, to a lesser extent, CTF or other teamwork-oriented game types. It really is true that I've failed to kill an opponent and had that opponent say that I should have succeeded, and that I should let the developer know! It's an honor-among-professional-soldiers thing, apparently.

I tend to check in most evenings, Pacific time. And I have perhaps the least imaginative login name in the DropTeam community...

I'm having great fun at 800 x 600 with all options except HDR on and maxed out, so I think I'm going to leave it at that. The landscape is a bit TOO stark with foliage off, IMHO, and I concur with poesel71 on the value of the particle systems.

Thanks for the kind words, Clay. Sometime we'll have to talk game dev over the poison of your choice. I had tried HDR... and it rendered the game totally unplayable (read: seconds per frame vs. frames per second) on my 15" PowerBook with the 128M VRAM option. So you can safely assume that I always have HDR off. The next thing I tried was cranking up all options but the resolution, leaving it at 800 x 600. The result, in terms of performance, was subjectively indistinguishable from having the options at half, except, of course, the visual results were vastly better (in particular, there was much less annoying "popping" of the terrain as the CLOD stuff did its thing). I also noticed that, when I played with everything maxed out at 1280 x 854, the foliage beneath my vehicle wouldn't re-render as I drove: it was as if my vehicle were killing all the plant life I ran over. At 800 x 600, though, the foliage correctly redraws, once again leading me to believe that at my top resolution I was blowing the texture cache big-time, and that the freezes I saw were at points when a new shader or particle system was instantiated, with the obvious impact from getting the necessary data over the bus to the VRAM. Still a bit surprising on a 128M VRAM system, but you can't win 'em all, and the game is totally playable at 800 x 600. Heck, I even took out a hovercraft with a 120mm HEAT round manually aimed today. Of course, he got me back scant minutes later...

OK, well, I guess technically, two is "multiple times." Next time is your turn!

Update: dropping all quality settings to half and resolution to 800 x 600 solves 99% of what I was seeing... which to me suggests rather strongly one of two things: 1) DropTeam is CPU-bound and my 1.67GHz G4 needs to crunch less data, which is helped both by the quality and resolution drop. 2) DropTeam is texture-cache bound, and so was primarily helped by the resolution drop. I would love to hear about other people's experiences with fiddling with their settings, but regardless, I have to say I'm surprised: I'm accustomed to playing, e.g. UT2004 at 1280 x 854 with all the settings at full-on gorgeous. OTOH, I know you guys are doing some serious simulation number-crunching, and UT2004 isn't doing anything with pixel/vertex shaders, soooooo... not a fair comparison. Other settings comments, anyone?

I've obviously given the wrong impression: I was using a successful kill as a sometime-example of when these lengthy pauses occur. But from your description, Clay, what I'm seeing are what you're calling "client pauses" as opposed to "network pauses," because the whole "world" really does grind to a halt, vs. seeing "leaping tanks." Having said that, if network latency is resulting in "leaping tanks," there are still opportunities to improve your netcode by doing more asynchronously, keeping the local objects interacting, and using various predictive and dead-reckoning algorithms to reconcile the local view of the world with the global view of the world. But now I'm badly off-topic verging on being offensive to a guy who's written a great game. Let me try dropping some of my settings (although I'm on a 1.67 GHz PowerBook with the BTO 128M VRAM option) and see if that helps things.

My one real critique of the game's underlying technology is (making an educated guess here) its network code. In my experience, hard stops sometimes lasting seconds, but typically around 1 second, occur when "something significant" happens, e.g. someone gets a kill. My theory, which could be all wet, is that these "significant events" are being communicated in such a way that no game progress is made until all players have been notified of the kill and acknowledged it, which is deadly for throughput. I see that DropTeam is using SDL.net, but I wonder what aspects of it it's using, and how. I'd like to suggest that the dev team investigate Spread as a possible alternative networking framework with many features that make it attractive for game development. Of course, I'm also happy to discuss the issues further, as a former game developer who maintains an intense interest in distributed computing.

DropTeam obviously has a very different pace than games with a much poorer (if the goal is realism, which is admittedly not for everyone) physics model. But when I drive a Thor, I love feeling like I'm driving a heavy piece of machinery, and when I'm zipping around in a Paladin, I love feeling like I can scoot out of harm's way. Similarly, I love trying out the various weapons and ammo types in various environmental circumstances, and dealing with the effects of, e.g. losing a tire vs. losing my gunner vs. just plain being dead. And I haven't even talked yet about the deployable units, dropping, extracting, planning with teamies... To reiterate one of Jung's points, the community is very much aware, right now, that a bunch of us (myself included) are newbies, and are very patient as we roll around doing dumb stuff. I'm learning a lot (mostly with Jung's patient help!) and having a great time doing it. Come join our reindeer games!

In some future revision, could you guys please perhaps put the DropTeamServerExtras.dat, DropTeamSettings.dat, and DropTeamTips.dat files somewhere other than $HOME, e.g. in ~/Library/Application Support/DropTeam? Yeah, I know it's a Mac OS X-specificism in what's portable code.

OK, I finished "Forsaken," and learned a lot, mostly about how helpful taking out enemy structures that can shoot down your own projectiles is, and how useful the CNTL-M indirect targeting thing with the mortars is. There's something deeply satisfying about seeing the names of four or five dead enemies roll across the screen in rapid succession thanks to artillery... I also found out that those mortars really crater the landscape, and just for fun I pushed some moondust around with the "special command" of my engineering unit. Mmmmmm... deformable terrain! I can't wait to put that to good use later... Anyway, to reiterate, this game is genius. Having been in the game dev biz myself, I so greatly appreciate good onion design: superficially simple and easy to get into, but the layers just keep getting deeper and deeper. Brilliantly done, folks.