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Losing connection to host


Gunhawk

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Originally posted by demoss:

Connection lost issues appear to be a big deal to a number of people, myself included.

It's a massive issue to everyone IMO - but it's a BETA issue - if it was in the commercial game then I'd be a cry baby too.........

Anyway - should be largely fixed now :D

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Glad to hear something has been done, it was the reason I stopped playing. With perma-death and frequent disconnects (okay, beta, I realize that) it was hard to care for pilots. They died easily enough when I had my hands on them, with disconnects their flights became doubly hazardous. I understand something has to be done about deliberate disconnect because people are tricksy bastards that way, but for the honest gamer a disconnect is punishment in itself and any disinsentive was just harsh punishment for a non-crime.

Anyway, good to hear something has been done.

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Can't the server check to see if the disconnect happened after a fatal attack card was played? I mean, the server is running all of the calculations, isn't it? (Or is the PC at home doing that?)

In any event, I like the Bot idea. It works for me. A player in deadly peril can 'zone out' of the dogfight, if he wants to, but his fighter'll still be taking rounds.

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We've talked about the idea of checking for 'deadly' situations. But, it gets complicated.

For example, if the opponent just played a card that will shoot you down, you have no cards to respond, and the connection is lost, that seems like it was probably intentional and easy to check for.

But, what if the opponent's turn starts, he's on your tail with 7 cards in his hand, you're 1 point from being shot down, you have no defense cards in hand, and the connection is lost. Was that intentional? Maybe, but hard to tell for sure.

The problem is, there is a large gray area of what might have been an intentional disconnect.

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Mmmm I was thinking of something maybe completely crazy, but for the sake of the argument, I'll go ahead regardless smile.gif .

What about storing all pilot's moves, the whole deck of cards in the actual order they appeared, even pre-computing next draws (this should be possible provided the random number generator state is saved at some point), in short gathering all necessary parameters to replay the exact same game up to the disconnect point?

Now let's say a game crashes or disconnects. One could let the players resume it at the exact same point. Problem solved, if and only if each human player agrees: the game resumes as if nothing happened, except the inconvenience of restarting it.

I have not thought in deep about the details, but It seems to me designing an automatic resume system should be possible: the server would wait (up to a reasonable delay, like a few minutes) for all disconnected players to reappear in the lobby (in case the disconnection was due to a client loosing internet access completely, otherwise the game disconnect should not even affect the lobby connection), then prompt them for restarting. Once they would be all back online and have clicked the "resume" button, the resumed game would launch automatically.

Of course, a player declining to rejoin the resumed game would have to face the consequences in terms of popularity, reputation or whatever. If it's a plain technical problem it will be obvious (the guy will vanish from the lobby or at least wont be able to play for a while), but if he can be seen happily playing other games a few minutes after, well...

Now assuming some player cannot or doesnt want to resume the game with the other humans, his element will get stuck with this game to finish (against bots) before being allowed to play on.

At this point, several copies of the same game would have to be kept (one for each group of human players playing the end of the game separately, i.e. a maximum of 4 copies for a 2v2 game with all players human, but still only one copy of a given game per player's element, which is enough to guarantee a non-proliferation of game state copies smile.gif ).

If some player resumes and plays but a few more moves before getting disconnected again, they are recorded by the same mechanism, and the resume point simply advances accordingly. Not much left to do than play the game to its very end, however bitter it may be smile.gif .

Of course, letting bots finish a game started against a skilled human may improve your chances of survival, but this choice would have to be made in broad daylight :D .

Maybe just whistful thinking, but still...

[ September 13, 2005, 06:32 PM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

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