Wednesday, 31 January 2024

Space Year 2024 Is Go

 

DIY gambeson, with padded arming cap (not visible) to stop sallet wobbling on head - it's everything you need to keep warm on a cold winter's night ... or possible prepare for the GREAT HAPPENING when modernity crumbles and all is returned to the ashes ... 

Monsters Loot Swag has received it's 24th Early Access Update, available here.

Speaking of which, I ran some of the game engine's internal debugging tools - which I have previously been unfamiliar with - to see what was happening with networking. Alas these debugging options were not as helpful as I had hoped ... 

TORQUE_DEBUG_NET for NetConnection packet logging, DebugChecksum guards to detect mismatched pack/unpacks, and Detection of invalid destination ghosts. Link to PacketDataChecksum disagree code.

TORQUE_DEBUG_NET_MOVES for detailed console logging of net moves. Link to moveChecksum disagree code.

What I got was kind of annoying and much less useful than I had hoped ...

Test1:

Spawning into a loaded level, with the randomized gameplay assets unbuilt (the Swag), I got 6 packetData and 17 moveChecksum disagrees, all from loading the level to the client and then spawning the player object.

Shooting 6 times gave me 3 packetData and 3 moveChecksum calls.

Moving around in a small circle had no effect.

Test 2:

Spawning into a loaded level which had then been populated with the randomized gameplay assets (the Swag), gave 4 packetData and 38 moveChecksum calls.

Shooting 6 times have the same 3 calls for each.

Moving around in a small circle for a few seconds gave 57 calls for both packetData and moveChecksum.

Conclusion; everything that gets loaded AFTER the level has been loaded is going to throw checksum disagree calls with every update of the client's position just because it wasn't in the original level file. Now add hordes of monsters, explosions, projectiles, etc and there is a huge amount of console spam with very little debugging value for networking ... :/

The good news would be no packet dropping showed up.

Anyhow, we perserve.

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