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Quasar

EE 3.33.01 Released

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Go 'n' get it at the Eternity page.

What's next for Eternity, you're probably wondering. I've been looking at the netcode and seeing what would be necessary to resurrect it. The answer? Thousands of lines of code need to be totally rewritten, including parts of the console, demo, config, compatibility, and other significant subsystems. Is it doable? I think so. Is it going to be easy or happen overnight? Don't count on it. Post your thoughts here.

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Are there more important things you could do to make Eternity a more flexible engine for modders rather than allowing multiplayer? Sure it can be fun, but honestly ZDaemon and Skulltag are the only two really played games of DM online and even they have very few. It just seems to me that multiplayer isn't an important aspect of eternity. HUD Scripting, SMALL, Portals, Vanilla compatible demo playback... all these are important to eternity and more tools for designers would be, in my opinion more important that multiplayer which a dozen people might use.

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Is just P2P doable, or do you think client/server might be? I guess what I find really attractive about the idea of Eternity multiplayer is that it's a nice, fast, clean engine, not to mention then Eternity wads could be played cooperatively...

But if it would involve breaking compatibility with vanilla than I'd very much against.

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The main thing is that some of the things that would be needed for working netplay are needed anyways. The prime example is the ability to record console commands as events in demos. The way they need to be written into the demo stream is the same as the way they'd need to be broadcast over the network. Since CQIII needs to use certain new console commands as player input, it would be very nice if demos and the such were able to fully record all the input and not just the movement-related parts of it. Not having this ability is a terrible oversight left over from SMMU and makes the engine feel very incomplete. Another example are weapon changes. The way ticcmd_t stores and transmits them now, there's only room for at most 16 weapons. I don't like putting such small static limits on things, and it will definitely get in the way when EDF weapons are possible.

As for client-server, after looking at Skulltag, I'm not optimistic about that. It requires such a significant change to how the engine works as a whole that it's difficult to imagine it being possible along with compatibility. This would leave P2P as the only option, which is slower and much less stable on the net. In one-on-one games the difference isn't so great, but with 4 or even 8 players, everyone would probably need to be on the same LAN for it to be workable. So in short, I dunno about this.

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2-4 P2P player games in a localized area (such as a big city) work fine over broadband. C/S uses prediction to synch movements in relation to the server, which is okay as a walk-around for long distances, but really, they only good was to play is on a LAN-like environment (up to 100 ms.)

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I've done quite a lot of work on EDGE's multiplayer code over the last 6 months (not finished, unfortunately), and have come to similar conclusions:

1. Client-server is a much bigger deal than getting the existing peer-to-peer system working again. It's a completely different model, and would require major changes to the code. Backwards compatibility would probably suffer (assuming it's important).

2. Peer-to-peer is not good for internet play in general (especially as the number of players increases), more suitable to LAN games, because of the way all clients have to be perfectly synchronised. The more clients there are, the higher the chances of a lost/held-up packet causes everyone else to wait.

3. Having internet play means having a master server hosted somewhere, and managed by someone. Like ZDaemon has. I don't know what's really involved here though.

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I'm with Scuba on this one. I really don't think the amount of time and effort needed to resurrect multiplayer would be worth it.

And for C/S play, before you even consider writing a line of code, you need to find someone who can set up a server, keep it online and maintained. Unless you want to do it purely as a learning exercise, there's no point spending those many hours if no one's gonna provide that critical ingrediant.

Weigh both cases up with the number of people likely to use it, and it comes up short. I'd leave the multiplayer to ZDaemon and Skulltag if I were you James.

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Well, the main thing is that the additional amount of effort needed to add a BSD/Win socks module and actually send the stuff over a network is tiny compared to the amount of other work that needs to be done, and most of that other work has to be done anyways, like the console thing. I want to take gameplay in CQIII in directions different than just moving and firing, but without a more flexible event i/o system it cannot be done in a complete fashion. Most of the console code is already overdue for a complete rewrite as well; it has been plagued with problems all along, many of which have been patched over with kludges in various Eternity revisions. Everyone's been asking for a better comp system (something more like what prboom has) and I agree with that as a worthy goal too.

So I guess what I'll do is put off actually adding the ability to connect over a network til last. I can and must do the rest of that work first anyways. By the time it's all finished, we'll see if anybody cares whether or not it can connect or not. I know there's been some wishes amongst the hardcore purist DM community for a Prboom alternative, though... Since Eternity is capable of acting almost 100% like DOOM also (and I care a lot about making up that 'almost' part of it), it would be another good option for them.

Also, a master server isn't a necessity, it's a convenience for people who like to find anonymous games to join. Quake 2 never had one but it enjoyed a lot of netplay amongst groups of friends, and that's what's most important to me.

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Hey! I don't have an opinion on the multiplayer issue either way... I'm just dropping in to say that I'm still working with the engine, I've got the last release and I'm still looking forward to more progress with it. I don't have the internet at home anymore, so you probably won't hear much from me. But, just letting you know I'm still active and anticipating further progress, even if I'm not around to say so very often.

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I just tried the new version and the look up and down seems to be borked. Deleted the config file just to be sure. Mouselook, look up and down keys, nothing works.

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Allow mlook must be on. Always mlook must be on unless you want to bind a key to the action "mlook" and hold it down to activate mlook. Both of these options are available right next to each other on the mouse menu. They are also documented in the console variable reference, although their documentation may need to be updated to make their purpose more explicit.

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A dumb convenience suggestion: how about pausing the music when pausing the game? So that if I go to bathroom I don't leave the music running for nothing. Thanks.

Sorry for bumping in here like this, but I'm just reporting a (less likely) bug. Eternity seems to crash on some wads, more than other engines. So far it happened on Alien Vendetta MAP01 and Artica4 (in the first imp blood pool.)
It bombed with that "segmentation fault--SDL parachute deployed" I know nothing about...

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Ebon said:

A dumb convenience suggestion: how about pausing the music when pausing the game? So that if I go to bathroom I don't leave the music running for nothing. Thanks.

Sorry for bumping in here like this, but I'm just reporting a (less likely) bug. Eternity seems to crash on some wads, more than other engines. So far it happened on Alien Vendetta MAP01 and Artica4 (in the first imp blood pool.)
It bombed with that "segmentation fault--SDL parachute deployed" I know nothing about...


SDL_mixer cannot pause MIDI music properly, so it cannot be done.

I know nothing of these crashes. Unless more people report them and are more specific about the nature of the problem, I'm not going to be able to do anything about it.

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Quasar said:
SDL_mixer cannot pause MIDI music properly, so it cannot be done.

Could you not make it so that when the game is paused to sound volume goes to zero (is muted,) saving the current value and then restoring it when unpausing? It's just looping music, so muting should work just as well as an actual pause.

It's not that important but, who knows; the music could get in the way of whatever the pause was for (a conversation, etc.)

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Now that's a good idea. I need to rewrite how all the music volume setting is handled anyways, to work around problems with the SDL volume affecting the desktop, so when I get to that I'll see if I can't take care of this problem too. Thanks for that idea ;)

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