CLucene is faster, and uses less memory, from what is basically a direct port. The README includes some benchmarks:
There are 250 HTML files under $JAVA_HOME/docs/api/java/util for about 6108kb of HTML text. org.apache.lucene.demo.IndexFiles with java and gcj: on mac os x 10.3.1 (panther) powerbook g4 1ghz 1gb:
. running with java 1.4.1_01-99 : 20379 ms
. running with gcj 3.3.2 -O2 : 17842 ms
. running clucene 0.8.9's demo : 9930 ms
I recently did some more tests and came up with these rough tests: 663mb (797 files) of Guttenberg texts on a Pentium 4 running Windows XP with 1 GB of RAM. Indexing max 100,000 fields à Jlucene: 646453ms. peak mem usage ~72mb, avg ~14mb ram à Clucene: 232141. peak mem usage ~60, avg ~4mb ram
Searching indexing using 10,000 single word queries à Jlucene: ~60078ms and used ~13mb ram à Clucene: ~48359ms and used ~4.2mb ram
I hold my phone to my left ear with my left hand, despite being right-handed, and probably always have. This is no surprise as it leaves my right hand free to navigate the mouse or type on the keyboard. Not rocket science.
Ha, that's awesome. I have the mission packs but haven't played them yet. I still intend to someday. Loved the campaign for Q2, and I think it still holds up pretty well.
A secret area in Quake II with a stash of ammo, that you could only get to by rocket-jumping.. acknowledging a unintended trick that started with the original Quake. The message printed on the screen was, "This is for you, you crazy rocket-jumpers."
Play it online using GameRanger and it's nearly flawless. From the Demigod Downloads page:
If you are having issues playing Demigod online, try downloading GameRanger. GameRanger is a free download that lets you play games and demos online with friends and opponents worldwide.
First: Demigod is peer to peer? Whoa, 1992 just called, they want their design paradigm back. Peer to peer is inherently unstable, unreliable and uncontrollable. Nobody (else) uses it for an "AAA" PC title, for those reasons. It's not an inspired choice, it's an insane one, by a company that thought they could palm off responsibility (and cost) on to their players rather than doing their own hosting.
Actually, nearly every RTS game uses peer-to-peer networking, and it's a perfectly reasonable choice when done correctly. Topology was not the problem here, as is demonstrated by the fact that the game plays online just fine through GameRanger.
Second: this whinging about the "network library", and needing to fly the developer in to fix it is simply pathetic. Raknet is an absolute joy to use, is well documented and comes with loads of examples and the source code. The issue is that they assumed that a network library designed in the last decade would deal with their retarded prehistoric requirements, and they didn't bother to check that or test it until way too late in the day. I'd love to hear the story from the Raknet side...
From what's been said, RakNet was only used for their Impulse matchmaking infrastructure, not the in-game networking. RakNet claims to offer peer-to-peer support, but has very limited support for dealing with NAT routers, making it useless for real-world situations. See above regarding topology choice.
Some mistakes are understandable, but screwing the network architecture on a predominantly multiplayer game takes willful ignorance. The cost to them in bad publicity and lost sales is far, far higher than if they'd paid a competent engineer to do a decent design. It's always cheaper to do it right than to do it twice.
They freely admit their ignorance in retrospect. It was simply a case of not knowing what they didn't know.
I use it to play Masters of Orion 2. It has a built in IPX simulator, so it makes multiplayer very easy.
You can actually play Master of Orion II online (the Win95 Orion95.exe) easily now with GameRanger.
It doesn't emulate IPX over TCP/IP, but rather tricks MOO2 into using DirectPlay for TCP/IP, rather than DirectPlay for IPX, so it should play smoother.
...the horribly broken multiplayer in Demigod is an example of exactly why many people choose to pirate games rather than pay upwards of $90 (in Australia, equivalent in your local currency) for broken software.
Stardock recommended GameRanger precisely because of the major multiplayer problems with Demigod's built-in matchmaking. The game's multiplayer itself played just fine through GameRanger. It's safe to say there would have been a lot more refund requests otherwise, and it took some of the heat off Stardock while they tried to address the problems.
They even added a download button for GameRanger on their Demigod page right next to the Impulse one.
Is it now possible to play a round without one guy with bad networking destroying the whole game?
Using GameRanger to play Demigod online made this possible from the start. The problems only occurred when you used their matchmaking infrastructure, Impulse.
At face value it seems that this is wide open to abuse. All it would take is to have a large number of people connect and instantly disconnect. TF server operators better hope they never piss off 4chan.
Not really. This behaviour would be pretty obvious to detect, especially since a server would already have a history and reputation prior to the attack attempt.
Not to mention that each of these people would need a legitimate CD key. As well as making it harder to mount the attack in the first place, once detected those keys (and thus the Steam accounts) can easily be disregarded (or punished) from then on.
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 1
Off Topic: The link to your forum on the support tab of your website is borked.
Thanks, but it's not a standard type of forum. It's tightly integrated with the GameRanger client, so it requires the client to be already installed.
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 1
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
You'll still have these problems with non-Valve (or at least non-FPS) games.
Steam makes it easier for games that use simple server lists where the game-play permits joining an already running server, but you're still mostly on your own for RTS and other games where lobbies are more appropriate (eg. hosting / joining game rooms, games where it doesn't make sense for late-joining, etc).
It does nothing to help you deal with router and firewall issues that cause major problems with these games.
The connection problems you refer to are exactly why I brought the GameRanger online gaming service to the PC. For most people, it completely solves all these network problems. It currently supports over 500 games, and is a fast, lightweight client that's dead easy to use.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it makes sense for the Labs to eat their own dog food.
CLucene is faster, and uses less memory, from what is basically a direct port. The README includes some benchmarks:
There are 250 HTML files under $JAVA_HOME/docs/api/java/util for about
6108kb of HTML text.
org.apache.lucene.demo.IndexFiles with java and gcj:
on mac os x 10.3.1 (panther) powerbook g4 1ghz 1gb:
. running with java 1.4.1_01-99 : 20379 ms
. running with gcj 3.3.2 -O2 : 17842 ms
. running clucene 0.8.9's demo : 9930 ms
I recently did some more tests and came up with these rough tests:
663mb (797 files) of Guttenberg texts
on a Pentium 4 running Windows XP with 1 GB of RAM. Indexing max 100,000 fields
à Jlucene: 646453ms. peak mem usage ~72mb, avg ~14mb ram
à Clucene: 232141. peak mem usage ~60, avg ~4mb ram
Searching indexing using 10,000 single word queries
à Jlucene: ~60078ms and used ~13mb ram
à Clucene: ~48359ms and used ~4.2mb ram
Far more likely to be because of the choice of algorithms and the resources behind the project. Would be interesting to see how CLucene performs.
Using two layers is the most secure. That's why I encrypt all my important data with ROT-13 twice.
I hold my phone to my left ear with my left hand, despite being right-handed, and probably always have. This is no surprise as it leaves my right hand free to navigate the mouse or type on the keyboard. Not rocket science.
Ha, that's awesome. I have the mission packs but haven't played them yet. I still intend to someday. Loved the campaign for Q2, and I think it still holds up pretty well.
A secret area in Quake II with a stash of ammo, that you could only get to by rocket-jumping.. acknowledging a unintended trick that started with the original Quake. The message printed on the screen was, "This is for you, you crazy rocket-jumpers."
That's true, and UPnP support is a joke, with users often having more luck with it disabled.
However, UPnP is a hideously over-engineered and over-complicated standard, so it's not surprising that few routers implement it correctly.
NAT-PMP is sheer simplicity and elegance in comparison, as you would expect from Stuart Cheshire.
Play it online using GameRanger and it's nearly flawless. From the Demigod Downloads page:
If you are having issues playing Demigod online, try downloading GameRanger. GameRanger is a free download that lets you play games and demos online with friends and opponents worldwide.
Yes, ip_conntrack_max is what I have to tweak on my router to eliminate that problem. It probably applies to many BusyBox-based routers.
I have to telnet in as root, and:
echo 5120 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_max
It dies pretty quickly with the default value of 512.
First: Demigod is peer to peer? Whoa, 1992 just called, they want their design paradigm back. Peer to peer is inherently unstable, unreliable and uncontrollable. Nobody (else) uses it for an "AAA" PC title, for those reasons. It's not an inspired choice, it's an insane one, by a company that thought they could palm off responsibility (and cost) on to their players rather than doing their own hosting.
Actually, nearly every RTS game uses peer-to-peer networking, and it's a perfectly reasonable choice when done correctly. Topology was not the problem here, as is demonstrated by the fact that the game plays online just fine through GameRanger.
Second: this whinging about the "network library", and needing to fly the developer in to fix it is simply pathetic. Raknet is an absolute joy to use, is well documented and comes with loads of examples and the source code. The issue is that they assumed that a network library designed in the last decade would deal with their retarded prehistoric requirements, and they didn't bother to check that or test it until way too late in the day. I'd love to hear the story from the Raknet side...
From what's been said, RakNet was only used for their Impulse matchmaking infrastructure, not the in-game networking. RakNet claims to offer peer-to-peer support, but has very limited support for dealing with NAT routers, making it useless for real-world situations. See above regarding topology choice.
Some mistakes are understandable, but screwing the network architecture on a predominantly multiplayer game takes willful ignorance. The cost to them in bad publicity and lost sales is far, far higher than if they'd paid a competent engineer to do a decent design. It's always cheaper to do it right than to do it twice.
They freely admit their ignorance in retrospect. It was simply a case of not knowing what they didn't know.
A solar eclipse. The cosmic ballet goes on...
I use it to play Masters of Orion 2. It has a built in IPX simulator, so it makes multiplayer very easy.
You can actually play Master of Orion II online (the Win95 Orion95.exe) easily now with GameRanger.
It doesn't emulate IPX over TCP/IP, but rather tricks MOO2 into using DirectPlay for TCP/IP, rather than DirectPlay for IPX, so it should play smoother.
The concept of voicemail is sound;
Astonishing!
That's pretty harsh considering what day it is today. :)
Mininova collapses. How Mininova went from being the largest BitTorrent site to being the smallest.
Like a Suprnova collapsing, but with a smaller burst of radiation beforehand.
...the horribly broken multiplayer in Demigod is an example of exactly why many people choose to pirate games rather than pay upwards of $90 (in Australia, equivalent in your local currency) for broken software.
Stardock recommended GameRanger precisely because of the major multiplayer problems with Demigod's built-in matchmaking. The game's multiplayer itself played just fine through GameRanger. It's safe to say there would have been a lot more refund requests otherwise, and it took some of the heat off Stardock while they tried to address the problems.
They even added a download button for GameRanger on their Demigod page right next to the Impulse one.
Is it now possible to play a round without one guy with bad networking destroying the whole game?
Using GameRanger to play Demigod online made this possible from the start. The problems only occurred when you used their matchmaking infrastructure, Impulse.
At face value it seems that this is wide open to abuse. All it would take is to have a large number of people connect and instantly disconnect. TF server operators better hope they never piss off 4chan.
Not really. This behaviour would be pretty obvious to detect, especially since a server would already have a history and reputation prior to the attack attempt.
Not to mention that each of these people would need a legitimate CD key. As well as making it harder to mount the attack in the first place, once detected those keys (and thus the Steam accounts) can easily be disregarded (or punished) from then on.
Off Topic: The link to your forum on the support tab of your website is borked.
Thanks, but it's not a standard type of forum. It's tightly integrated with the GameRanger client, so it requires the client to be already installed.
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
You'll still have these problems with non-Valve (or at least non-FPS) games.
Steam makes it easier for games that use simple server lists where the game-play permits joining an already running server, but you're still mostly on your own for RTS and other games where lobbies are more appropriate (eg. hosting / joining game rooms, games where it doesn't make sense for late-joining, etc).
It does nothing to help you deal with router and firewall issues that cause major problems with these games.
The connection problems you refer to are exactly why I brought the GameRanger online gaming service to the PC. For most people, it completely solves all these network problems. It currently supports over 500 games, and is a fast, lightweight client that's dead easy to use.
Desperately trying to stay relevant. When was the last time anyone cared about them?
As for the the liquid (just) form of Guinness.. now we're talking.
Members include Microsoft and WildTangent.
I think I'm gonna be sick.
November 3: Casual Dev WildTangent Closes Internal Studio, Cuts Staff
They'll still be doing publishing apparently, but no more in-house development.
Because a single ego-tripping forum mod is far more credible? Right.
News at 11.