Is anyone hosting 5th Gear Breakaway (simulator) games online?

[onecoolc]

Is anyone hosting games for the 5th Gear Breakaway game simulation online? My team just got it up and running today, and have six computers set up playing the game together (five players, one to host). We were wondering if anyone is hosting games online (and if no one is, how can we look into it?)

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum, or has already been asked. If it has, please post a link?

[gblake]

Originally Posted by onecoolc

Is anyone hosting games for the 5th Gear Breakaway game simulation online? My team just got it up and running today, and have six computers set up playing the game together (five players, one to host). We were wondering if anyone is hosting games online (and if no one is, how can we look into it?)

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum, or has already been asked. If it has, please post a link?

The sort answer is "No"; but....

By sharing IP addresses with other players, and by ensuring that all firewalls between you and them are open (I'll post the ports we use in 5th Gear soon) you can take a shot at playing over a Wide Area Network (i.e. the Internet).

However, we have not yet attempted to tune the interactions between the clients and servers to make WAN play (with non-trivial message travel times) work well. I have a hunch that if you can keep the server-to/from-client delays under 50 msecs, thing will work OK; but don't hate me if I'm mistaken.

So, my big non-answer is to say "Recruit some other adventurous souls. Give it a try. See what happens; and then let us all know."

Blake
PS: This is one of our top topics for summer of 2010 improvements.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by onecoolc

...
My team just got it up and running today, and have six computers set up playing the game together (five players, one to host).
...

If you are willing to risk having one client be a bit more sluggish than the other five, you can run a client on the same computer as the server. That will let you have full 6-player matches.

Turn off all of the graphics bells and whistles on the computer doing double duty; put the server window mostly off screen or behind the Client window, and perhaps lower its screen resolution too. That should help it not get bogged down.

Blake
PS: Don't forget to use the replays to relive your favorite victories and taunt losing alliances (in a Graciously Professional manner, of course )(or to perhaps train your real drivers).

[gblake]

Originally Posted by onecoolc

...
We were wondering if anyone is hosting games online (and if no one is, how can we look into it?)
...

If by "looking into it" you are volunteering to be the host(s), that sounds like something you can volunteer to do right here or in the primary 2010 5th Gear thread 2010 5th Gear on CD.

However, because we haven't wrapped the right sort of automation around the process of signing up 6 and only 6 players (who aren't in the same room with each other or with whoever is running the server), that part of being a host would have to be performed more or less manually. It is easy to do when all 7 computers are on a couple of adjacent table tops; but not so much when everyone is in different states or countries.

I don't want to discourage you from trying it, but I suspect that with this version, you would want to do it in a few short spurts with a small group of players who are connected through IM or something similar ; not volunteer to do it 24/7 for the whole world.

Blake

Blake

[BrandonG]

I have a server at my house and am trying to get it up and running, ill let you know about my progress

[BrandonG]

Hmmm I need something better than onboard gfx, ill toss one in when I get home

[Chris is me]

I'd run a server for kicks, but I'm on a college network. No idea how well that would work without something like Hamachi. Any tips? I'd love to play someone. Hit me up on IM if you want to play around a bit.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Jeff 801

Is there a way to override that 50msec requirement

It's not a requirement - It's a WAG (Wild _____ Guess).

Last year, when I was working on something that I hope to release soon, the server software was pushing out state updates (to the clients) for the simulation objects about every 200 msec. I think it still is, but I haven't measured it for our Breakaway code yet.

With that 200 msec interval in mind, I guessed that a 50 msec delay between client and server would be tolerable and might not even be noticed by players. Server updates and client commands should never be more than one update (1/5th of a second) out of synch with a 50 msec (100 msec round trip)delay involved. And the client graphics shouldn't glitch too much when/if they occasionally have to be wrenched back into agreement with a server update that was delayed in transit (and other actions/calculations weren't invoked to more gracefully compensate for the delay).

Just remember, it's a guess. Maybe my guess is very conservative and 75 msec will work just fine, or maybe I'm overlooking something crucial and 49 msec will cause a Hindenburg-style crash and burn.

Bottom line is that I/we haven't explored this yet. When you go outside of the LAN environment in which we have done our testing so far, the best we can do is be optimistic (and I am).

Blake

[Chris is me]

Played around with LogMeIn Hamachi with jeff 801. When the server was hosted by a client of the VPN, it worked for about a minute of gameplay before the server crashed. This was probably due to the high latency (110-130ms), and reducing this would likely not lead to any crashes.

[BrandonG]

Well I really havvent had any time to work on this because getting home at 11-7am means im really tired and want to go to bed...