Re: xconq 7.5a (win32)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>2. I have yet to complete a net game - at some point, a message appears
>saying the checksum doesn't match and the game appears to become
>unresponsive soon after.

Is this a real network game or one between two instances of Xconq on the
same machine? I'm asking because almost all debugging of the network game
was done on one machine, for obvious reasons. Then only serious real
network debugging that I know of took place 2 years ago when Jim Kingdon
and I got rid of the last sync error.

The status of the network game is as follows. Prior to the addition of
Peter Garrone's path-finding code the network game was completely stable
(no desyncs at all). Unfortunately, the path-finding code reintroduced
desync at a low frequency, which is most likely what you are seeing. Eric
and I have discussed what to do about this, whether to take out the
path-finding code (a great addition) or try to fix it.

In any case, bug reports from network games are most welcome. I have asked
for such reports before on this list, but didn't get much feedback. What
would be very useful if you experience a desync is an auto-saved game from
the preceding turn. Also useful would be debugging output files, if you run
your game with debugging on. Xconq will generate two debug files if you run
a network game: Xconq-Master.DebugOut and Xconq-Client.DebugOut. There are
also the two files Xconq-Master.Csums and Xconq-Client.Csums which are
created automatically if a network game desyncs.  A bug report with these
files attached would be welcome. However, don't post big attachments to
this list. Mail it directly to me (or Eric) instead.

>3. Just now, I attempted to restore a saved game from it's save file and
>a number of warnings were reported as it restored including "colour of
>units changing" etc.  I decided to ignore future warnings and the game
>restored but the map image was corrupted and refused to come good so the
>game was impossible to continue with.

This complaint about a changed colour palette when restoring saved games is
an old problem. As far as I recall it is harmless on the other platforms
but does mess up the Windows interface. I'll see if I can finally figure
out what to do about it.

> From memory, these sorts of quirks have been around since the beginning
>as I remember having problems restoring save files back on X11 too as
>well as the game occassionally locking up etc.

The new (tcltk, MacOS, SDL) network game is completely different from the
old X11 network game. It is played between multiple apps on different
machines, while the X11 network game was played using one app on one
machine with a remote display for each player. The possibility of restoring
a network game from saved files did not even exist with the new code until
I added it just before Christmas. So we are still working hard on those
fundamentals that you mention. However, fixing interface bugs is important,
too. If your app crashes all the time in the interface code it doesn't
really matter if it would desync eventually. The MacOS X app is now much
more stable than it was just one week ago.

Hans