Update - 4 games in a row where someone has dropped

yeah, zero chance.

I don't get the part about no chatting. There's no particular reason why the chat stream needs to be part of the main game. You could still chat through the overlay, for example, it seems like if a reconnect interface were added that they would retool the in-game chat to be functional through it.

Also I don't get why you would need to sit through a replay to get back to where you were. The game could be just told outright how much gold, experience, items, etc. everyone has and refresh the position of all units if the developers were so inclined. It'd be a lot of work I'm sure, but I really don't see why it'd have to be so outlandishly inconvenient if it were implemented.

It just seems like you're saying the development team would put a lot of effort into a major feature but still be unwilling to tinker with the nuts and bolts of the program.

 

That being said, they're correct that there is pretty much zero chance of it being implemented.To do it well you really would have needed to have the feature in mind when the networking was being built.

You mean 0.

Is it at all possible to trick demigods peer 2 peer connection into thinking that it is peer 2 peer, but actually being hosted by a  server?

I.e. If a person can connect to a proxy with a single connection, then from the proxy to the game; is there any chance to use that existing code to simply connect to a "fake" proxy, which is actually a server connection that everyone connects to? I understand this would require servers to be implemented etc

I ask, because i have an idea for a thread topic on the subject, but would be pointless really asking  if theres absolutely no chance of it occuring.

zer0!11!!

Well, it's still not comparable to a basic client/server model, because the "client" who is proxied still sends the same amount of data to the player as he would to each player individually in total.

Not quite - in a 3v3, for example, you maintain a single connection to the 'server', who passes along your information from themselves, while still forwarding the same amount of information. Because it's on a single connection, it's more stable and can potentially work better. It works similar to how Battle.net operates, basically. It works great for the 'client', but the demand on the 'server' is pretty extreme.

This is true, but everything else afterwards is speculation, and, as a software engineer with networking experience, sounds ridiculous (replay to sync?! LOL).  The probable reason it's difficult is simply that the server doesn't have the details of game connections anymore (it threw them out once the game was handed off) to try and re-establish them for you.  If it did, bringing you back into sync with the other players should be comparatively trivial, with little to no interruption to the game.

Not really ridiculous, just the most realistic outcome. At current, the game contains no code to allow starting conditions to be applied - basically, apart from the options available in the Lobby menu, you can't give Demigod and Creep locations to the game, can't set item load outs, gold levels, Tower health, etc. It's simply not in there. In order to work around this, you would quite literally have to play through it because adding in the additional code won't happen - Frogboy already confirmed this kind of re-write is out of the question.


Being as there are no servers in this game, I assume by server you mean each person's computer - which is correct. However adding a log for the connection details could quite easily be done once we have offical mod support; perhaps you could create a mod to allow this reconnection feature if it's as easy as you say? To be honest, that kind of manipulation is outside of my knowledge base.

By server, I meant the lobby server.  It's in the best position to know whether a match is still in progress or has completed, and remember who is in the match and how they were connected (directly or proxied).  If it retained this information, it could coordinate reconnecting to the other players.  Once the connections are restored, there could be a recovery stage during which all the stateful objects associated with a match are iterated over to retrieve their current state in the background (from, say, the match host).  While this is occuring, the sync messages (which presumably only reference objects that have just changed state) are also still received and processed to keep things current.  Once the iterations are complete, the player can return to the match and take over from the AI (though this could be a shock if it happens in the middle of a fight, and argues for the AI to do nothing but wait at the crystal).

Now I'm the one guilty of speculating, since this capability makes lots of assumptions about how things are implemented and could be extended to support reconnecting.

Actually, the Lobby itself is handled through Impulse rather than through Demigod itself, it hands off the connections to Demigod once all the handshakes have taken place and the game begins (Lobby uses TCP, Demigod uses UDP iirc). The network code in Demigod doesn't currently support reconnections, however Brjoha is most likely correct (again, we're outside my knowledge base now) in saying the Lobby is the best place to start - it's handled by Impulse, meaning the Impulse server which links all the players together for Demigod has a record of the connections; if it could remember those connections and their details it could theoretically re-connect a player to a game in progress by, for discussions sake, plugging them back in instead of actually needing massive changes to Demigod's network code. This means the Code Ninjas at Stardock are the best place to pester rather than GPG. Having said that, again I'm fairly sure Demigod itself doesn't support the basic feature we need which is the ability to set up a game state if it wasn't hard coded to begin with.

ZehDon, the Lobby is still handled by Demigod itself. Impulse only manages the connection facilitation and hands over the connection to Demigod every time a player successfully connects to another player. There is no difference between ingame and lobby, connection wise.