Brad's first impressions of BETA 3

Glad to see you have you have acknowledge that "Connectivity MUST BE BULLET PROOF. If you can't reliably get into games, Demigod will fail."

The game itself is F*#&'ing super-awesome. But the connectivity issue is really spoiling it right now.

Yes I agree that the game itself is amazing.

I'm still quite puzzled by why they went with P2P connections instead of through a server. Most of the people that I'm connected with have a ping of 150+ and it makes me lag horribly bad in game. 

For the few games I've actually managed to get into, I haven't really noticed the lag. It's always nice to have a low ping, but for a game like this ping isn't as important as it is in a FPS game.

If it was client/server, the lag would be 300.  Client/server doubles ping. That's why it's peer.

This beta is my first time playing this game and I never thought that this game could be better than DotA, but I was wrong...

Ever since I heard that were developing a game based on DotA, I was like "No can develop a game better than DotA", well the game is really fantastic, but I have to agree that the connection prblems needs to be solved.

In spite of the connection problem, for a beta version the game is already pretty good!

Gratz for this fantastic game! Really love it!

I couldnt get a game going with anyone. Lots of crashes.

But I did have a lot of fun playing with the AI.

My biggest problem right now, aside from the connection issues, is that playing against the AI (I tried both normal and hard), the cpu players were just not at all respectful of monitoring their life. Rarely did they retreat. They'd run in and fight me in front of my towers and creeps all by themselves until they died. And I think they also maxed out respawn time at their citidel, which only meant they fed me more often.

Pretty noobish, even for the Normal level.

But I suppose that if multiplayer gets fixed I won't need to worry about it

well karma is broken, otherwise you'd get some for a clearheaded analysis of the game's current state.

Peace

I know this is going to sound crazy but the connectivity problems are pretty fun to debug.  I am actually quite anxious to get in on Monday and figure it out.

See, in Beta 2, the architecture was only being put in.  In beta 3, the architecture is plumbed in, now we just have to debug it. 

I've seen some people talk about how there's only 2 months until release. Pish.  That's an eternity for these kinds of things.

I agree.    I like debuging code (not just connectivity issues).   

So is a large part of stardock pushing to get this release out soon?   or just a few select people like you, frogboy?

Since brad is the ceo, when he is pushing and deems it necessary everyone also has to push.  Guess that must be the nice part of being the boss.

Tell that to the developers of Company of Heroes.

There's a ton of people at Stardock and GPG testing this stuff.

Up until Beta 3, we had our hands tied because it had to first be implemented really. 

Now we can get down to it.

Anyone who has connectivity issues should be hanging out on #demigod. We'll be looking for people to test with.

CoH relied on GameSpy didn't it?

In this, we control essentially all the code.

Thank God Demigod isn't using GameSpy.  The thought is just painful  .  We've had lots of rough times with the connectivity but I've done surprisingly well in beta 3 so far.

For players who want to know where we think we are on connectivity here's a rating scale:

1 = absolutely awful.

10 = perfect

By release the game needs to be at an 8.

So where do we see ourselves?

Beta 2: 1

Beta 2D: 2

Beta 3: 4

I thought Relic had their own servers and their own "nat trasnservlskdjthing." At least for CoH. I believe DoW I used gamespy.

Fixed. your welcome.

Well then it sucks to be you, slurple23.  If beta 3 is a 1 for you then you better be ready to spend some quality time on #demigod if you want it to meet your needs.

Since we can get 5 on 5 games going in a mixed network environment with people from around the country, you may want to seriously look at your network configuration and work with us.

Unfortunately the player base for Beta testing Demigod spans out much further then your own country. I wouldn't just blame other people's network configurations.

Nevertheless, there is no magic bullet here for users who can't connect to ANY games in Beta 3. Those people will need to work with us or hope someone like them works with us.

For most users, based on the logs and what we've been seeing can get games going but are often frustrated/thwarted by the poison pill users. 

In the final version, the poison pill users won't be an issue and that'll cause it to work fine on 95% of connections.

But those 5% will need to work with us to find out what we can do to make sure we can work with their systems (or provide instructions for users to help themselves).

I have participated in a few test sessions previously with Cari_elf i believe while on the IRC server, i hoped that any information from those tests helped in all the problems i have been having trying to connect to people. Those tests at that time seemed to have a 100% connection rate regardless that i was so distant (it seemed to just be a simple peer 2 peer command line program) but i guess being able to successfully connect all those times in the test would have translated to some benefit towards Demigod's connection methods.

I read "poison pill" very often... what exactly is meant with it?

Term for a guy who tries to join and fails and destroys the entire hosting... Basically it's a cheap term for we failed at making the networking system work well enough to support everyone. I know for that I have a friend who has no problems with ANY other game but this game just refuses to work at all in multiplayer for him, he can't host, he can't join, his games don't even show up in the server list. It's clearly a very bad system and I really dislike it, what has happened to the old fix your own damned router up and let the console kiddies stay on their crap systems.

Well, i just so happen to be perm-banned from #demigod.

Mr. Zoomba said I will be permitted re-entrance when DG is released. So I guess if you want slurple's help fixing these connectivity issues on IRC YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO WAIT.

on "going" i hope you mean getting a connection.

the performance is awful with more than 4 players per team as it lags all the time