Ceylin

And by the way. League of Legends? Now *that* is a Dota clone. They didn't even go with their own art style.

I think what Demigod is missing is what you intend to add -- real online competition. Right now its just a multiplayer game, but the reason I was excited about it was a few key points. 1) A rating system tied to matchmaking. I want to be able to play good players who don't rage quit because quitting will adversely affect their ratiing. This is what Demigod can offer that games like DOTA cannot. A true matchmaking system. 2) Clans. Being able to do

[quote who="Jinx" reply="18" id="2248467"]I thought this thread was going to be about pathfinding...[/quote] Me too. We're nerds.

[quote who="Sinzer" reply="16" id="2242007"] So as soon as you buy priests, you are increasing each wave by over 40% in XP and almost tripling the gold worth. This is way out of line with any other increase, simply too much. Pretty much every Cit upgrade is beneficial, this is the only upgrade that is detrimental. It creates a harsh and unfair game rule, where you have to save from buying a useful upgrade, because it will lose you the game. The XP should be lowered

Does the connection system still do an iterative loop trying ports when the initial NAT facilitation fails? There seems to be a big timesink between that and setting up the proxy.

-1 Karma for leaving the game early +1 Karma for winning a game +3 Karma for losing a game. Really, what you need to do is reward players for sticking it out. Can't just award completed games, because most people will stay in for a game they're winning, thats not really all that impressive. Most people you'd want to play with will stick it through no matter what. Also though, the biggest way to fix this is to have a rating system.&nbs

I've had this happen more frequently before I switched my router. But basically, I can play a game fine, and suddenly my connection goes terrible, and I start getting some extreme flakiness. It drives the game into an unplayable stutter, so I usually end up quitting. I had BitMeter 2.0 running in the background this time, and I captured a picture of my network traffic. <img src="http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~riesbr/bitmeter.bmp" alt="BitMeterPic" width="442" h

I was also getting the strangeness of not being able to connect to the 'last' person. I would get blazingly quick connects to 7 people, and #8 would just hang there. Hopefully proxies grab that #8

Another thing that I worry about, which may or may not be an issue, is that they have debug logging activated in the lobby. I have a 10k RPM harddrive thats obnoxioulsy loud and it goes berserk during the lobby connection phase. Once everyone is done, it calms down. But hopefully thats not impacting any performance. But anyway, interesting read. I was also noticing I was having a problem connecting to the 'last' person in the lobby everytime. Didn't

My guess is they'll eventually have it to the point where it can quickly determine the best connect to use. Though really the only part that I see as slow is the NAT negotiation. First the NAT Negotiator tries the 'quick way' of exchanging information to get the connect between the two computers behind NAT. If that fails it does a whole iteration of attempts on a range of ports to see if thats where the computers are possibly listening. When that fails it goes to

Yah usually these visual errors stem from the graphics card memory going bad. You start drawing a ton of geometry in a sequential order, where order matters entirely, and some points go missing with memory corruption, you get this. A lot of time this problem can happen by the card getting overheated and damaging itself as well.

Do us all a favor. Download a bandwidth monitoring program.. something like BitMeter http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2. Then calculate some average bandwidth sizes for 5v5, 4v4.. etc games. Then post that information! It would be great to know :)

[quote who="Murazor4096" reply="6" id="2207511"]I am also experiencing problems still. Somebody started a thread yesterday about Demigod crashing his router. This still happens for me (E-tech) with the latest update. Sometime during connecting to the lobby or while in the lobby, my router will just crash and take Demigod with it. This didn't happen before yesterday's update. Now, a router shoulnd't just crash, whatever the program is doing, but I suspect Stardock is doing something rather dod

I'd like to see variable match sizes. So if just a couple of your clan members are on, you can do a 3v3. If you have enough, 5v5.. Also instead of scheduling a match I'd like to see something similar to WoW's Arena. Where you just log in, form up an arranged team with your clan members and hit 'ready for match' and then get matched up with someone near your skill level to have a match against. Each clan can then have a ladder rating.

Is comcast known to do this? Does anyone know? Because that would be a large bummer if I could never get in a big game to do packet shaping.

This has been happening to me as well. I *can* get some 3v3s to run fine, but then a few games will spike up. I just now exited a game that ran ok for 20 mins, then 3k pinged me. I exited so the other players could still finish the game. I ran the broadband speed test immediately after, and got very poor performance (4megabit/down). About 5-10 minutes later, checking it agian, it was averaging 12-14 megabits down (2.9 up) which is expected for comcast.</p

[quote who="scyldSCHEFING" reply="3" id="2174382"]Well, a sausage factory is a valid analogy for the development of a game that is a sausage fest. Thanks for the update.[/quote] I was thinking the same thing. Computer science nerds in a building could be called a sausage factory. I still wonder if its worth offloading the NAT faciltator to some of the hosts of the game. Though maybe thats too much bandwidth for a user to sustain, but it would certa

Are these those proxy servers that RakNet mentions for the '5%' of users who can't connect?

That does strike me as odd. 1000% of the games owned are pirated. That IS an interesting statistic! But seriously.. 50% includes DRM and other cracks. A game that has *zero* will be downloaded more, plus the demographic playing this game might have more pirates :)

Well I know they've since changed servers for the legal users. So the pirates are making calls to an old one thats getting hammered, while we talk with a better one :)

So it was just the few checks before the multiplayer even engages that was causing the slow downs? Does this mean pirated copies don't get into the standard multiplayer? (they do things like hamachi?)

First off I want to say that I own most of Stardocks games, and I love them as a company. They respond with actual specific facts when they post problems, and have very good customer support. I also enjoy their games, and their outlook on the gaming industry. In particular, I think their Gamer's Bill of Rights, is a very good thing. One of the main points it makes is that some of the draconian DRM that games are employing can severely punish people for legally buying

[quote who="Werwie_011" reply="8" id="2143423"]Did you try rerouting the subnet through friendster? [/quote] Hmm, I should try sending Mr. Hankie an email and see if he knows how to do that.

Here is some more information on how NAT punchthrough works with that initial connect. I would assume that some amount of time is givein in that initial connect. But I don't know. I do agree with you that it seems like the connection between players takes a pretty large amount of time, or simply doesn't connect. I do reliably connect to one of my friends all the time though - which I find interesting (he's in a different state too) simple description <a

Heres some information on the NAT negotiation that they use -- RakNet http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/manual/natpunchthrough.html I'd be curious to know how often these connects are failing the original connection of exchanging IP/Port addresses between two clients, and then moving onto phase 2 where they are just brute force guessing which ports to use to communicate. It seems to me th