sNeaksieGarrett on 29/11/2008 at 07:20
So I've been testing out the beta with two machines at my house (playing co-op with myself, lol) and have come across a few things.
Bugs I found not listed in the readme file:
1.) The sound can sometimes not be synchronized on both computers. Like I'll whack garrett on one computer, but I won't hear him being hit.
2.) You can actually damage your player friends. I don't know whether that is intentional or not, but I thought i'd mention it anyway.
3.) On the client's side (when I was playing Ambush! (testing it real quick)) when the host (me) knocked out a guard and hid him in the shadows, it appeared to the client (also me lol) that he was actually alive and well. The guard was just standing there. The client could not interact with the guard, nor did the guard do anything but just stand there. If the host player picked up the body he would vanish in thin air, and then when dropped he would reappear, still standing up, on the client side.:weird:
4.) Widescreen patch and this mod do not work. Ddfix can be reapplied but widescreen patch is impossible. The reason is because the widescreen patch .bat file will change the thief2.exe when choosing the re-install option after trying to use the thief multiplayer patched version. I tried hex editing in thiefmp.dll in its proper place on thief2.exe, but that does not work. I ended up making two thief "installs", one for multiplayer and one for regular play where I can still use the widescreen mod. HOWEVER, I did find a workaround. I remembered that ddfix (one of the older versions, not 1.3.11) had a custom resolution patch added into it. Well, I just installed 1.3.8 for my thief 2 and now I can have custom resolution (1280 x 800), ddfix applied, and thief 2 multiplayer applied.:)
5.) This is not necessarily a bug, I think it is just my machines' fault. When I host on one computer, and the other computer joins in, the second computer actually loads faster than the first, and gets to "in-game" before the host does.... I think this is by nature because the second computer is a faster machine than the host computer. I also noticed on top of this that the second machine patched with ddfix was having text overlay issues (such as the player name being stuck on the screen) I ended up fixing this by switching to a different version of ddfix. Now, this is not to say it will happen to anyone else, maybe it's more complicated than just ddfix and this beta. Who knows.
Anyway, thanks for your hard work so far Tos.:thumb:
Henri The Hammer on 29/11/2008 at 07:32
:eek: Holy s***! I've been waiting to play this since it was first announced. Thief LAN parties here I come :thumb: Great job!
Tos on 29/11/2008 at 08:24
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
Bugs I found not listed in the readme file:
1.) The sound can sometimes not be synchronized on both computers. Like I'll whack garrett on one computer, but I won't hear him being hit.
Actually, the cause of this problem is rather bizarre. In multiplayer, each player begins the game with all of the items that are linked to the mission's starting point, as usual. Unfortunately, the object IDs of those items are exactly the same for each player, and some odd things start to happen when the "same" object (even though they're really just duplicates) is owned by multiple players.
For some reason, this causes Garrett's pain sound to not be played when the host is hit by another player's sword. It is when the host hits someone else with their sword however, oddly enough. If all of the players have swords with unique object IDs, the problem goes away.
While the sound problem by itself is pretty minor, the shared object IDs are also what's causing throwable inventory items to not work too well. I tried to fix it a bit ago by having each player create new copies of the items linked to their starting point upon spawning (and thereby give them a new ID), and while this did fix the problem, it introduced some new ones that were actually worse than just leaving it unfixed.
This problem has me stumped at the moment. It can be worked around in fan missions by not linking objects to the starting point and instead allowing players to pick them up in game, but that won't solve it in the original missions and is a pretty clumsy fix. Hopefully I'll find some way to fix it eventually.
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
2.) You can actually damage your player friends. I don't know whether that is intentional or not, but I thought i'd mention it anyway.
This is actually the default behavior of the game in multiplayer -- I didn't do anything special to enable it. I could stop it, but I didn't see any reason to (killing vort while we were testing was just too much fun, I guess). I can add an option to disable team damage in the future if people would prefer to have it off.
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
3.) On the client's side (when I was playing Ambush! (testing it real quick)) when the host (me) knocked out a guard and hid him in the shadows, it appeared to the client (also me lol) that he was actually alive and well. ...
Yeah, this is the problem with body carrying that I mentioned in the readme. Other players will see all sorts of strange stuff once you drop the body. I haven't made much of an effort to fix it yet (it's been like this since day one) since there were more serious problems to fix. I may take a look at it now however.
Body carrying has been intentionally disabled for clients, but I left it in for the host because disabling it entirely would render some missions impossible to complete (Kidnap, and possibly some FMs). I don't advise using it unless you absolutely have to, though.
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
4.) Widescreen patch and this mod do not work. ...
Hmm, that's a problem. I'd assumed that the widescreen patch just byte-patched the executable rather than replaced it.
The number of changes that need to be made to the .exe to apply the multiplayer patch are very small, so perhaps someone would be willing to create a byte-patcher for this if I don't get around to it myself.
Alternatively, I could add an option to the .ini that would patch the changes the widescreen patch makes into the game's memory at run time, but that would be up to the author of the patch.
Quote Posted by sNeaksieGarrett
5.) This is not necessarily a bug, I think it is just my machines' fault. When I host on one computer, and the other computer joins in, the second computer actually loads faster than the first, and gets to "in-game" before the host does....
Some players may load faster than others, but the game shouldn't unpause until everyone's in game and synchronized.
Not sure about the text overlay issue, I haven't had that happen. I do most of my testing with an old version of ddfix that renders through DirectX9 (and also allows me to start the game in windowed mode, which has been a
huge help). Player names do draw correctly for me when I'm testing in full screen with the latest version, though.
Haegan on 29/11/2008 at 09:11
I may not be leaving this room for some time...
KarrasEvul on 29/11/2008 at 11:32
Might sound stupid... But is the Multiplayer patch onlt for Co-op play between two connected computers, or can you play it online?
KarrasEvul on 29/11/2008 at 11:49
Well... Im up for some co-op if I can get this thing working.
Name: .... Does this matter? xD Nah.. KarrasEvul at TTLG, Fozza at most game servers.
Skype: ---
Email: Garrett_foo AT hotmail DOT com
Modem: Cable.. I think xD
Location: Sweden
bikerdude on 29/11/2008 at 13:41
BLIMEY...!!! :eek: :wot: :thumb:
Well done that man - may I suggest you add a date to the thread title to give it more oomph!..
Also who/how are we going to host a thief game..? does one person do it and then other join, or can it be done on a stand alone server that people can join..? and if the latter who is gonna offer up a server for hosting..?
biker
d'Spair on 29/11/2008 at 14:04
Now THAT's an astonishment achievement and the proper way to celebrate the 10th anniversary. Thanks for all the great work, Tos!
sNeaksieGarrett on 29/11/2008 at 16:01
Thanks for the responses Tos.;) That's weird about the object IDs....:weird:
Quote Posted by Tos
This is actually the default behavior of the game in multiplayer -- I didn't do anything special to enable it. I could stop it, but I didn't see any reason to (killing vort while we were testing was just too much fun, I guess). I can add an option to disable team damage in the future if people would prefer to have it off.
Yes, I think that would be a good feature to add, as it really does not serve much purpose in a co-op game unless your playing "every man to his/her self" and the other player is only getting in your way.:o
Quote Posted by Tos
I'd assumed that the widescreen patch just byte-patched the executable rather than replaced it.
Yes, I believe so. When you are installing the patch, a black window appears and shows "thief2.exe (266445 bytes)" or something like that and says whether the file has been patched or not. At first I thought it replaced the exe as it says something about restoring the backup when doing a reinstall. :confused: Anyway, I'm almost certain it is impossible to make this patch work with widescreen, but as I said, one can use an older ddfix that still had the unsupported resolution fix. (I used 1.3.8)
I should mention so I don't look like a complete idiot, have you successfully been able to use widescreen with it, Tos?