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Author Topic: Overcoming "fear of failure"...  (Read 28270 times)
Michael
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« Reply #15 on: June 09, 2015, 10:08:07 AM »

Going from running your server on localhost onto a separate machine is like your kid learning to drive a car...
You'll fear fear itself.
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pspeed
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« Reply #16 on: June 09, 2015, 11:27:04 AM »

Going from running your server on localhost onto a separate machine is like your kid learning to drive a car...
You'll fear fear itself.

Heheh... yeah, well, I've already tested it from multiple machines on my LAN.  Opening it up to the world is like sending your kid out on his/her own for the first time in a car.  Smiley
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pspeed
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« Reply #17 on: June 13, 2015, 01:07:12 AM »

Well, I think I've gotten the absolute minimum done to allow a test release to be posted for espace.  I'll probably do it Sunday afternoon to see what additional polish and stuff I can shove in before then.  Maybe at least count hits against other players or something.

There is some wonkiness with the object creation/removal timing that appears every time you fire a plasma cannon so I want to see if I can deal with that.  That's officially in my "bug" list.  If that goes well, maybe I'll get hit counts in too.
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pspeed
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« Reply #18 on: June 15, 2015, 01:30:35 AM »

I finally setup the second monitor again and cleaned up the espace code to the point I was ready to release something.

I've got the server running on the same server that Mythruna does now... and the second monitor means I can also keep the corner of my eye on it occasionally.

The issue is that for some reason the client is getting some timing issues.  I haven't had much time to track it down yet, mostly been adding more debug information.  I fixed one issue but now a different one has cropped up.  re: the first issue, it's actually a good thing because I'd seen that once or twice before even in local testing but not consistently enough to find and fix.  It was nice that it consistently happens against a "real" server.  Same with this second problem: it consistently happens.

Hopefully I can fix it soon and then post a client download.  Sorry for the delay.
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Rayblon
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« Reply #19 on: June 15, 2015, 05:25:02 AM »

Sorry for the delay.

There is no need to apologize for releasing free stuff late. Tongue

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pspeed
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« Reply #20 on: June 15, 2015, 06:50:33 AM »

Sorry for the delay.

There is no need to apologize for releasing free stuff late. Tongue



Heheh... sure... but if I'd tried it with a real server on Saturday instead of late last night then maybe we wouldn't be having this problem and logging would just be messier (what I worked on on Saturday).

On the other hand, logging is great to have now. Smiley
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« Reply #21 on: June 23, 2015, 02:09:46 AM »

These issues have been taking me longer to track down than I wanted.  First because we lost power here a few days after I had to stop working on it and the computers all went down before I could get the generator up.  So all of the logs I had open to the "exact right spot", files open, etc... were all closed and I had to start over.

Add to that: my day job was grinding me down plus "last week of school" stuff for the kids and I only this past weekend got back to it in earnest... and I've been dreading it.

Fortunately, I've been able to identify at least one major glitch causing jerkiness and fixed it.  The nice thing was I was able to see it happening when the ship was supposed to be sitting still right after the game started.  Seeing the ship jerk around there when the position was supposed to be 100% knowable made tracking the issue soooo much easier.  As with most things like this, it would have been nearly impossible to find otherwise.

Some jerkiness was caused by the camera "spring" acting funny... I knew this before and so I've turned it off.  (I'd even get some little skips and strangeness in single player.)  Some more time related tweaks were made so that the camera 100% follows the ship in single player as there were still some hiccups.

All in all, I've fixed about half a dozen bugs.  The networking is much smoother now, though still not perfect... and it's a little laggy now.  (That may be because of all the logging I currently have running and it may be because I set the lag delay high to make sure I wasn't trying to interpolate data that was too fresh... never a good sign when one resorts to just 'randomly trying crap' until something sticks so I still have a bunch to undo there.)

Every now and then I still see the ship jump to an odd location.  I will have to come up with a way to detect that in code such that I can dump some data to figure out why it happens.

Getting closer, though.

I may have to take a break and work on some unrelated Mythruna stuff because frankly I'm jonesing to work on that code again... got some stuff I want to try.
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« Reply #22 on: June 28, 2015, 12:01:56 AM »

Once again I spent several days tracking down an issue that turned out not to be networking related.

Once I'd gotten rid of the jumping ship issues I was noticing that the ship appeared to speed up and slow down even when velocity should be constant.  It was quite jarring.

Ultimately, I even put in some tracking at the object level just to show me the calculated velocity of each object and how much it varies... it varied _widely_.  No surprise then that it showed up visually.

After tracking back, it turned out to be a time source issue on the server.  Physics frames are supposed to come consistently every 16 milliseconds (60 frames per second).  As an architectural/design decision, I've set the physics engine up as a fixed step 16 ms no matter what.  (It improves physics accuracy overall to not vary and given the relatively low requirements of this game it should have been no problem.)  However, the thread that runs the game loop was varying its frames widely.  Sometimes as much as 48 or 50 ms between frames.  There was really no reason for this other than that the thread is relatively low priority and running on the same system as the Mythruna server.

I tightened up the timing loop to not vary so much and the problem went away on the client.  So good news again that another problem turns out to not be networking... it was sending along exactly the crappy information I was giving it on the server.



Yesterday was kind of a milestone because it's been exactly three years since a public Mythruna release (20120627).  Not really a happy day for me... I'd planned to go into this weekend full bore getting this networking thing finalized so I could move on.  Unfortunately, life had other plans.  As if to remind why I'm here and how foolish it is for me to make plans in advance, my wife fell on Friday and tore some ligaments in her foot.  We spent 4-5 hours doing the emergency room + prescription pickup thing with two kids in tow... good times.  This week she will go do see a bone-doctor to get a real cast and stuff.  She can already barely walk as it is so this essentially puts her in a wheelchair for the foreseeable future.  So this weekend was co-opted for other purposes: mainly putting in a wheel chair ramp for our front door.

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Moonkey
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« Reply #23 on: June 29, 2015, 12:03:15 AM »

Sad Good god. I have nothing to say besides how much I want to help. Or be there.
Family isn't family without effort, and as saddening as it is to see all of this, I hope you all stay safe and pull through... And I hope your wife recovers faster than it would take.
You and your family, stay awesome. And make sure to place the rest of us behind family Wink

And sorry I've been gone for so long. Life has other plans for everyone, and it's daunting and horrible!
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 12:05:41 AM by Moonkey » Logged

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Rayblon
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« Reply #24 on: September 12, 2015, 01:22:52 AM »

I thought about E-space and got all excited and thought I'd tell you guys. It'gonna be so cool when it's finished! Cheesy
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« Reply #25 on: September 12, 2015, 11:37:06 PM »

I thought about E-space and got all excited and thought I'd tell you guys. It'gonna be so cool when it's finished! Cheesy

Smiley So many things are going to be so cool when finished...
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Rayblon
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« Reply #26 on: September 13, 2015, 04:24:54 PM »

Smiley So many things are going to be so cool when finished...

Just gonna put it out there... I wasn't hyped for MGS V and, while impressed, wasn't terribly interested after seeing it.
... And I'm not hyped about FO4, particularly.
HL3 and L4D3 has medium hype.

But your games are... I just can't help but to be excited because I know you'll take the idea and make the best damn thing possible out of it. Not just something that works well and looks pretty, but something that's innovative in one way or another.
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pspeed
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« Reply #27 on: September 13, 2015, 06:23:02 PM »

Smiley So many things are going to be so cool when finished...

Just gonna put it out there... I wasn't hyped for MGS V and, while impressed, wasn't terribly interested after seeing it.
... And I'm not hyped about FO4, particularly.
HL3 and L4D3 has medium hype.

But your games are... I just can't help but to be excited because I know you'll take the idea and make the best damn thing possible out of it. Not just something that works well and looks pretty, but something that's innovative in one way or another.

Yeah, I'm excited for my games, too... but I am also really excited about FO4... I plan to take a few days off work maybe.  (Note: planning and doing are not the same thing but it's fun to fantasize. Smiley)

I just played some of the MGS5 one level pre-thing that was relesed some months back.  It's definitely my kind of game as I really loved MGS4... not quite the same vibe there.  Hard to say if that's because it's essentially a tech demo for the real game or not.  I'm definitely experiencing a bit of 'stealth game' fatigue though as a month ago I finished the game Styx over a many week period.  There is much that is similar about these games except now I can kill people from a distance.  MGS tends to put a lot of nice detail in.  Saw a video of a guy who accidentally snipped a power line and it actually broke and stuff.

For the record, there is a no-mans land in my day where my brain is too dampened to do any real work but I'm also not sleepy enough for a nap... right about dinner time.  It's a nice time to drop into a game for an hour or so.  Lately I've been digging a giant pit in Minecraft as a monument to a place I died.  Instead of rage quitting, I'm turning the whole cave system into a giant crater.  I should post a pic sometime.  It's the perfect level of mindless activity to round out my day and give me solid thinking time. Wink
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