Myth II 1.6 PB Feedback Thread

[The Elfoid]

Game is perfect. My interface is screwy though. I cannot install custom interfaces, I did as I was told (forget what) and it won't work. Any ideas?

[AblitERateOR]

ok back to my intel mac now

nothing bad to report at all except for same problem with preview for saved games from older versions that was there in the ppc version too. Get 120-150fps, or with fps cap on the cpu usage is down around 20% for 30fps

[Tireces]

I am not sure if it is becouse 1.6.0 (PC) but:
Yesterda I have hosted 5 FFA games in ranked room and today pm.net statistic say that I have: play 2 / host 1.
Shouldnt it play 0 / host 5 ?
Could it be problem with 1.6.0.?

I also remember that there was a problem with autohosting games in ranked on 1.5.2 (PC). Games didnt count and ppl do not get points.

EDIT : not 100% sure again but i think in few games all had 1.6.0 beta and in other few were still on 1.5.1.

[mcchazo]

i guess fixing the invisible chat/f7 text after minimizing and maximizing isn't possible or never really looked into? or is this the main reason for windowed mode? does windowed mode minimize on opening/changing to other apps? i only played on my friends laptop for a few mins to check out the new maz but he didnt have it in windowed mode

sorry if this was addressed elsewhere

[jasiu]

Two bugs I found:

1. The windowed build is still very laggy (I posted about this when the non-public beta was released) - almost unplayeable, . I have a 256/128 ADSL connection. The classic build seems to run fine though (checked with both versions, the same day, the same hour, playing with the same poeple and having no other internet using apps in the backgroung).

2 The classic build seems to have some rendering problems - when I set the renderer to D3D, everything is ok until i quit or end the mission (no matter single or mutli) and the game shoud return to the menu/lobby/whatever, but instead it crashes to windows saying that the program performed an illegal operation. This does not happen on OpenGL rendering, there everything is just fine. None of that happens with the windowed build, but as I mentioned above it's VERY LAGGY. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 card, an Athlon 2400+ prcessor, and 512 RAM on a WinXP SP2 system.

Apart form the above, great work guys.

[jasiu]

I got to the bottom of this lag issue. it seems that there is synchrounous FPS between the dispay and the net. So basicly the data you send and receive is all the frame count (it's probably that way because of myth's advanced phisics) - the more frames you got the more packets you need to send and receive. Normal Myth runs at about 30 FPS which is the standard of net FPS for most games (at least FPP shooters). If you set the FPS limit to more, you may experienca lag, and if you don't set the fps limit,you get usually about 300 FPS (at least I get) which is completely unpleayable. The solution is to set the max FPS to 33, or to make the 1.60 have asynchrounous client and net FPS like it is solved for example in r1q2 cilent for Quake 2.

[AblitERateOR]

strange.. i actually thought myth multiplayer worked by sending just the commands issued by players, keeping a random seed synched and doing all the physics on everyones computers. At least this is how i was aware it worked, and that this is why myth films are so small

If you are experiencing lag by turning up the fps, is it not more likely that its just that your computer cant handle it? As has been pointed out in the past, even when myth said it was running at 100 fps it was only running and 30 internally, now it actually runs at that speed, at that is definately gonna put more of a strain on the processer if u dont cap fps

[War]

Hi

Just wanted to thank all those involved in the 1.6 Beta release.

I've not played Myth for about 4 years but have been talking to a few old friends and thought I'd try it out on a new machine 'for old times sake'.

Well, snap my bollox in a bear trap! it works a treat, thanks to you kind people.

iMac 20"
MAC OSX 10.4.8
2 GHz Intel Core Duo
1.5 GB DDR2 SDRAM

I did stumble a bit on the install, as I kept clicking it, and it kept asking for the 1.5.1 update. I then read elsewhere on the list, that you just drag the file over to your Myth folder and that's it!

I've nothing to report as far as bug's are concerned and have started going through the single player (one) to get my keys set up properly and (two) to remember those long long nights when we stayed up till 4.00am in the morning to play Myth World Cup 1999 - 2000 - 2001 and 2002 (kin mad or what!)

I've also looked at a few old films, and they work a treat to! I still suck though, but my team were the dogs' so it all worked out in the end

Again, thank you ever so much for your endeavours, and may all your kids still love you when you ain't got any money

War

[Khadrelt]

I was having some serious issues with "join by address" games. A friend and I were trying to play some coop together. We both have build 284.

Things went fine for the first ten minutes, but then he started lagging out a lot. We tried a bunch of different stuff, and the weird thing is, when we did multiplayer netmaps it worked fine, but when we did coop levels - ANY coop level - he lagged out (usually within the first 2 minutes, but sometimes he lasted a little longer). We tried Bagrada, and he made it right up until the trow reached us before he lagged out. When doing Shiver, it locked up in the middle of the Deceiver and Shiver's little chat at the beginning. We also tried Mazz VI, and it locked up almost immediately.

But the multiplayer maps worked fine, no lockups, a little minor lag now and then but nothing serious. Except Fetchball, he locked up on that one about halfway through.

Just to see if it was a problem with our connection, we quit Myth and played a couple other games (Diablo II and Halo) and they worked fine, no problems.

I was using a Mac mini with OS X 10.4.8, and he was running Windows XP, though I'm not sure exactly what configuration his computer had.

[The Elfoid]

Alt tabbing for over a few minutes (even on Windowed mode which eliminated the problem in 1.5.1 Windowed Beta) makes chat freeze up. But not a big issue for me.

[jasiu]

About the lag thing again. If my computer couldn't handle it, it wouldn't display over a 100 FPS. Besides, when I was host everything was smooth and ok for me, but other people complained about the lag (my connection probably never got so much abuse ). I suppose that myth actually does count net physics by FPS--it seems logical, as there is just so much data needed to make things right (the developers of Myth boasted that you won't see two similar explosions in Myth and not without a reason) and it's not a technology like Havok. Anyway caping fps at 33 solves the lag issue

[AblitERateOR]

If you read this interesting article here written by someone here at project magma i think, youll see that:

Since Myth only sends the player's commands over the network to other players, and not actual updates of the locations of objects in the game, this approach to networking is very bandwidth efficient. All players receive the same commands for a given game tick (the base unit of time in Myth, equivalent to 1/30th of a second), and these are all processed individually on each client's machine. Since the code running on every player's computer is the same, the expected result is for the game to play in exactly the same way when it receives the same input commands from all the players.

It is only sending the commands, although i guess it is possible that if you up the fps you are sending a lot more commands per second, which uses more bandwidth, and might effect the other players if they are on lower fps. However i have a feeling it still only sends 30 commands a second, as this would still be a tick on the game clock. Youd have to check with one of the developers on thsi though, and i know it doesnt explain the lag problem[/url]

[vinylrake]

It is only sending the commands, although i guess it is possible that if you up the fps you are sending a lot more commands per second, which uses more bandwidth, and might effect the other players if they are on lower fps. However i have a feeling it still only sends 30 commands a second, as this would still be a tick on the game clock. Youd have to check with one of the developers on thsi though, and i know it doesnt explain the lag problem

I am not a Myth II developer, nor do I play one on the internet, but from my understanding of how it all works, there is no way that bumping up the FPS rate is going to increase network traffic and slow down your game, so any visual slowdown you are experiencing is due to some limitation/chokepoint on your computer, NOT the communication traffic between your computer and the host of a network Myth game.

Why? Because as explained above, the internal Myth game engine is only going to send / receive commands to and from the gameserver/host 30 times per second. The commands sent are of the "player x moved unit y to point Z" and "player Q's archer unit #1 shot a flaming arrow at player R's lock#4" variety, there are no visual display commands sent to or from the server. Bumping up your frame rate increases the smoothness of your visual display, but it doesn't increase the rate at which the Myth game engine sends commands to and from the server - the host/server doesn't care what you are seeing on your screen - it could be beautifully smooth rendered 1280x1170 300FPS HDTV quality graphics or it could be 480x640 pixellated Atari 2600 style graphics - every time a command is received from a player the server/host sends it to your computer which then translates that into the graphics you see on your computer, likewise every time you do some action with your units that command is sent to the server then to the other players, but screen refresh rate has nothing to do with that. If the FPS/screen refresh rate DID effect the communication rate it would mean that either
a) players with faster FPS would have an advantage over players with slower FPS's because they could send more commands to the server in the same amount of time.
or
b) players with differerent FPS rates wouldn't be able to play with each other because if different people's computers were sending/receiving commands at drastically different rates games would go out of sync all the time because your computer running at 300 FPS would have (for example) sent 10x as many commands to the server as the person whose computer is running at 30FPS and since their computer couldn't handle the rate of commands the games would just go OOS in the first second or two of the game.

The caveat of course is that if your computer can't handle the graphic rate you have it set for or your internet connection is too slow then having a high FPS rate will slow down your game, but that's a local issue - because your computer can't render the number of objects on the screen at the FPS you requested, or your internet connection isn't fast enough - Not because there is MORE communication related TO the faster FPS rate.

[AblitERateOR]

yea thats what i would have thought too. Personally, i dont see much benefit in having the game render more than 30 fps, visually you cant see any difference and all it does os eat up all your cpu usage

[Myrd]

The commands sent are of the "player x moved unit y to point Z" and "player Q's archer unit #1 shot a flaming arrow at player R's lock#4" variety, there are no visual display commands sent to or from the server.

Actually, commands are more like "player X ordered unit Y to go to location Z", "player X ordered unit Y to attack unit Z". The individual partial movements or single attacks are not sent... instead they are calculated and generated in exactly the same manner on all computers from the higher level commands.

The reason it could lag other players when you're hosting and getting max fps, is most likely due to your system spending too much time in rendering code, and thus the network code gets allocated a smaller portion of the CPU, and has less time to process incoming packets or send outgoing ones.