Kent747

its one more variable for just about every calculation ... but its still possible... Many first person shooters run with very little lag, and sending lots of data.. The genius of netcoding design isn't in making your packets send faster.. (not much you can do w/ that when certain amounts of data HAS to be sent..)... the genius is in deciding what to send... If I'm on the opposite side of the city... its not necessary to know whats going on on the other side... moral... if you can't see it, its not happening.. Obviously the server keeps track of these things, and updates what the client knows about as necessary... Kent

we don't see many other languages because we use search engines based on our language... Use a france based search engine, i imagine you'd get different results.. Kent

i think the bubble idea is the best.. there is still the issue of having the server keeping track of all those cars... (not necessarily sending data on every one..) but at least having to know where they are... until a dedicated server is worked out, i don't think this idea will be happening..... its just way too much on the server... But... there may be another way... probably much more difficult to code... but allowing players to generate their cars.. and only synching to each other's bubbles... there would be issues to work out when player A spawns a randomly generated car into person B's bubble, etc.. Its just a basis for the concept.... I think the first focus shoudl be the dedicated server, (which it looks like they are working on...) Kent

i don' thtink you really understood my methodology.. the idea of the circle concept would be to allow large amounts of peds/cars to be handled w/ minimal lag.. w/ my idea the average person wont receive more than 20 cars/peds at a time... and the server wouldn't have to send more than that either.. all the peds and cars outside the bubble wouldn't be sent... to anybody.... it saves time on both ends... its probably the most effecient way your gonna be able to do it.. Kent

gtatari is going to host the file for me... a zip file containing the project, and a text file for the source.... it was kinda a quickie... but i think the idea is there.. The concept that i use should be tweakable (if thats a word) to the point that you can change a lot of stuff but it should still work... possibly even copy it to a more compact string and still allow you to use Zlib compression on it... if you have any questions feel free to PM me.. Kent

Definte lag.. i think you may have a different definition... Bad netcode may make the game "feel" laggy.. but thats not the case Lag is experienced when packets are not making it to the server, or packets from the server aren't making it to the client... this results in the game hanging or freezing at intervals.... What bad netcode can do... is take too long to send large amounts of data, making the game freeze.... But there's always ways to cut that down... Kent

I worked up a quick VB example that could help the Dev team a lot... As of know i understand you are sending the packets as a string, through UDP.... I worked up an example of how to send an Array of Doubles through Winsock, but this method would even work for cutom Types... This would help you all in several ways.... 1. you wouldn't need to waste cpu cycles putting the data into a string, or breaking the string back into data 2. You can cut down the amount of data to send... i.e. "1234.23432123" is 13 bytes, as opposed to just sending the 8 bytes that a double takes up... also including the ,'s would add an extra byte... All in all you could save a lot of space if you could use this method to send everything using the smallest amount of memory possible.... If someone on the DevTeam (if you are the net coder or otherwise)... would send me a PM with your e-mail address i can send you the project as an example.... because I don't have any web hosting services up right now.... Kent

... i dunno i think MTA has their work cut out for him... the server program on theirs doesn't require ANY data from GTA3.... and its written in C++ its fast... that means DEDICATED servers... mta won't support that unless they abandon everything they've done so far... still mta looks to offer more than just deathmatch... so we'll see.... big issue though is mta requires gta3 to run, even if their netcode gets cleaned up there's gonna be a lot of cpu overhead to run the game... that means more lag... Best of luck to ya all though Kent

don't be so pushy, im sure if it came out prematurely... a lot more people would be upset by that. Give it time and you'll probably be glad you waited... Kent

you mean like some sort of clan or gang(hehe) association?? Kent

stat^, actually it is that easy pings are not a result of netcode, it is solely dependent on your connection.... a bad connection is gonna screw you no matter how good the netcode is... obviously more bandwidth is gonna help that situation... because you can send packets faster.......... and yes vb is very limiting as far as netcode goes, thats why we are suggesting at least that part be written in C, where arrays of any data type can be sent... and it wouldnt' be hard at all to write... just some way of getting the data from the VB program to the C program and getting information backf rom the C program to the VB program... would be neccessary, which im looking into.. I'm meeting w/ my Computer science professor on this topic tomorrow morning.. i imagine it has something to do w/ OBJ files, but i haven't messed with that before kent

yeah i had considered something like a grid system... it sounds cool in concept... and its probably the best way to go.. but this still leaves it on the server to calculate the positions for all the cars, its pretty cpu heavy... its gonna have to be done in one form or another... at this point though the netcode is actually storing the double(?) values into strings... which means for numbers w/ many digits a lot of space is wasted rather than just sending the 8 byte double.. i think we've gone over this a lot im gonna talk to my Computer science professor and learn a little about how OBJ files work, and see if there is a way to put C/C++ code into a VB project... that way there isn't this little console running in the background.. its all handled in the VB code..

there is a img tag but you need to upload your image somewhere and just link to it w/ the img tag

yeah.. and if the display buffer can be changed, could it be set to a really large number?? It'd make the game on the server run like poop but the server could basically be running just for the purpose of making the game playable.. (doubt a dedicated version can ever be written.. as its so interdependent on code already written in GTA3. i dunno there may be other options possible...

other guy has to also be waiting in his second vechicle before you do that... both players have to have synchronized 2 cars, or bad things happen

i ran the program a few times , some of the ports that opened up where 3426 3430 3431 thats just for the server list stuff i believe the game runs on ports 2003 and 2004 so i supposeyo ucould get a range off that

look at the readme

how about rather than a person having to be a VIP have someone have to carry a "football" can't think of a good word or a briefcase or something so you can hand off and try to get from A-B

as far as the display buffer goes, the only way around that may be to change that number on the server version.... also there has to be something in gta to say a certain car must always be displayed.... (look at the cop vigilante mission for example..) regardless of whatever other traffic is going on... that car IS displayed.... server may have to do that w/ a bunch of cars?? iuno exactly how that would work... the dev team would need to figure that one out.. because they actually understand how the game works. I'll look into socket programming in C, i actually haven't tried that before.. i'd like to learn it.. i'll need it if i ever get to writing the netcode for the game im working on... all i have now is a 3d opengl engine that displays any number of models facing any way.... don't have any physics code to actually move them around... i can fire the idea to IJsVogel, however im not sure exactly how to explain the whole concept... Kent

thats perfect.. hopefully somebody could forward this to the dev guys... then implementing the "Circle" method we debated on, would be cake.. and extremely fast.. I think the hardest part is getting GTA3 to make cars/peds for the whole city... since by normal routine gta generates them as you move through the world... could possibly call whatever function generates those w/ "hotspots" placed in a gridlike manner... these would act like players to the Server's game.... but not actually be players.. just something to trigger the function call to generate cars/peds Im sure there is a better way... its just something that hasnt really come up either..

im sure there is something similar out there... for VB 6.0 just have to look around

yeah i think winsock is the devill don't htinkyou need a control '//namespace: Imports System.Net.Sockets was at the top of the code.. i know its commented but maybe that can point you in the right direction (im not a VB coder.. im a C/C++ man) see if there is something in vb about that, i can't give you all much else i hate the language hahaha Kent

yup thats the idea.... its pretty ingenious when it works though its typically done to put one smaller simple data type into another larger simple data type emphasis on simple... wont work for arrays or custom types... i think the way to go with this is to find a control that is polymorphic... im sure its out there for vb and i doubt it'd be a huge overhaul of their code.. either way its necessary

here's some source code i found online that appears to send an array of data, though i don't htink its winsock... they didn't give much explanation... though i hardly think winsock is the best idea for doing netcode for a game... Dim oListener As TcpListener oListener = New TcpListener(1150) oListener.Start() Dim oSocket As Socket = oListener.AcceptSocket() '// To Receive data use Receive method on ur Socket obj '// data passed to Receive must be in thr form of an array of byte Dim arrOfBytesReceive(100) As Byte Dim intNmberOfBytes As Integer = oSocket.Receive(arrOfBytesReceive, arrOfBytesReceive.Length, SocketFlags.None) Dim arrOfBytesSending(100) As Byte '// To Send data u call Send method oSocket.Send(arrOfBytesSending, arrOfBytesSending.Length, SocketFlags.None) oSocket.Close() oListener.Stop()

masking is a way of using logic And Or and Nots to store more data in a variable and combining that with shifts for example you could store 255 booleans into a short. by using an OR this is the mask 000000 or a boolean then left shift (assuming true) 000001 or another boolean (assuming its true) 000110 if thereis a false the next would b 001100 i'd suggest reading on this elsewhere its kinda a low level topic.. learned a lot about it in my assembly class... its an easy way to compress data.... alot of programs use flags this way i believe the common dialog control makes use of this, which makes me think its possible in vb... Kent