"Again? But that trick never works."
"This time for sure!"
This is the exact same build as I tried to post last night, but packaged correctly and with a new build date to avoid confusion. It's a direct replacement for the 2011-07-10 morning build, the first of which was catastrophically broken in MP strat. It includes the same fixes (hence the similar "What's New") along with some new ones. In particular, it includes fixes for the no-credit bug, sniper status overlap bug, and single-player missions not ending.
Like the previous build, this one sends object state updates across the network more efficiently, allowing the same number of updates at lower bandwidth settings or more updates at the same bandwidth setting. The level of improvement depends on the number of objects getting sent but with compression enabled can be as high as doubling the update rate. One object has essentially no reduction and two have very little, but things improve rapidly after that as packet unification and data compression kick in. Deathmatch gets little to no improvement but Strategy gets big improvements almost immediately.
The big change is that compression is now controlled by UseCompression in net.ini and disabled by default. I revised the code in an attempt to fix the crash in MP strat, but this is the safest course until I'm confident that everything is working properly.
For players on dial-up, try setting the maximum bandwidth down to 3000 or even 2500 since the operating system can add significant traffic on its own even when seemingly idle. That should reduce those skyrocketing ping times caused by data packets piling up in the queue.
Downloads:
Testing Executable and Symbols
Game Assets (no changes since 2011-05-19)
What's new:
* Fixed status display getting overdrawn by the sniper rifle in widescreen resolution
* Fixed script-spawned units getting stuck inside the Recycler or Factory
- Offset position when spawned from a vehicle or building
- Allow units to ignore collision in Stuck state so they can escape bad situations
- This should fix some missions that wouldn't end
* Fixed ordnance ownership after entering a vehicle created on another machine
- The most common case was sniping another player out of their vehicle and entering it
- This involved surprisingly extensive changes to Ordnance and DistributedObject...
* Send all object state updates in unified packets
- It previously sent one unified packet and then a bunch of single-object packets
- This cuts out packet overhead from UDP (8 bytes), Anet (6 bytes), and the game (6 bytes)
* Object state packets support optional data compression
- This saves as much as 40% for nearly-full packets
- This cuts out even more overhead since more object state fits into one packet
- Control with UseCompression in net.ini (0 for off, 1 for on)
- Disabled by default until I can resolve stability issues...
* Shell and in-game chat have their own settings for system messages
- Shell turns them off by default
- In-game turns them on by default
* Net game lobby shows the build date and check crc above the chat window
- I'll probably remove this after final release
* Seismic wave limits time step like it did in 1.4
