~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

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Lucifer
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Lucifer »

This is the first of hopefully many iterations of the mobile Ubuntu, right? I'm not surprised so much of it doesn't work that well, heh. But I think they and Microsoft have the right idea: One OS for everything. I think that's Google's and Apple's achilles heel. The application stack for Android and iOS might be extensive, but until we can run the actual desktop apps we're accustomed to using, tablets aren't going to replace laptops. Which is kinda sad, really. I mean, my tablet has more power and memory than my laptop, so why can't it run things my laptop runs just fine?

Did you find out which libc Ubuntu went with? I'm wondering if the latency issues might be related to their choice of C library, which would justify google making their own half-assed c library for Android.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Monkey »

Phantom Rider wrote:
Monkey wrote:I know that my vote doesn't offically count
and that's the issue!
Actually, I don't want my vote to officially count because if my vote has to officially count then so does yours and everyone elses.
sinewav wrote:this is not a democracy.
Damn right this isn't a democracy and thank **** for that. Personally speaking, I prefer benevolent dictatorships to democracies because they tend to produce a greater level of meritocracy.
Phantom Rider wrote:
Monkey wrote: Oh, BTW, I would like to thank the devs for the work that we both see and don't see them doing.
Wouldn't you like to thank them for everything they've done and be able to see it?
IMO the devs have been open with most of what they have done and the rest I don't want to see. Why would I want to see every spam post?

In the OpenBSD world there is a saying "shut up and hack". IMO, if Durf wants to contribute to Arma, he should either apologise to the devs for his negative behaviours or (as others have pretty much already said) shut up and hack.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by ConVicT »

I second Light for mod. He's helpful, reasonable and if you get stuck up a mountain with him, he'll starve before you, unless you break your spine and become a vegetable. :D
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by sinewav »

Ii have no objections to Light becoming a moderator. He's got a good temperament, unlike me. :twisted:
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Z-Man »

Light: AndroIRC is currently in my top three, yeah. What it lacks for me is that it does not show chat from previous sessions. My current favorite is AndChat, I like the UI better. I do have to try to get Quassel running, but the raspi refuses to get quassel-core configured correctly.

And yes, a remake in Unity3d has been on my mind. Thing is, what makes this game not totally suck is the very custom netcode. If you just hack something together in Unity3d, you get the standard "sync objects and variables" netcode and that's simply not good enough. I know because I started out with it :) And to do something better, you have to bend Unity3d a bit, and hope you don't have to bend it until it breaks.
Lucifer wrote:This is the first of hopefully many iterations of the mobile Ubuntu, right?
The first one for a tablet with the Convergence thing (Tablet/Desktop mode switch), yeah. A phone with Ubuntu has been out for, oh, about a year? And yeah, they have the right approach, apart from the bit where you can't apt-get freely without having to fear breaking stuff.
Lucifer wrote:Did you find out which libc Ubuntu went with?
No, I did not really check that. I played around with their emulator while waiting for the preorder to ship, in that, you can apt-get without problems and gcc runs fine, I saw no difference to regular desktop Ubuntu. So I assume it's the regular libs they are using.
Lucifer wrote:I'm wondering if the latency issues might be related to their choice of C library
I consider that unlikely. It's probably rather an overlong rendering composition pipeline. That would explain why the mouse cursor lags less than the rest, for example; if you drag an icon with the mouse, the icon lags behind considerably. On a flat pipeline, cursor and icon would always be in sync. I guess they want their swiping and swooshing to always look smooth (if you can call 30FPS smooth) regardless of how badly the app stutters, so there is at least one step of indirection: App renders into buffer, compositor renders buffer to screen. Just like in Unity (the other one!) on the Desktop. That one has problems, too. I remember that on my previous, not to weak PC, games would also just get 30FPS on screen at most. They'd happily claim to be running at 60, but every other frame was dropped in the compositor. Grrr. Anyway, a single indirection only accounts for about 100 ms of lag (well, ideally two frames, so 2/30 s, but then there is double buffering overhead and stuff), so they must be doing something horribly wrong there. I hope it's correctible. It might just be caused by the core devs not having access to the final hardware soon enough.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Lucifer »

Z-Man wrote:Light: AndroIRC is currently in my top three, yeah. What it lacks for me is that it does not show chat from previous sessions. My current favorite is AndChat, I like the UI better. I do have to try to get Quassel running, but the raspi refuses to get quassel-core configured correctly.
Quassel is the one I'm having trouble with on my laptop, heh. I'll look up AndChat and see if that gets me anywhere. The problem I have is that my bluetooth keyboard doesn't work very well for some reason. I get it connected, and then there's huge latency between keypresses, and every now and then, the tablet will for some reason hang on a particular key and just repeat that a few hundred times. I want to find a USB keyboard that'll replace the bluetooth one and still stick to the case with a magnet, and also still be reasonably big (the problem with my old USB keyboard being the keys were smaller than my finger tips).
And yes, a remake in Unity3d has been on my mind. Thing is, what makes this game not totally suck is the very custom netcode. If you just hack something together in Unity3d, you get the standard "sync objects and variables" netcode and that's simply not good enough. I know because I started out with it :) And to do something better, you have to bend Unity3d a bit, and hope you don't have to bend it until it breaks.
That's why I'm in favor of a Panda rewrite, actually. We'd have to port the net code over to Panda, but it'd stay C++.
The first one for a tablet with the Convergence thing (Tablet/Desktop mode switch), yeah. A phone with Ubuntu has been out for, oh, about a year? And yeah, they have the right approach, apart from the bit where you can't apt-get freely without having to fear breaking stuff.
I've read that their long-term goal is to write up a library that'll translate all the touch screen events into mouse events and start opening up the repositories for everything. But, you know, what would make it killer is if they had a dock station for charging the tablet that also connected it to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, while still letting you use the touch screen as an input device. They could even go the extra step and make the docking station so that it has it's own CPU that's much faster and have it replace the one in the tablet when you're docked, making it possible for it to run CPU-heavy apps.
Lucifer wrote:Did you find out which libc Ubuntu went with?
No, I did not really check that. I played around with their emulator while waiting for the preorder to ship, in that, you can apt-get without problems and gcc runs fine, I saw no difference to regular desktop Ubuntu. So I assume it's the regular libs they are using.
I'd guess it's uClibc, then. You know, the one used on all the other non-Android embedded Linuxes... ;)

I hope it's correctible. It might just be caused by the core devs not having access to the final hardware soon enough.
Likely, actually. The tablet company fell behind the schedule and made some unfortunate last-minute substitutions, if I remember correctly.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Word »

I'd also be in favour of promoting Light, if that means anything. Are Unity's networking specifics still an issue after the internet has become more stable and faster almost everywhere (granted, not in my own hometown...)?
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Light »

Z-Man wrote:And yes, a remake in Unity3d has been on my mind. Thing is, what makes this game not totally suck is the very custom netcode. If you just hack something together in Unity3d, you get the standard "sync objects and variables" netcode and that's simply not good enough. I know because I started out with it :) And to do something better, you have to bend Unity3d a bit, and hope you don't have to bend it until it breaks.
As a start, I wouldn't imagine it being too bad to go backwards a little. Then working on future enhancements could be done over time. I just think something that closely resembles the game, networked on mobile and a web client would easily get the popular vote. It would be cool to have support for current servers, but in the spirit of a full rewrite, you could even take in a little bit from Legacy and add multi-platform arenas with little effort.

There's also the benefit that C# is an easier language than C++, plus it's inside an engine which has you wrapped in some nice, easy to use functions. I'm pretty sure you would get a lot more activity from the community wanting to help out and provide patches, assuming it would remain open source.

Just my thoughts though. I know going "too new" isn't going to help much, as some Tron games have already shown us. There seems to need to be a balance between old and new, and the important part of that I think is the 90 degree turning for quick, skilled fights, rather than the smooth turning racing feel.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by sinewav »

Z-Man wrote:My current favorite is AndChat, I like the UI better.
AndChat was the one I finally purchased. Seems to work well enough, though I can't say I used it more than sporadically on my phone, usually just a couple hours at a time, but it was as reliable as my connection, so that's good.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Z-Man »

Lucifer wrote:I've read that their long-term goal is to write up a library that'll translate all the touch screen events into mouse events and start opening up the repositories for everything.
Touch events are already interpreted as mouse events; just regular left clicks and drags, though. I don't think they re-interpret two finger drags as mouse wheel input. Of course, even that would not be a perfect replacement for good touch control optimized drag scrolling as there is no way to sync the finger motion to the scrolling 1:1.
Lucifer wrote:They could even go the extra step and make the docking station so that it has it's own CPU that's much faster and have it replace the one in the tablet when you're docked, making it possible for it to run CPU-heavy apps.
You can already have that :) Plug your device into your PC's USB and access its data via regular PC apps.
Lucifer wrote:Likely, actually. The tablet company fell behind the schedule and made some unfortunate last-minute substitutions, if I remember correctly.
I find that bit hard to believe. The hardware is almost identical to the Android tablet of the same name, that's why flashing it with Android works in the first place. I was more referring to the fact that while Canonical is a regular for-profit company, most of the actual developers are not employes and I don't think everyone relevant got the proper hardware to test on.
Light wrote:As a start, I wouldn't imagine it being too bad to go backwards a little. Then working on future enhancements could be done over time.
The problem is that the network architecture determines a lot how you have to design the rest of the game. A strategy game, for example, typically only transmits raw player input and each client simulates the action on its own. There, it's crucial that your game update is 100% reproducible across all supported platforms. It's very hard to get there if you started out with a different network architecture that does not require reproducibility. The genre to use as a template for an Armagetron reboot would probably be fighting games, so GGPO. I think you need the ability to quickly copy entire game states for that.
For the rest: Yup, yup, yup.

Word: Internet bandwidth has improved a lot, by a factor of about 1000 for me personally since the project was started. But latency ist still an issue. Sure, pings to the backbone went down from 200 ms to 20 ms, but a trip across continents is still about 100 ms minimum. Stupid physics police and their light speed limit.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Lucifer »

Z-Man wrote:
Lucifer wrote:I've read that their long-term goal is to write up a library that'll translate all the touch screen events into mouse events and start opening up the repositories for everything.
Touch events are already interpreted as mouse events; just regular left clicks and drags, though. I don't think they re-interpret two finger drags as mouse wheel input. Of course, even that would not be a perfect replacement for good touch control optimized drag scrolling as there is no way to sync the finger motion to the scrolling 1:1.
Yeah, I was thinking they were blowing smoke. At the layer where input events are turned into events and sent to the app's event queue, there is no knowledge of scrollbars or toolbars or anything GUI like, other than it's an Xlib app. I'm also curious about these new windowing systems that are supposed to be phased in soon, more or less completely replacing Xlib.

So anyway, I couldn't see how they could do any more than left click events (button pressed, button released) and the associated drag actions. They still couldn't do scrollbar events without knowledge of the scrollbars, which they don't have at that layer (in X.org, that layer is in the local display server, where the app could be running across the network).
Lucifer wrote:They could even go the extra step and make the docking station so that it has it's own CPU that's much faster and have it replace the one in the tablet when you're docked, making it possible for it to run CPU-heavy apps.
You can already have that :) Plug your device into your PC's USB and access its data via regular PC apps.
Sort of. Yeah, that works, and I've done it myself. But it's limiting. The best free office suite I found for Android doesn't support .odt files, so I'm stuck with .doc files. Inkscape barely works in Android (and requires a 10 inch or bigger tablet). The drawing problems that you would expect would be great aren't, and they work in their own file formats, so you can't just fire up the GIMP to do what the drawing programs you were using can't.

It's when Ubuntu fully realizes their idea that the tablet can be used just like a desktop and a large percentage of the application stack is available for their tablets that this dock station starts to come in handy. It'll basically solve the problem of people who want two giant monitors to play their MMO games, or graphic designers who use them, etc, where the tablet is just too small. But instead of having to maintain a high-end gaming system, the tablet gets built so it can handle the gaming and serves as the tower unit for the big console setup.

I've put way too much thought into something that probably won't get developed.
Lucifer wrote:Likely, actually. The tablet company fell behind the schedule and made some unfortunate last-minute substitutions, if I remember correctly.
I find that bit hard to believe. The hardware is almost identical to the Android tablet of the same name, that's why flashing it with Android works in the first place. I was more referring to the fact that while Canonical is a regular for-profit company, most of the actual developers are not employes and I don't think everyone relevant got the proper hardware to test on.
I thought it was a weird article. The base hardware was already a production Android tablet that's been on the market a few years, I thought. But, you know, Mark Shuttleworth has been trying to adopt Steve Jobs' reality distortion field...
Light wrote:As a start, I wouldn't imagine it being too bad to go backwards a little. Then working on future enhancements could be done over time.
The problem is that the network architecture determines a lot how you have to design the rest of the game. A strategy game, for example, typically only transmits raw player input and each client simulates the action on its own. There, it's crucial that your game update is 100% reproducible across all supported platforms. It's very hard to get there if you started out with a different network architecture that does not require reproducibility. The genre to use as a template for an Armagetron reboot would probably be fighting games, so GGPO. I think you need the ability to quickly copy entire game states for that.
For the rest: Yup, yup, yup.
Well, there's always the problem where Unity isn't exactly open source.... ;)

But we don't necessarily even need full updates quickly in the netcode, we just need lots of updates quickly enough that what we see is reasonably accurate. Panda might support a netcode rewrite that'll give us the same reliability that we have now, might even improve it, but it also turns everything into a state machine. Also, no way will we get that same reliability writing the protocols in Python.

I'm still considering throwing together a local game version of Armagetron using Panda. If I do that, then there's at least a starting point to see how to hook up any network layer to it.
Word: Internet bandwidth has improved a lot, by a factor of about 1000 for me personally since the project was started. But latency ist still an issue. Sure, pings to the backbone went down from 200 ms to 20 ms, but a trip across continents is still about 100 ms minimum. Stupid physics police and their light speed limit.
Do we have to go through any satellites to get across the pond? I've always wondered that....
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by |Phantom~Rider| »

ConVicT wrote:I second Light for mod. He's helpful, reasonable and if you get stuck up a mountain with him, he'll starve before you, unless you break your spine and become a vegetable. :D
Kira wrote: I cannot because my servers are set up using sty+ct. I do not, and likely will never have +ap
because it's a dead project that hasn't been receiving updates in quite a long time now.

The direction I will likely move is towards 0.4 in the (possibly distant) future, when more +ct
function gets put into stock 0.4, which is supposed to be happening sometime semi soon.

Sorry about that.
Except for using +ap and lying about it to you because he assumes you're ignorant on the topic :o . oh and funny cause you don't have any power and you're pretty much an irrelevant smuck without a voice, so I must sadly inform your that your opinions matters not.

https://code.launchpad.net/~armagetrona ... -sty+ct+ap
sinewav wrote:Ii have no objections to Light becoming a moderator. He's got a good temperament, unlike me. :twisted:
Ditto ^
Monkey wrote: Damn right this isn't a democracy and thank **** for that. Personally speaking, I prefer benevolent dictatorships to democracies because they tend to produce a greater level of meritocracy
You're the epitome of the failure within the own system you want of meritocracy, just saying.

[qoute="Word"] I'd also be in favour of promoting Light, if that means anything. [/quote]

It means nothing, you're irrelevant and nothing but a smuck to that decision and its making. sorry, but that's how the system is currently 8)
sinewav wrote:
|Phantom~Rider| wrote:Follow the lead, or take the PROGRESSIVE IDEAS and go elsewhere
There is nothing about this system preventing progressive ideas. The code is there for you to do what you wish. You have total freedom. Though we al know it is attention you seek, not progress.
Yea, not quite. But nice try *claps*



Nice double standards Z-Man
Z-Man wrote: Swearing and doing his usual thing. No, not having any of that.
Word wrote:No. You have to answer what keeps you, Durf (seeing that we only talk through your parrot), from doing your own thing with the code, then sharing it. Somebody's mindset you say? What does that have to do with anything you can do or can't do if you want to?


Lucifer wrote: @Z-man: Tell them to DO IT.
He speaks in an equivocal manner for a reason :lol:
Lucifer wrote: @Tank Program: Tell them to DO IT.
Nice try, but he's not going to reply anytime soon, unless he wants to prove me wrong? :o
Lucifer wrote: @Everybody else: Tell them to DO IT.
Funny cause they don't have the power and they're pretty much irrelevant smucks
Light wrote: which I must sadly admit is a bit outdated (in my opinion).
:o :o :o :o EXILE HIM!!!!!! HE SPEAKS AGAINST THE SYSTEM!!!!!!!!
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by sinewav »

Whelp, that's the end of this thread. Thanks for playing!
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Clutch »

You and Durf are syphilis in human form.

-edit-

1000 shitposts, hurray.
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Re: ~Misc Stuff~ Decision Overturn

Post by Lucifer »

I found his post quite entertaining, especially the way he picked and chose what he would quote and respond to.

He apparently forgot that I'm funny as all get-out.

He has a bit to learn.
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