0.2.8.3_rc4 available! Post bugs here.

[Phytotron]

Oy, I'm getting these MESSAGE_CACHE_SIZE and timer hiccup messages all the dang time now. A little while I got one during a local game. It froze up and I just sat and waited and eventually got the timer hiccup message. Then, the other night while attempting to connect, it gave me an additional message:

ErrorMessage2.png

Grumble grumble. I'll go back to playing with 0.2.8.2.1 for awhile and see if I continue to get these.

***

I swear I've both experienced and witnessed 'phasing' or some such thing, where I or someone will pass directly through a wall they've hit straight-on, perpendicularly. I can't figure how to make it repeatable, but figured I'd mention it in case anyone else has experienced or seen it. I think I've only seen in that Mud Puddle server; perhaps related to _timebased being 1.4? I dunno.

Oh, something relatively trivial, but I discovered PLAYER_RANDOM_COLOR, which I actually find practical for myself. Question: in an online game, how often should it change? (I tried the search function but it kept filtering out 'color' and/or 'player' and giving me 683 results.)

[epsy]

Oh, something relatively trivial, but I discovered PLAYER_RANDOM_COLOR, which I actually find practical for myself. Question: in an online game, how often should it change? (I tried the search function but it kept filtering out 'color' and/or 'player' and giving me 683 results.)

Each time someone enters, leaves or changes color(so you always have a unique color)

[Z-Man]

Each time someone enters, leaves or changes color(so you always have a unique color)

Actually, once per round. Every round, it looks for a random color that is farther away from the other colors than the color you currently have. If it finds one, it changes to it. Only a few tries are made, so in addition to relatively likely changes whenever someone new comes in or changes their color, there's the chance of a random change every round.

[compguygene]

This sounds like a fun command. Is it a Boolean command?

[Phytotron]

Ah, well methinks it's not working properly for me, then. It can go multiple rounds, matches even, without changing. Seems it may also have issues with recognising people abusing the color overflow bug (multicolored cycles)?

I think I got annoyed first time someone posted their little script or hack or whatever to make this happen, categorising it in my mind with multicolored cycles/tails and the colored names and chats that had gotten so popular and annoying. But upon finding it recently, I realised that this could be very practical for me. I've never liked having the same color as another player (or when two or more other players have the same color; nothing I can do about that), and am frequently changing my own as people come in the server. Now I got something that'll automate it for me—if it'll work (or work better, whatever the case).

[compguygene]

Thank you for the explanation. I will have to experiment with this. By the way, in a server if you were to set BUG_COLOR_OVERFLOW 0, people that are using this have their custom tail/bike colors overridden. For instance, this is what the Ladle config does to ensure that all members of a given team are the same color.

[Z-Man]

Ah, well methinks it's not working properly for me, then. It can go multiple rounds, matches even, without changing.

That can happen if you already have an ucommon color, like pink. I usually end up pink or purple for quite some time

Seems it may also have issues with recognising people abusing the color overflow bug (multicolored cycles)?

Yeah, those colors would be treated as out of range and thus very far away from the randomly picked color, even if the actual color as it appears on screen would be the same. Hmm. Dunno whether that is fixable with reasonable effort.

[Jonathan]

Seems it may also have issues with recognising people abusing the color overflow bug (multicolored cycles)?

Yeah, those colors would be treated as out of range and thus very far away from the randomly picked color, even if the actual color as it appears on screen would be the same. Hmm. Dunno whether that is fixable with reasonable effort.

How about some retro integer math?

shovel(x) = 17 * x % 256
trench(x) = min(x, 15) // perhaps a little bit more to compensate for the [0.7, 1] lighting factor
color_dist(x, y) = dot(x - y, x - y) // or whatever, more perceptual
distance(x, y) = color_dist(shovel(x), shovel(y)) + 289 * color_dist(trench(x), trench(y))

289 = equal influence. Tweakable.

[Z-Man]

I didn't say it's impossible or even that I wouldn't know how to do it But fact is, the color overflow is a bug, and I don't really want to cater for it all over the place.

[Jonathan]

I figured, but I already did half of it before I knew it. And yeah, the idea of "supported bug" bugs me.

[Phytotron]

shovel(x) = 17 * x % 256
trench(x) = min(x, 15

How's about we just get a shovel and bang over the head people who use the color overflow, then toss them in a trench. You know, figuratively speaking.

[Phytotron]

I'm getting tired of me, too.

So, I said I'd try using 0.2.8.2.1 for awhile to see if I got those messages and hiccups and whatnot. Well, on first time I loaded it up since saying so, I selected 'Internet Game' and the following loooong list came scrolling by. This isn't even all of it, but only so far as I could page up. Something to do with score biasing?

[Z-Man]

That's normal if you downgrade, only happens once, those are unknown fields to the server list that were added in the meantime the old client doesn't understand, so it complains. Current versions just log the same message once only.

[Phytotron]

Gotcha.

For the record, since I've gone back to using 0.2.8.2.1, I haven't received that message_cache error, freeze, or hiccups.

I did receive this just today, though, as I exited a server:

[Z-Man]

I don't even remember under what circumstances that message gets printed, but if it happens during disconnection, it's nothing to worry about. If it is printed on a server or in a local game and a recording is available, then yes, definitely, there's a problem and I want that recording really badly. But so many things happen to the game state when you disconnect and none of them matter because the whole thing is going to get torn down two microseconds later anyway.