0.2.8.0_rc1: Release process and bugs

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 8:19 pm

Jonathan wrote:This is probably why your font is white....

Well, then shouldn't that be undone? It would not be good to force people to turn on alpha blending in order to read text, given the significant fps hit it causes.

(/me realises now that the recording was unnecessary

)

joda.bot: Those are some of the textures I've made for my eventual ginormous moviepack set that will be put up for grabs. I can't give you any estimate on when that'll be, though.

Jonathan · Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 8:59 pm

I was thinking about a good fix, but indeed we need readable text ASAP.

Significant FPS hit: depends on your system.

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 10:43 pm

About the font: sorry, I should have checked for that. Yes, Jonathan's suggestion is good, I just did not do it already because it's quite special case coding, but I'll rethink that. As a workaround, just copy font_s.png from an old release over.

About the camera: Can you pinpoint what behavior trait disturbs you? There have been several changes, the biggest two were one in the glancing and one in what the camera does when it finds itself in front of the cycle. We could do test builds where parts of the code are reverted, but in your case, it'll be work for nemo, too. My current theory is that you're just too used to the old behavior and that you'll like the new one better once you've been exposed to it for a while, anyway. That's falsifiable, of course

Oscilloscope wrote:Oh, was it proper that all my settings were automatically loaded into rc1 when I launched it?

I think so, at least that's what it does on the other platforms.

The color removal in the server browser was done by nemo, IIRC, and on purpose. It's configurable with FILTER_SERVER_NAME_COLOR_STRING. I'll add a line to the other color filtering options in settings.cfg. Any opinion here whether it should default to "filter them out, they're annoying" and "ooh, colored servers are nice"? The other filter settings default to "ooh, nice colors", so my feeling would be this one should also.

Luke-Jr wrote:Err, anything that has a newer build is automatically flagged, you don't need to manually specify it... It's just the discontinued stuff that needs a manual flagging.

Oh, I thought the flag did something more than that. I would not know what, though

Post by **dlh** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 12:02 am

The ChangeLog has changes that are not in this release -- like the sound engine. Everything committed to HEAD after we branched b0_2_8 should not be included, correct?

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 12:21 am

Correct, but tell that to cvs2cl. Uhh, I RTFM, looks like it's possible.

joda.bot · Post by **joda.bot** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 12:33 am

@z-man: 4 recordings of missing rubber... If I had to pick one I'd choose the 4th recording (should be the bug and is rather short).

I might have misjudged the other instances

... turned to late or just had packet loss.

--- waste of time bugs ---
EDIT: Download http://homepages.upb.de/joda/2006.01.17 ... _1.tar.bz2 (non permanent)

In the first recording:
1) Another instance of missing rubber might be at 1450:
I died next to the blue zone at a rim wall.

2) strange turn problem:
1. Recording Timestamp: 1950

I watched it right now, and I have to say it looks like I just hit the key once too often... but I can shake the feeling that I did not actually push a key to turn into my own wall there. (Rare wierd bug if some key press would be processed twice ...)
3) another missing rubber bug is at the end of the recording

Notes: The recording does switch resolutions at start... if the configuration is reverted to 640x480, 640x480 it should select 800x600 (windowed) and 1024x768 (full screen). Other initial resolutions will be changed to higher resolutions.
--- ---

Otherwise use the bug grep technique... I forgot to write them down...
If you want me to, I'll extract them for u.

EDIT: Could not upload the 6MB file

Fonkay · Post by **Fonkay** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 2:57 am

z-man wrote:About the camera: Can you pinpoint what behavior trait disturbs you?

It makes my eyes hurt.

I'm not sure why it is, or what exactly is different about the camera, but when dancing in SiH or Shrunk, My eyes physically begin to throb

. But in fortress I find the new settings help me out a lot, and don't hurt my eyes at all.

So that info doesn't help much, but I'll play a bit more and get back to you.

EDIT: So on further investigation, the main problem is the way the camera turns. It used to slide around on turns as if stuck a pivot point. But now every time you turn, the camera jerks in an awkward fashion. It gets bad when you're turning a lot in small spaces, but with the large delay on fortress it's not a problem.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 8:17 am

z-man wrote:As a workaround, just copy font_s.png from an old release over.

Yeah, I figured I could do that, so I will.

Since I seem to be the designated 10.2.8 tester I guess I'll try it some more and see if I can get used to the camera, as well as determine what it was that made me literally nauseous. I hope I don't have to take some dramamine just to play, heh.

Luke-Jr · Post by **Luke-Jr** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 8:20 am

Is there a reason we lack x86_64 RPMs? Just curious

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:07 am

Joda: Thanks, I'll replay them.

Fonkay may have identified the spot that is disturbing: the focal point of the camera changed a bit to make the forced release of glancing on a turn look better, it moves faster as you turn. I can imagine that causing nausea

Luke: The previous amd64 rpms were built by me on the SuSE we had installed on our insitute's PCs. Now we switched to Kubuntu. In theory, the rpm tools are still available, but they fail to find the source tarball. The error message says "file /bla/blubb/tron.tgz not found", but when I check, it's exactly there and readable, so I gave up. And we don't have root access or even fakeroot, so I can't build the .deb packages there as well.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:28 am

No, I don't like the new smart cam at all. Here are the behaviours I noticed and disliked:

1) It's very jerky.
(This fact also seemed to knock my framerate down some, but that might not actually be so.)

2) It does indeed pull back further than the old one, even at slow speed (e.g., in Shrunkland).

3) I get now what the other guy was talking about with respect to it not staying behind the cycle. It's almost always off to the side, even when going in a straight line in a wide open area. I had to have a large arena and begin at one side and travel almost to the other side to get it to settle behind the cycle as it would with the old one.

4) You know what it's like? It's kinda like using the custom cam with CAMERA_CUSTOM_TURN_SPEED set at about 5. Not identical, obviously, but similar in effect. If nothing else, in this respect you've just made a sort of built-in custom cam.

It's also sort of like what happens when you're in a server with a map, and as your cycle turns you notice that the arena makes a little turn as well, you know? Disorienting and nauseating.

I'm not sure how else to describe it.

5) The 180 (or just any quick turnaround) behaviour. It goes off to the side now, right? I get why that was implemented, and could see it being beneficial in certain circumstances, but I just find it terribly disorienting, whether it's in a short space or over a longer one.

I tried it in Shrunkland, Swampland, and Swamplords in Hell, and did all kinds of different moves in each of these different speed settings. I personally found it bad for any style of gameplay, whether it was "twitchy," complex, mazing-type stuff or more straight-line speeding stuff. Heck only knows how it might work in an even higher-speed server.

This could seriously turn me off from using this version. But others may like it. Any chance of having, say, Smart Cam 1 and Smart Cam 2? One old behaviour, and one new, as an option in the menu.

On a related note, could you explain what the SMART_GLANCE_CUSTOM_1-4 are? I noticed they're 1/0 on/off things, but I'm wondering what they change specifically.

And why are the values for the custom cam (back & rise—I didn't check pitch) different now? For instance, 4 seems about equal in distance to what 10 or 15 used to be.

I do like the new glancing behaviour whereby glancing left then turning left keeps the camera facing in that direction. Nifty and handy.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:49 am

Yo, this is crazy. I tried to connect to nemo's In Limbo server, and well, you'll have to see the recording. Thing is, the playback plays back much more quickly than how things actually went down. Things were very slow when it was actually happening, with a lot of sort of mini-freezes.

Also, this isn't what happened the first time I tried, before I made the recording. In the first instance, eventually a game between Consumer_bot and someone named "June" (iirc) began. I don't know whether June was a bot or real player. But what was weird was that I was stuck looking at just the console messages, no game, and couldn't scroll, pull up the menu, take a screenshot, or anything. I eventually force-quit the app that time.

Anyway, here:

Post by **Lucifer** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 10:18 am

I was able to connect just fine, silly. Um, I'm running off the trunk, though, not the branch. Maybe someone with an RC client can try it?

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 11:29 am

About Nemo's server: see here, earlier in this thread:
http://forums.armagetronad.net/viewtopi ... 0283#40283

On a related note, could you explain what the SMART_GLANCE_CUSTOM_1-4 are? I noticed they're 1/0 on/off things, but I'm wondering what they change specifically.

They are the new player-specific settings that govern the glancing behavior of the smart camera, like the single setting we had before. They're now configurable in the menu so people who don't like the new stuff don't have to edit config files.

And why are the values for the custom cam (back & rise—I didn't check pitch) different now? For instance, 4 seems about equal in distance to what 10 or 15 used to be.

To get the old behavior back exactly, you have to set the FROMSPEED settings to zero. If I'm not mistaken, there is a block of settings in settings.cfg to uncomment that reverts exactly to the old feeling.

Any chance of having, say, Smart Cam 1 and Smart Cam 2? One old behaviour, and one new, as an option in the menu.

Hardly. Currently, this would result in quite entangled spaghetti code.

I stand to it that the new custom camera feels better, but I'm considering to admit it was a mistake to introduce it that late in the beta process. I could revert it as far as it makes sense for 0.2.8, but keep the new stuff in the trunk where it can be refined. Unfortunatly, the good glancing behavior looks horrible whith the old focal point code, that's as far as I tested. I'll experiment.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Wed Jan 18, 2006 11:44 am

I'm back with more.

I don't know whether any of these are things that would show up in a recording, so I'll hold off until told to do otherwise.

1) Framerate is definitely lower. I played a good while with rc1, then quit and loaded beta_4 to check. It's substantial, about 20 fps difference on average, if not more.

2) I get a bunch of "mini-freezes," especially toward the end of a round and between rounds. A few here and there in the middle of a round. Short little pauses, during which key commands aren't read (e.g, turning, typing).

3) There's still that bug whereby sometimes when you enter a server the camera is pointing at no one, and the only way to get it to fix on someone is by changing the camera view. Simply pressing a direction to change players does nothing.

In other news, I tried out the Smartcam in fortress, sumo, and even mbc. The bad stuff is less pronounced in a high speed server, like mbc, but it's still enough. It's just about unbearable in Shrunkland or Dance of the Cats mini. Given that Lucifer and others have expressed a great liking for the new cam, me thinks an option would be best.

[Edit: I was apparently typing this as you responded in the last post. Note I'm talking about the smart cam, not the custom cam. I didn't think the custom glances looked bad with the old smart cam, myself. Meh. It's really too bad it would be too troublesome to have two smart cams. I'm extremely turned off from this new one.]

Not to be totally negative, something else I like: the new zones. Not only are they immensely practical, taking care of the blocking issue, but I also think they look rad. They looks like old vector-screen graphics, such as with Asteroids or Tempest, or that really old Star Wars game.