18-01-2000 07:01									#1
	medal for Mr Nesse Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

Our honorary member Mr Nesse continues to distinguish himself with prompt responses to glitch and bug queries.

Yes, it could be argued that we shouldn't be having to deal with glitches and bugs, but the gentleman is ever prompt, patient and courteous.

Latest probs being analysed: a particular game that kept freezing and booting players on a particular AI Barb turn. In the breakdown process, players would be unable to access their cities, before a red-ish hue would colour certain icons and images on the screen, before their civ name would appear as, literally, the word "nil".

Mr Nesse's response was that the dislocating AI Barb turn problem is similar to a unit movement problem that he's been tracking. He's going to test the game save I sent him.

The other seemingly increasing problem, at least for me, has been a tendency for hot joining players to boot other players out of the game in the hotjoining process. Mr Nesse's belief, based on examining the PC Civ codes - and I've heard it expressed elsewhere by PC experts - is that many of the MultiPlayer aspects of the PC version were simply laid over the original version without a lot of thought for compatibility.

Anyway, Mr Nesse soldiers on, on our behalf.



------------------
finbar
Mono Rules!
#33984591


[This message has been edited by finbar (edited January 17, 2000).]

	19-01-2000 03:52									#2
	Inflate your Upload Space

A slightly more technical response from Mr Nesse concerning the freeze and jam problems caused by (particularly) the AI Barb turns in games:

"Apparently what is happening is that certain units (the barbarians appear to
be especially susceptible to this, but I've seen it happen with other AI
players also) get confused as to where they are located on the map. They
have some goofy queuing system where they process some events immediately
and queue some for later display. The net result is that the unit stacks get
messed up and it goes into an infinite loop trying to find the first unit in
the stack. My current version of the application does some sanity checking
for this that it wasn't doing before, but it's still not perfect... just
better."

And as to why the modem can be booted off line when these things happen:

"The reason your modem disconnects is because the system doesn't get any time
while the program is looping."

And as to the instability of the whole Multiplayer aspect of the game, it transpires that that the MP aspect of the PC game (the basis, of course, for our version) was apparently done by someone other than the original development team.

These MP code writers have, apparently, left comments within the PC code to the effect that they didn't know why the original code was written in such a way, that they were afraid to change it, and basically did what they could.

As Mr Nesse observes, it's frightening.



------------------
finbar
Mono Rules!
#33984591