running 2 instances ?

[Nigo]

Hello,

to play around with the network engine I would need to run 2 instances of vdrift (I only have 1 computer right now)

I started 2 instances and it went fine. But when I start the "server", it grab the mouse and won't let it go unless I pause the game, so I had to pause it in order to go into the menus in the second instances and start the "client", which... fail. Does it fail because the server is paused, is it some kind of "thread management" problem, or is it and other network error ?
anyway, since I don't use the mouse to drive the car, what should I modify in order to get a free mouse even when I drive ?

oh yeah, btw, it looks like vdrift is monothreaded, do you confirm ? How is the main thread managed, basically ?

thanks

[FFuser]

1) As far as I know networking is broken
2) Why do you want to compete agianst yourself with networking? Singleplayer works good enough isn't it?

3) about threading: I don't know

[thelusiv]

1. Networking is fixed, at least back to its original state - still has problems, but Joe and I got it "working" again last weekend. We even tested it a little.
2. I think Nigo wants to work on improving network play so playing against himself would make it very easy to test.
3. VDrift does use only a single thread, I believe it is started by SDL using the pthread library.

edit: oh and I almost forgot, the mouse thing: we do need to make it not grab and auto-center the mouse all the time, there has to be some good solution for that. At least it should release it when not in Free or Orbit camera modes. This also causes a problem in the Pause menu, when the game is paused the mouse cursor is always in the middle so the selection is set to the Options button instead of the first button (Return to Game) as it's set to do.

[Nigo]

I managed to get it working, it's kinda hard because I can't use 2 configurations so when I accelerate, both cars do
The sound lag is about 1 second, and the display lag about 5 seconds, but it guess it's better on a real network... I hope :lol:

[thelusiv]

I wouldn't assume that the lag is better on a real network. It's very hard for us to judge that when the only testing we've done is between Joe and I across the internet. Every other time I've attempted to host a game or be a client with someone besides Joe it has failed...I haven't yet tested VDrift on my local network, either.

[reece146]

I wouldn't assume that the lag is better on a real network. It's very hard for us to judge that when the only testing we've done is between Joe and I across the internet. Every other time I've attempted to host a game or be a client with someone besides Joe it has failed...I haven't yet tested VDrift on my local network, either.

Did I read somewhere that vdrift is using UDP for its network protocol?

Maybe it is time to switch to TCP? More reliable, but I'd assume some kind of buffering would have ot occur if it doesn't already.

[thelusiv]

Well we've been having a discussion about networking on the vdrift-devel mailing list. Joe explains why TCP doesn't really make sense for games here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/messa...d=37218042

[Nigo]

it could just be because running 2 instances the threads are overloaded, making the network slow. I've seen that before, this has nothing to do with UDP
further, it'll be important to test on local networks, ideally with QoS, but for now...