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ShrewdTactician

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Posts posted by ShrewdTactician

    Starting a LAN Game, struggling

    in Technical Support

    Posted

    Glad to hear you like the game. There's isn't a default minimum number of player required to start. You can turn off the waiting for players time by using the config files. Look at the wiki for details on server setup and settings. I haven't heard of the game getting stuck at 4 seconds before. There maybe other who have experienced it before, tho. Try turning the waiting time to 0 and see if that solves it. If it continues to be an issue, post the log files.

    Addressing the Player Problem

    in Renegade X

    Posted

    Pretty much what Fffreak9999 said is spot on.

    If you want to help, the best thing to do right now is to simply raise awareness and help new players.

    Here's a list of simple things you can do as a community member.

    1. Play the game more. One of the hurdles we have right now is the low online active player count. While the actual community is quite large, its congregating into specific groups/times. New players get turned off by low player counts and don't understand this "grouping", so playing the game more often at more varying times will help with this.

    2. Be welcoming to newer players.  This means stuff like:
         a. Allow community members to ask "silly" questions
         b. Say hello to new members and you look forward to seeing them around etc.
         c. Offer to help them with any issues.
         d. Be patient with them

    3. Mention the game more, where you can find an excuse to do so. Is there a topic/chat/comments where you can mention your playing a game, or what your favorite game is, then give renegade x a mention. Don't spam, but don't be shy either.

    4. Create Media. Stream the game, post youtube videos, create art, etc. Even if you think no one will watch you, the very fact that the game is getting this media will get more eyes on the name renegade X, sites like youtube will pump up renegade x more in related videos if there are more people uploading them, the game will show up more in the stream game lists, etc.

    5. On the flip side, support community media creators, watch their streams, like their videos, share their art etc. This helps show a united, strong community and can pump up the game and their media on platforms.

    6. Information. There are many sites that deal with information about games, list of games, info about games, etc. Plays.tv, player.me, gamefaq.com, moddb.com/indiedb.com, etc all have their own database of games, media to go along with it, and communities. By making sure that the info is up to date, sharing media, favourit'ing a game on these sites, will again, bring it up in attention.

    7. Wishlists. A lot of sites and platforms have lists of games that are along the lines of "my list of best fps games of 2017", etc. Try creating/adding renegade x to these lists. Even site like GOG, and Steam, which we will never be able to actually put the game on, can still have renegade X mentioned in these lists.

    8. Forum banners, user bios, etc, you could mention Renegade X in these.

    9. Share news, if a new patch comes out, or a cool new map, etc, maybe mention it with your friends, on facebook, in chats, etc.

    10. Be creative, there are other avenues to raise awareness of the game out there. Without being spammy, find excuses to mention the game :).

    • Like 2

    Lag and possibly incorrect ping time reporting

    in Feedback & Bug Reports

    Posted

    7 hours ago, djlaptop said:

    Just wondering what's possible at all.

    Get out of America while you still can.

    You simply need to find a more stable connection.

    Satellite is going to be just as bad.

    I would also say that using cell towers isnt a great option either, as depending on your environment, its performance can vary considerably thought the day. That being said, it will be more stable than satellite.

    You can buy LTE boosters and try that for getting hold of a signal.

    I don't know if you have something like an ombudsmen you can complain to, but if after speaking with you isp, and not getting anywhere, I would start complaining to every third party you can think of, via email, and cc the isp in on the emails.

     

    • Thanks 2
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    [Shrewds Dev Blog] Game Packaging

    in Renegade X

    Posted

    For the last couple weeks, the team has been looking into the packaging of Renegade X. Specifically, the size and how the content is stored and downloaded. In general the team does actively try to avoid large patch sizes, (looking at you AAA games). We have a custom downloading solution, custom patching solution, our own collection of mirrors, etc. That being said, the game has been under development for a good number of years, and over time unused assets have crept into the hundreds of different packages that make up Renegade X.

    For the last couple of weeks, we have been looking into 3 different things related to the game package as a whole. Which I will break down and explain.
    1. The amount of assets we have.
    2. The "compile" type of packages.
    3. The download process.

    The first one, the amount of assets. We grabbed all our assets, and also the list of 3rd party maps on our level download section and asked a simple question, how many assets are not referenced by any of these other assets or anything else? Well after touching 489 files, turns out about 3.13GB's worth! So we pulled out unused assets from each package and stored them in a separate folder,  that is not for inclusion in the public release. These files will be included in the sdk release, so that content creators can use them if needed. But in general, that should reduce the file size of the game by a large percentage. Now this wont translate into a direct saving of 3.13gb, due to a number of reasons, but its still going to be a shrinkage overall.

    The second point, the "compile" of packages. We are a UDK based game, which means we use a fairly open version of the unreal 3 engine. The unreal engine works on a variety of platforms. PC being one of them of course, but there's also xbox, playstation, wii, ios, android, etc. In understanding that nearly all of these platforms run differently and are limited compared to PC, you can understand that the engine has mechanisms to deal with packaging the game for more resource limited environments. Over time, as these consoles are pushed to their limits, it meant that more optimizations are made to the engine to deal with these limitations. Eventually the guys at unreal worked out that some of these optimizations can be brought back over to PC.

    So what does this actually entail? We'll traditionally, if you wanted to run your unreal engine game on a console, you would have to "Cook" the packages to work on that platform. Cooking does a good number of things, including, but not limited to:

    1. compress content
    2. convert the format to be native to the target platform
    3. serialize the objects to be loaded from disk faster
    4. compile everything related to the assets
    5. update cross package dependency import/export/name tables
    6. reduce disk seeking
    7. create a startup package with dev specified common used packages, to save level loading time
    8. other stuff

    Some of these improvements can help PC as well, so we have been experimenting with cooking the packages for the PC platform. We have actually tried cooking before, a very long time ago, and packages that haven't been touched since then should still be cooked, which is why the game release currently stores its data in the cookedpc folder. That being said, our devs have noticed improvements when cooking the rest of the game, but it will be the more hard drive/cpu limited machines that should see the most benefit. For this coming patch, we are aiming to cook all of the content, except map files. The following patch should have the map files cooked as well. This is still being looked at, so we may decide not to use it, if problems arise.

    Our 3rd item, is downloading. As mentioned before, our downloading system is a custom setup, and that is from the need to have a better downloading experience then what was available to us and you from stock setups. Recently, we have been looking into improving this system. Our biggest change looking forward, is to implement torrent style downloading, which is used in a variety of different games in this day and age. Torrenting is more resilient and natively supports multiple download sources, compared to traditional http downloading. Even if we implement torrent based downloading, there will still be a fail back option to http downloading, and as such, we are also looking into what can be done to improve the http download experience as well.

    Now with these changes, even tho they are made to reduce the size of the game, and the speed of which it loads and downloads, and we generally try to keep patches from being bloated; because many files had to be touched, the actual size of the patch will be larger then typical, as even a slight change to a file means that the whole file needs to be updated. This larger then normal patch size should be a once off, or possibly twice off, as the maps will hopefully be cooked as well, in the following patch.

    Overall, result of these changes should be a smaller sized, quicker to load and download Renegade X. Which I think most people would agree, is worth the investment.

    • Like 5
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