A3P [formerly Stainless]

[et1337]

Okay, I added the .htaccess file. Still doesn't load for me, but I do see the progress bar moving steadily up till the end. I also changed from using httplib to Panda3D's own HTTP functions, and the networking is now all UDP. Technically, online play is fully ready to go, but the SourceForge server isn't receiving my UDP packets, so no NAT punch through right now. Hopefully I can find a way around that.

[drwr]

It doesn't load for you? What do you see in the logs?

I was able to get in and start playing in single-player mode just fine. Firefox still isn't caching the file for me for some reason, though. Maybe it doesn't like to cache large files. Guess there will be a good reason to move to a separate p3d file and mf package eventually.

The game certainly looks beautiful! After a couple of minutes of gameplay, I got this:

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ODE INTERNAL ERROR 1: assertion "bNormalizationResult" failed in _dNormalize4() [../../include/ode/odemath.h]

and the networking is now all UDP

I've never been really happy with UDP over the internet. It seems it's always being stopped by every firewall between you and the server you want to reach.

David

[drwr]

Oops, on the second launch of the game I get this error immediately:

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  File "main.py", line 27, in <module>
  File "src\engine.py", line 78, in loadConfigFile
ZeroDivisionError: float division

Looking in the "config" file (which gets written into the game's start directory, which is Panda3D/start unless the game specifies otherwise), I see that window-width and window-height are set to 0. Could this be the problem? I removed the config file and it ran.

David

[et1337]

Yeah, that was the problem. I added a check for zero so that doesn't happen, but I'm wondering why it was zero in the first place. It just saves the values of base.pipe.getDisplayWidth() and height.

I think it's just not working on my Windows 7 machine, I got it working on an XP machine in FF3. On Win 7 in FF3, I'll get the play button, the screen flashes black, and then the panda comes back. On Win 7 in Chrome, the loading bar stays perpetually a few pixels away from loading. The logs are pretty much the same as the one I posted earlier.

Reason I switched to UDP is so that I can do NAT punch-through, which apparently is incredibly difficult to do with TCP. I found an eight-page white paper on it.

[drwr]

It just saves the values of base.pipe.getDisplayWidth() and height.

Ah, this method is not implemented on all platforms. It particular, it always reports 0 on Mac OSX, which is where I happened to be running when I got that crash.

On Win 7 in FF3, I'll get the play button, the screen flashes black, and then the panda comes back. On Win 7 in Chrome, the loading bar stays perpetually a few pixels away from loading. The logs are pretty much the same as the one I posted earlier.

Would you mind posting the logs from one of these failed sessions anyway? The log you posted from the failed attempt to load tagger shows it downloading 60.3% of the p3d file, and then you left the page. It never got to 100%. It's not clear whether the download had stalled, or some other connectivity issue had occurred. However, from your Win7/FF3 report, it sounds like the game launched but immediately exited (the p3dsession.log file should be interesting). On the Win7/Chrome report, it sounds like another connectivity issue, maybe a failure to contact runtime.panda3d.org. The log file would clarify this.

David

[et1337]

Actually, neither log file is very interesting. I think it hard-crashes upon starting my game; double-clicking the p3d file now results in a hard crash, with no log error info. Don't worry about it, though. I think something got screwed up with my install, because like I said, it works on my XP machine. I'll try this again after a new runtime / packp3d comes out, and see how it goes then.

[rdb]

It just saves the values of base.pipe.getDisplayWidth() and height.

Ah, this method is not implemented on all platforms. It particular, it always reports 0 on Mac OSX, which is where I happened to be running when I got that crash.

For the record, I just checked in support for display_width/display_height on OSX to CVS. Should be in my next plugin release (which I'm going to do later this week).

[rdb]

FYI I've just updated the plugin builds:
http://www.panda3d.org/phpbb2/viewtopic ... 8710#48710

Among the improvements are getDisplayWidth/Height support on OSX, a "morepy" package and David's plugin fixes.

[et1337]

This release worked great in FF3, Chrome, and IE8 all running on Win7! I put the new P3D up here, complete with plugin detection/installation JavaScript shamelessly ripped from drwr's plugin demo site.

I had one problem which probably has as much to do with my game as it does with the plugin. It crashes upon trying to read a replay file from a previous game. I can see that it successfully writes the replay file, but apparently it can't read it back. The log files haven't shown anything useful so far. Since the main menu will try and play back the last game replay, you'll have to delete the "replays" folder in %Panda3Dfolder%\start if you want to play more than one game.

I also had a weird bug when double-clicking the p3d file, where the window came up minimized by default, and I could only get it to show by doing a "show desktop" and then restoring all the windows.

Known bugs on my end include the tutorial mode not working at all, and there's no easy way to release focus from the game.

Anyways, great work rdb and drwr! This is awesome!

[drwr]

Looking great! For whatever reason, Firefox is caching the p3d file for me now, so I only have to suffer the download on the first run.

I do get this error consistently as soon as I start to roll:

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IndexError: list index out of range
le "C:\Users\et1337\Documents\Stainless\dist\src\net.py", line 466, in update
  File "C:\Users\et1337\Documents\Stainless\dist\src\net.py", line 364, in processPacket
  File "C:\Users\et1337\Documents\Stainless\dist\src\controllers.py", line 847,
in clientUpdate
  File "C:\Users\et1337\Documents\Stainless\dist\src\controllers.py", line 599,
in clientUpdate
IndexError: list index out of range

As for this error:

I also had a weird bug when double-clicking the p3d file, where the window came up minimized by default, and I could only get it to show by doing a "show desktop" and then restoring all the windows.

I know what this is--the window is actually being placed offscreen by mistake. Makes it hard to find it. I've already checked in a fix, and it will be available with the next plugin update.

David

[et1337]

You'll need to pick a weapon first. When the match first starts and you see all the circles with Xs, use WASD to buy weapons and units. From left to right, you pick your primary wep, secondary wep, special ability, and the weapon and special ability for each of your units. If the tutorial were working, it would have told you this.

But yeah, I do need to add a check to make sure the player actually buys a weapon. Otherwise that would be a boring first match.

[rdb]

I've just played it on my Ubuntu machine. Works great. This game is awesome!

However, the .p3d is not cached here. Every time I run the game, firefox has to redownload it.

I think this deserves a place in the screenshots section. Would you mind if I placed a few screenshots of Stainless there?

[et1337]

rdb, glad you enjoyed the game! And I would love to have some Stainless screenshots in the gallery! Feel free to use any of the screenshots on the media page if you want. Note that the individual model close-ups are Blender renders though.

Caching didn't work for me either, in any of the browsers. It's probably some setting I need to add on the SourceForge server or something.

Did it crash when trying to run a replay? I've narrowed the bug down a bit, and it seems that my use of pickle.load() is the problem. Turns out it opens the file just fine, but the call to pickle actually causes p3dpythonw.exe to hard-crash.

[drwr]

I had an error message in my log about a missing codec when it tried to call pickle.load(). Try using "-r morepy" to get all the codecs.

I'm still getting these ODE errors on my Mac:

ODE INTERNAL ERROR 1: assertion "bNormalizationResult" failed in _dNormalize4() [../../include/ode/odemath.h]

Might be something to do with the floating-point characteristics of a Mac, or the ODE library there, or something.

David

[rdb]

Note that these kind of ODE errors only pop up in a debug build of ODE. Et1337 is probably the release build of ODE (that might be the case for the Windows build of Panda) so he won't notice these errors.

[et1337]

Mmm, I've noticed those bugs before, but I haven't seen one in a few weeks. Usually it's related to a trimesh having a non-coplanar quad, or an ODE body having a huge amount of force/torque/speed due to a bug. But again, I haven't seen one of them in awhile; if it's popping up regularly for you, maybe I should look into it more.

And I already tried doing "-r morepy"; unfortunately it didn't help anything. But, I updated the P3D anyway, in case it does help on Macs.

[drwr]

Should we be shipping a release build of ODE with the plugin?

David

[rdb]

That's a fine idea. I'll do that.

[rdb]

rdb, glad you enjoyed the game! And I would love to have some Stainless screenshots in the gallery! Feel free to use any of the screenshots on the media page if you want. Note that the individual model close-ups are Blender renders though.

Hey, how should I call the game in the screenshots section? I noticed you recently switched to the name A3P, are you no longer using stainless as name?

[et1337]

Yes, the new name is A3P, and it shouldn't be changing again anytime soon. Sorry, I should have said something earlier on here about it.

[wvd]

I've tried out the browser plugin, it worked all fine except for two things. First, firefox doesn't seem to cache my download, since it's also getting game.p3d the second time. I'm on windows 32-bit. Last thing, the screen resolution is too big for me, this means I have to scroll to see the whole game. It might be an idea to add some kind of fullscreen-option. Other then that, it's amazing!

[et1337]

I updated the browser plugin. Now multiplayer support is fully functional! (at least on Windows). And it even uses a separate package for all the assets!

Here's an updated gameplay trailer.



Here's a feature list:
- The lobby server is finally live!
- Reloading and clips. Units that are reloading are highlighted to show their vulnerability.
- Shadow mapping
- New map: “Orbital”
- Improved unit controls: you can only buy two helper units now, but you can control them more easily with the Q and E keys.
- New weapon: Pistol. Shoots darts capable of pinning enemies to the wall in certain circumstances.
- Shattering glass; AI bots can’t see or pathfind through the glass. You can shoot the glass to let them through, or leave it and use it to your advantage.
- Drastically improved network performance and reliability. In addition to a slew of bug fixes and optimizations, the new network code uses data compression and client-side interpolation to keep things running smooth. Bandwidth usage was cut down by about 60% in some cases.

[drwr]

Awesome!

David

[et1337]

Beta 2 is out now! Check it out! This'll be the last beta release before 1.0.

The one major issue I've been having is that mouse control is broken on OSX. Apparently the cursor is failing to re-center. Does anyone have mouse code that works on OSX?

That being said, a ton of new features have been added, here's an overview:

- New camera angle and aiming methods. Should be familiar to fans of Gears of War and loads of other third person shooters.
- New money system (the return of drop pods!) with a whole new UI for purchasing items to boot.
- Massive AI overhaul using navigation meshes rather than waypoints.
- A whole new game type called Survival. Think Nazi Zombies or Dawn of War 2′s Last Stand, although maybe not quite as awesome.
- Three new fabulous maps created by the excellent Bobpoblo. Seriously, check out his CS:S maps, he’s a genius with Hammer.
- The molotov cocktail is the latest addition to our assortment of weapons available. Use it wisely.
- Revamped online lobby complete with a nifty global chat box.
- At least 3.7 million other tiny little updates and bug fixes. Like the spawn points and home bases, which have been modified to be much less annoying.

[rdb]

The one major issue I've been having is that mouse control is broken on OSX. Apparently the cursor is failing to re-center. Does anyone have mouse code that works on OSX?

Hm, are you using MRelative mode for mouse movement? I think that is the only way to get mouse movement working correctly on OSX, thanks to OSX' restrictions on how the application can control the mouse.

[drwr]

Unfortunately, MRelative doesn't work when the window is embedded in a browser on Mac. The browser won't yield control of the mouse. So the short answer is, it's not possible to do classic mouselook-style movement on a Mac in a browser.

Your two options are (1) pull the game window out of the browser frame, or (2) use some different mouse control system (or make another system available).

David

[et1337]

Bummer. Thanks, Jobs. Now when you say a "different mouse control system", do you mean controlling the mouse via some method other than Panda3D? Or do you mean ditching mouselook completely in favor of something else?

[MrMarkie]

Seems like I can stop looking for a solution then. Hey Et, great work anyways

[drwr]

I mean ditching mouselook style.

It's possible that we will still find a way around this problem in a future release. Admittedly, I haven't yet tried very hard, having been distracted by more pressing issues. We do have an in, since the plugin code itself runs within the memory space of the browser, so it might have sufficient permissions to take over the mouse control from the browser and proxy for the Panda application. This will be fairly complicated, though; it will mean sending mouse information back and forth through a pipe stream.

Which I'm perfectly willing to do, if it works. But it might take a few weeks more for me to get to it.

David

[et1337]

I'm willing to wait, but that sounds like a lot of work for a relatively small feature. In the interest of letting you work on more interesting things for Panda3D, I'll probably just provide an option to pop out a new window. Mac users can deal wid it.