OMG!!! Computer Gaming World review - Page 2

WarpStorm · December 30, 2002, 12:43

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
OK, I was going a little overboard there. Most of what you're saying is correct. I certainly don't agree, though, with your explanation for lag. The net just isn't that slow, and prediction is mostly used to smooth out motion in realtime games. That is, say I'm playing Quake with a guy on dialup who has a ping of 200, so his character is only updating five times a second. My machine is running at 60 FPS, so there must be prediction to keep things from looking choppy. Prediction does not, however, compensate effectively for dropped packets or a legitimately bad connection.

He didn't go into the fact that PTW is peer to peer and every packet has to be confirmed by all players and resent till all players get agree that the message has been recieved. This is the cause of lag.

Quote:

I have never seen a drive just randomly get corrupted (especially an NTFS drive) where I couldn't link it to a legitimate hardware problem. Last week, PTW locked my machine during a delayed write and corrupted my hard drive. It destroyed my SYSTEM32 directory (making the machine unbootable) and my Documents and Settings folder (destroying my financial records and a large project I was working on, both of which had changed a lot since I backed them up two weeks ago). This really isn't acceptable behavior for retail software.

So you're accusing Infogrames of ruining your hard drive. FUD.

Jaguar · December 30, 2002, 13:46

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
Even if that were the case, it doesn't really excuse the fact that PTW is excessively slow and buggy. I have worked with all kinds of Win2K machines for years. I have never seen Win2K just randomly lock up in the middle of something when there wasn't some sort of a hardware issue (usually explained by a blue screen) which I could attribute to an actual problem. I have never seen a drive just randomly get corrupted (especially an NTFS drive) where I couldn't link it to a legitimate hardware problem. Last week, PTW locked my machine during a delayed write and corrupted my hard drive. It destroyed my SYSTEM32 directory (making the machine unbootable) and my Documents and Settings folder (destroying my financial records and a large project I was working on, both of which had changed a lot since I backed them up two weeks ago). This really isn't acceptable behavior for retail software.

It is if I've played three 120 hour games (giga map!) and not had a problem.

Dimension · December 30, 2002, 16:14

Quote:

Originally posted by WarpStorm
So you're accusing Infogrames of ruining your hard drive. FUD.

I'm not actually accusing anybody of physically damaging my hard drive. There's nothing wrong with any of my hard drives. PTW crashed and corrupted the directory structure of my boot drive. It's not FUD; it's a fact. Maybe it was just bad luck, but if you're suggesting that I'm spreading unfounded rumors about PTW being buggy, then it looks like you've got quite a conspiracy on your hands, because everybody else is saying it, too. Even the one guy saying he really likes multiplayer admits it crashes a lot.

Huzurdaddi · December 30, 2002, 18:37

Quote:

He didn't go into the fact that PTW is peer to peer and every packet has to be confirmed by all players and resent till all players get agree that the message has been recieved. This is the cause of lag.

Uhm, all RTS games have to do the same thing. There are many schemes. Fraxis was either ignorant of how to correctly program the networking component or they did not want to spend the time. Either way the result is the same: the game is far too laggy to be playable.

Quote:

The guy is an idiot. <---- period

How does it smell that far up fraxis's ass? Just wondering. You are the one who has been posting furiously since the game's release that PTW works correctly. It doesn't everyone knows it. You are simply attempting to spread FUD to help stimulate sales. Do you work for fraxis? No wait, I remember, you assemble computers. Maybe you do that for fraxis. whatever.

ahh ... a fair review:

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/feature...2002/pc33.html

WarpStorm · December 30, 2002, 19:57

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
I'm not actually accusing anybody of physically damaging my hard drive. There's nothing wrong with any of my hard drives. PTW crashed and corrupted the directory structure of my boot drive. It's not FUD; it's a fact.

Well, any program that writes to your hard drive can do this if it (or any other program on your system if you are using one of MS older OSs) crashes while writing. Like I said, FUD.

WarpStorm · December 30, 2002, 20:09

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi
Uhm, all RTS games have to do the same thing. There are many schemes. Fraxis was either ignorant of how to correctly program the networking component or they did not want to spend the time. Either way the result is the same: the game is far too laggy to be playable.

Well, the AOE series used a 5 animation 'frame' (this is enough to mask 1/6 second of lag totally) to allow resync. This basically means that the server kept trying to resync the clients data during this time while the clients used client side processing to respond to the user. Only if lag was greater than this window did you see it at all.

They used a client-server configuration rather than the peer to peer that PTW uses. This will lower the message traffic as the number of players goes up but means that the server has to do all the processing for all players (it also implies that the server should be the player with the best connection to the net). (I probably would have gone this route myself.) The peer to peer means that all players will run at best as fast as the worst player-player internet connection and as fast as the worst CPU in the game.

notyoueither · December 30, 2002, 23:33

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi
blah, blah, blah

Oh look, the yapping one is back.

Did you miss nap time today, junior?

Nubclear · December 31, 2002, 01:49

Quote:

Originally posted by notyoueither

Oh look, the yapping one is back.

Did you miss nap time today, junior?

Unprovoked ad hominems usually weaken ones arguement....

Dimension · December 31, 2002, 02:43

Quote:

Originally posted by WarpStorm
Well, any program that writes to your hard drive can do this if it (or any other program on your system if you are using one of MS older OSs) crashes while writing. Like I said, FUD.

It's time for you to stop now. I explained myself completely and you're still saying the same ignorant thing. Win2K SP3 is not "one of MS's older OS's" either. Obviously, everybody is not having their whole system freeze and corrupt their data, but PTW was made poorly. That's a fact, not FUD. It's asinine for you to chime in with your buzzword accusations when you don't have a leg to stand on.

I like PTW. I'd buy it again. From a coding standpoint, though, it's the worst implementation of a retail game I've seen in years. That's all I'm saying, so stop trying to make this some personal issue. Standing up for Firaxis is fine, but at least make your comments rational.

notyoueither · December 31, 2002, 03:04

Quote:

Originally posted by Tassadar5000

Unprovoked ad hominems usually weaken ones arguement....

Oh look, another one!

Try reading what I responded to, comrade.

Dimension · December 31, 2002, 03:05

All you people who think there is some kind of an excuse for the mutiplayer implementation of PTW to be so horrible should look at SMAC.

Alpha Centauri is an old game. It was made by Firaxis, and it shipped with working multiplayer support. That's right. Hotseat, LAN, and TCP/IP play worked fine out of the box. I've played several lag-free games of online SMAC, and the only time I ever had someone disconnect was when they were playing on a POS computer with a defective Apollo Pro motherboard that kept crashing.

notyoueither · December 31, 2002, 03:11

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
It's time for you to stop now. I explained myself completely and you're still saying the same ignorant thing. Win2K SP3 is not "one of MS's older OS's" either. Obviously, everybody is not having their whole system freeze and corrupt their data, but PTW was made poorly. That's a fact, not FUD. It's asinine for you to chime in with your buzzword accusations when you don't have a leg to stand on.

I like PTW. I'd buy it again. From a coding standpoint, though, it's the worst implementation of a retail game I've seen in years. That's all I'm saying, so stop trying to make this some personal issue. Standing up for Firaxis is fine, but at least make your comments rational.

Sorry bud, you made this personal a long time ago with me. Now you do the same with someone who has been quite civil. You don't seem to be able to do anything else. You give strength to the arguement that there are very few ways to deal with trolls.

BTW, only idiots blame a game when Windoze blows their hard drive. Sorry to break it to you.

Oh, and BTW, if your reading comprehension were not so pitiful, you would have picked up that the crashes in the game I described were due to the hosts problems with his ISP.

vondrack · December 31, 2002, 06:34

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
All you people who think there is some kind of an excuse for the mutiplayer implementation of PTW to be so horrible should look at SMAC.

Alpha Centauri is an old game. It was made by Firaxis, and it shipped with working multiplayer support. That's right. Hotseat, LAN, and TCP/IP play worked fine out of the box. I've played several lag-free games of online SMAC, and the only time I ever had someone disconnect was when they were playing on a POS computer with a defective Apollo Pro motherboard that kept crashing.

I have never played SMAC online (and very little SP), but I do remember reading a discussion about its MP some time ago here on Poly. The major difference between the SMAC MP and Civ3 MP was said to be the fact that in SMAC MP, only one player was allowed to do things at any one time (I-go-U-go scheme). Civ3 allows players to do certain things even when it is not their turn, which heavily increases network traffic and adds a lot to the lag problem.

Note: anyone correct me, if I am wrong - this is what I recall reading, but I may be wrong.

And yet one more note regarding PtW crashing Win2k, causing data to become corrupt. Well... AFAIK, Win2k is supposed to NEVER ALLOW that, no matter what a bad piece of software tries to do. So even if PtW managed to cause such a bad crash, which I highly doubt (after spending so much time running PtW under WinXP Pro, never having a slightest problem), it would be Win2k to blame, at least "too", if not "only". Actually, from the programmer's point of view, blaming PtW for corrupting Windows system directory is just nonsense, as PtW never writes anything to disk directly (Win2k would never allow that), so all PtW does is it is using Win2k write-to-disk routines to write data. If these routines go amok and corrupt the file system, it is hardly PtW to blame for... I would say that the Win2k crash Dimension mentioned was just an unhappy coincidence and had actually nothing to do with PtW itself.

Dimension · December 31, 2002, 09:20

vondrack:

Wow, just when I was going to abandon the thread someone posts something on-topic.

No, SMAC lets human players take their turns at the same time in TCP/IP games. Units moving in the same area will sometimes get warnings to try the move later, but you only have to wait until the other player is done with the unit they're moving. The only time you're stuck waiting is at the end of the turn and then during the turn upkeep if there is a moron who won't close a popup message on their screen.

I heard Civ Net sucked, but SMAC worked well. It even let you chat with the microphone. It's ironic that Firaxis made SMAC and didn't do a better job with PTW. I suppose they were being pushed to add new and exciting multiplayer modes, instead of just simply giving Civ3 the ability for net play.

Back to this old topic... Yeah, I know Win2K is also at fault. I hope PTW wasn't doing anything with my System32 directory, but apparently Windows was when it crashed. It doesn't have to be Win2K "going amok" though. Abstraction in Win2K isn't complete; there's room for software to screw things up. It was an Atlas 10K drive I've never had problems with on a newer Adaptec card. It could have been a SCSI problem, but everything's been fine since I low-levelled the drive. Bad drives don't magically get better. It's just ironic that PTW crashed then Win2K froze completely. I don't see the need to talk about it so much, but when people accuse me of being full of **** I defend my position. PTW crashed then the system froze, and the drive was so corrupted it wouldn't reboot. If you think those are unrelated that's fine. I won't say anything unless it happens again.

Hurricane · December 31, 2002, 10:14

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
I heard Civ Net sucked, but SMAC worked well. It even let you chat with the microphone. It's ironic that Firaxis made SMAC and didn't do a better job with PTW. I suppose they were being pushed to add new and exciting multiplayer modes, instead of just simply giving Civ3 the ability for net play.

Wasn't it so that Firaxis was unable to use most of the code from SMAC because Brian Reynolds (?) had the rights. So in fact, they had to create much of the code from scratch.

Tiberius · December 31, 2002, 10:56

I don't know whether Brian Reynolds had or not the rights for the SMAC code, but the departure of so many valuable programmers/designers from Firaxis (Brian Reynolds, Jason Coleman, Doug Kaufman, Dave Inscore) certainly influenced in a negative way the development of Civ3.

WarpStorm · December 31, 2002, 10:59

Actually, I've had few problems with PTW MP, when I play with other players who have few problems.

Having said that, I really want Firaxis to implement a 'true' turn-based mode of play for PTW. This would eliminate nearly all lag issues and make it a moot point. The best way to do this would be essentially like PBEM without the EM part. The only net traffic going on when it's not your turn should be diplomacy and chat. Yes, there would be longer downtimes when you can't do anything, but when it is your turn it would be smooth (as you only send out messages at the end of your turn). The big change that would be needed is an event log (or similar mechanism) so that you know what happened between last turn and this (this would be useful for PBEM and HotSeat also).

Truce, Dimension.

Huzurdaddi · December 31, 2002, 17:13

Quote:

Unprovoked ad hominems usually weaken ones arguement....

Does it really weaken his arguments when that is all that his arguments are composed of? LOL.

Quote:

They used a client-server configuration rather than the peer to peer that PTW uses.

I hope someone, someday, does a teardown on the protocol used in Civ3. It would make a great post mortem.

Quote:

you would have picked up that the crashes in the game I described were due to the hosts problems with his ISP

Uhm, you do understand that an ISP is incapable of causing a crash, right? It's up to the application to correctly handle mal-formed packets. No matter what crap gets sent to your socket as a developer it is your responsibility to not crash.

vondrack · December 31, 2002, 18:06

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi
Uhm, you do understand that an ISP is incapable of causing a crash, right? It's up to the application to correctly handle mal-formed packets. No matter what crap gets sent to your socket as a developer it is your responsibility to not crash.

Uhm, do you understand that if the problem is that the ISP changes the IP address of the hosting machine on the fly (which was the problem nye mentioned earlier in this thread), packets sent to the outdated IP address - whatever "crap" they contain - will never arrive at the target machine, effectively locking the application... Malformed, shmalformed - there is nothing your correctly developed application can actually handle, right?

Happy New Year!

Nubclear · December 31, 2002, 19:00

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi

Does it really weaken his arguments when that is all that his arguments are composed of? LOL.

Two ad hominems don't make a right. I suggest you refrain from using them as well.

RomanGod · January 2, 2003, 04:24

Quote:

Originally posted by vondrack

Uhm, do you understand that if the problem is that the ISP changes the IP address of the hosting machine on the fly (which was the problem nye mentioned earlier in this thread), packets sent to the outdated IP address - whatever "crap" they contain - will never arrive at the target machine, effectively locking the application... Malformed, shmalformed - there is nothing your correctly developed application can actually handle, right?

ummm.... no. The, or any, ISP does not change the computer's IP address 'on the fly'. With broadband connections, IP addresses do not change, period. Unless you purchase one. With analog connections (14.4k, 33.6k, 56k) the IP address changes every time you disconnect from the current session.

Dis · January 2, 2003, 04:29

actually I have a cable modem. My IP changes all the time. well not that often, but it does change.

Alexander's Horse · January 2, 2003, 06:45

I'm amazed at the ability of some here to defend the indefensible. Those of us who still play civ 2 get a reliable multiplayer experience and the MP version of that game was developed six years ago.

Cesa · January 2, 2003, 09:06

Quote:

Originally posted by Tiberius
What bothers me with these PtW reviews is that most of them give a 1 for the gameplay. For the gameplay, which is the same as in Civ3 vanilla! No, I'm wrong, it is not the same, it is better: the AI is better, the new city improvements are good; good additions are the radar towers, the new civs, and so on. You could argue that these should have been in the original civ3, but they were not. Period. If one gave 5 stars for the civ3 gameplay, he must be an idiot to give 1 star for a better civ3.

If they wanted to punish Firaxis for a crappy MP, then they should have given a 1 for the MP implementation (prior the patches) not for the gameplay. I wouldn't be very surprised if they changed the grades for the graphics, too

Saying that "There isn't a single, solitary element of this package worth $3, much less $30" is an idiocy, I agree. I would have paid 30 bucks for PBEM and hotseat alone, so spare me with this “doesn’t worth 3$” crap. It worths as much as people are paying for it.

A reviewer is supposed to review the expansion pack itself, i.e. (in this case) the difference between vanilla Civ3 and Civ3+PTW. So what he's saying with the 1 star gameplay is that the difference is small and that the PTW additions isn't worth the money. If reviewer was to review the total experience a game with an expansion pack would always get a higher grade than without the XP, which doesn't make much sense.

vondrack · January 2, 2003, 12:32

Quote:

Originally posted by RomanGod
ummm.... no. The, or any, ISP does not change the computer's IP address 'on the fly'. With broadband connections, IP addresses do not change, period. Unless you purchase one. With analog connections (14.4k, 33.6k, 56k) the IP address changes every time you disconnect from the current session.

Would you care to read nye's post?

You might have expressed it differently, but the thing is the problem nye mentioned was that the hosting machine had its IP changed every couple of hours. If you wish to nit-pick on me using "being changed on the fly" instead of "being reassigned" to describe that, feel free to do so.

Tiberius · January 2, 2003, 14:30

Quote:

Originally posted by Cesa
A reviewer is supposed to review the expansion pack itself, i.e. (in this case) the difference between vanilla Civ3 and Civ3+PTW. So what he's saying with the 1 star gameplay is that the difference is small and that the PTW additions isn't worth the money. If reviewer was to review the total experience a game with an expansion pack would always get a higher grade than without the XP, which doesn't make much sense.

Give me a break. If the MP had worked perfectly, the reviewer would have given PtW 5 stars for the gameplay, I bet. The gameplay did change to the better, so giving 1 star for the gameplay, not for the MP implementation or overall is stupid.
He should have said:
gameplay: 5 stars (because of the better AI, new city improvements, new civs, etc)
MP: one star
overall value: 2 stars
This would have been logical (an example I don't agree with, but I wouldn't protest against it).

Tiberius · January 2, 2003, 14:32

Quote:

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
Those of us who still play civ 2 get a reliable multiplayer experience and the MP version of that game was developed six years ago.

Good for you. What are you doing in the civ3 forums then? (other than trolling, of course)

woody · January 2, 2003, 15:45

Quote:

Originally posted by Dimension
Civ3 fans are still going to pay for PTW, but many of them are doing so while feeling that they shouldn't have to.

Well, I'm a Civ3 fan, and I certainly don't plan to ever buy PtW. While Civ3 eventually was patched to be a great game, I don't have the same hope for PtW. I've bought every Civ game since the original Civ1, but I had enough after the way Civ3 was handled.

Never again will I buy a Firaxis product, without reading many reviews and waiting at least 6 months for patches.

Alexander's Horse · January 2, 2003, 17:53

Quote:

Originally posted by Tiberius

Good for you. What are you doing in the civ3 forums then? (other than trolling, of course)

Some of us would like this game to work.

Tiberius · January 2, 2003, 17:57

Some of us are playing with this game and are enjoying it.