Official beta testing time. It now has most of the functionality as well as many bugs (but I’ll go the Microsoft way for now and just call them hidden features) but I’m ready to see it beaten down by people playing it. I’m logging everything that happens today in an effort to find any bugs that occur. More information can be found here:
http://www.captiveimagination.com/forum/index.php?topic=41.0
Or you can just go directly to the page and start it from here:
http://rollarama.captiveimagination.com
Like I said, it’s still pretty buggy, and I am currently having bad problems on my computer which keeps me from being able to test it even, so we’ll see how much damage this release does. :-p
darkfrog
hey, just played a bit against Llama 
But I he was about 3 times as fast than my own player 
Edit: hmm, I'm really slow - maybe even 10 times slower than Llama o_O
and it's lagging quite a bit - the other player pops around . . . still a lot work to do, I'm afraid 
Hmmm, I'm seeing a lot of exceptions being thrown and I think that's causing a lot of the lag. I just restarted the server as a temporary fix. I think the game got confused and was still trying to send events to disconnected players. :?
I saw that slowness issue popup before…it's very strange because I think it is due to a little work-around for height from terrain that I was using to a hardcoded "max y from 0" value so that you can't move as fast in the air as you can when you're on the ground. The fact that it is hardcoded makes it seem very strange that it would be sparratically occurring.
Thanks for giving it a try and even a bigger thank you for the valuable feedback.
darkfrog
Very professional work on gui system and options etc. InGame needs some working to reach the quality of the previous. Keep up the good work
Yes, and even though I seemed to be a lot faster, irrisor appeared laggy here too. Also my own actions seemed lagged (eg there is a lag in picking up the ball, you seem to roll on without it at first)
I also had some crashes when leaving and then trying to enter a game again, with OpenGL window dissappearing, but the application still running in the background
Exception in thread "Thread-35" java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.awt.Container.remove(Unknown Source)
at com.captiveimagination.rollarama.game.ClientSoccerGameState.managedDisable(ClientSoccerGameState.java:251)
at com.captiveimagination.rollarama.game.ClientSoccerGameState.managedCleanup(ClientSoccerGameState.java:258)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.ManagedGameState.cleanup(ManagedGameState.java:68)
at com.jme.app.GameStateNode.cleanup(Unknown Source)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.GameManager.cleanup(GameManager.java:306)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.GameManager.run(GameManager.java:358)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Very interesting. I scored once for myself and once for llama… Lag seems to be an issue.
kman said:
Very professional work on gui system and options etc. InGame needs some working to reach the quality of the previous. Keep up the good work :)
I agree...sadly I probably spent more time writing that menu than I did the game itself. :-p
llama said:
Yes, and even though I seemed to be a lot faster, irrisor appeared laggy here too. Also my own actions seemed lagged (eg there is a lag in picking up the ball, you seem to roll on without it at first)
I also had some crashes when leaving and then trying to enter a game again, with OpenGL window dissappearing, but the application still running in the background
Exception in thread "Thread-35" java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.awt.Container.remove(Unknown Source)
at com.captiveimagination.rollarama.game.ClientSoccerGameState.managedDisable(ClientSoccerGameState.java:251)
at com.captiveimagination.rollarama.game.ClientSoccerGameState.managedCleanup(ClientSoccerGameState.java:258)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.ManagedGameState.cleanup(ManagedGameState.java:68)
at com.jme.app.GameStateNode.cleanup(Unknown Source)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.GameManager.cleanup(GameManager.java:306)
at com.captiveimagination.jme.GameManager.run(GameManager.java:358)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Thanks for the trace, I'll try to get that fixed tonight if I can get my machine to run jME again. :o I might just end up having to set up a ext3 partition and move all of my projects there. My original hope was to have FAT32 partition that I could access all of my projects from on Windows and Linux so I can just dual-boot.
darkfrog
And I think it's the lag that effects the "throwing" too… whenever I want to throw when I have some momentum and charge, the ball just gets left behind me.
mojomonk said:
Very interesting. I scored once for myself and once for llama... Lag seems to be an issue.
There seems to be a consensus about lag. :-p I'll definitely try to deal with the lag as the primary purpose of this game is to show off the capabilities of JGN and PhysicsNetworking so it kinda sucks if the biggest issue is relating to that....however, I don't believe it has to do with them, but rather my poor implementation within Roll-A-Rama. :-o
darkfrog
llama said:
And I think it's the lag that effects the "throwing" too.. whenever I want to throw when I have some momentum and charge, the ball just gets left behind me.
That very well could be since throwing, passing, and knocking possession away from someone all requires a message to be sent to the server to tell it that the client is invoking an action and then the client has to wait for the go-ahead from the server.
Is chat working alright in-game?
darkfrog
I used chat and saw my own messages…
Not that anyone said anything back… 
hehe…it's a good start. 
I just realized I think part of the lag issue is because I forgot to turn the synchronization event cycle back up…I turned it down on development so I could test three clients and a server running on the same machine without causing my machine to lock-up, but I believe I forgot to change it back. :o
It wouldn't really be lag, but choppiness that you'd be seeing, does that seem to reflect at least partially what you're seeing?
darkfrog
Yes, choppiness would describe it well. To be clear, there's no lag in steering and such (at least not with me). Just with seeing the other players, picking up the ball, and shooting/throwing
Then I think that's the primary trouble there. The JGN project has an Updater that receives MessageSenders that have a priority defined for each and the Updater is a thread that simply makes sure those MessageSenders are called with the priority defined and spread distinctly between each other. The priority is not high enough on the players and ball so it creates a choppiness effect.
However, picking up the ball should be a direct update call so shouldn't be related to that. When you roll over the soccer ball it lets you roll right past it for an instant before the ball is picked up? If that's taking time that's either true lag, or it has to do with those exceptions getting thrown causing the server to lag.
Thanks again for helping me debug this.
darkfrog
dude that is one sweet menu
My original hope was to have FAT32 partition that I could access all of my projects from on Windows and Linux so I can just dual-boot.
I dual-boot and I wouldnt touch FAT32 with a 32 foot pole.
hehe, I already had to add some fstab options just so I could use case-sensitive naming conventions…it kept converting all my files and directories to lowercase…ext3 here I come!
darkfrog
Instead of getting any time to work on Roll-A-Rama last night I decided to drive several hours and buy a puppy. :-p
Unfortunately I've got a basketball tournament tonight so it will probably be Friday before you'll see much more on this. Thanks for the constructive criticism and testing, it will help a great deal in diagnosing and fixing the problems.
darkfrog
Okay, I made a couple changes to Roll-A-Rama and it should be functioning much better now. The updates priority has been modified to happen much more frequently and I had neglected to update the game with the most recent version of JGN so I was seeing some bugs I had already fixed. :-p
Let me know if you are still seeing any lag issues.
darkfrog
uh, I cannot even access your site any more :?