Author Topic: Co-op experience report, nov 2021  (Read 1426 times)

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Offline shodan

  • 22
Co-op experience report, nov 2021
Hi,

I have been playing some freespace in the past two weeks in co-op with a friend over the internet.
And this is how this went

We had a few unsuccessful sessions before finally succeeding.



Connecting as LAN via Hamachi did see and connect the games, but would fail at
"Please wait until all clients have finished joining" https://i.imgur.com/hhbXLwC.png

Then as recommended we switched to PXO. It worked for my friend but it did not work for me.
I was trying to figure out the problem with wireshark when I figured something about hamachi was causing the problem
Specifically "hamachi tunelling service", I had to kill that process every time I want to play, just closing hamachi was not enough.

I'm not sure why, it seems on my computer the FSO engine tried to connect to PXO via hamachi even though there's no way to the internet ?

Also strange that my friend with a similar setup, did not have this issue.

The connection problem was manifested by extremely slow validation of .tbl that eventually time out after over 15 minutes.

----------------------

Next issue we had was figuring out the game creation process.
This is heavy and convoluted to have

First the PXO chatrooms, that you have to be in the same channel as the host, then click games
Then join that game, then you're in a pre-game lobby which is the only moment the engine will allow joining.
Then briefing worked great, so did the cinematics !
Ship selection and weapon loadout was not working correctly for the host, but I was not there to see if he was doing it right.

------------------------

We both started playing with mouse and keyboard and the default control, are simply not useable by any normal human person.
I directed my friend to just wiping all controls and started over. This makes on-board extremely tedious unfortunately.
I would hope Knossos could help here and suggest several sane control layouts for various input devices.
And a way to swap them in and out and share them to other player with ease.

------------------------

I've seen discussion of hitbox problems. So far I only played about 6 missions of FS1 and there have been no hitbox issues.
My hits appear to hit all the time and work great.
I have LTE internet of poor quality, yet in about 5 hours of play time we experienced zero network glitches, which is just amazing.

I think for ease of use, the ability to join at any time, possibly by just right clicking my friend in steam and clicking "Join"  would make this experience FAR more accessible.
I really hope that if anyone is still banging on that net code, that this is top priority.  The rest has been really excellent.

I will try to screen record my next co-op experience with my friend from both perspectives.

In the mean time here is my playthrough of the Eve of Destruction mission

https://old.reddit.com/r/freespace/comments/qvtjed/eve_of_destruction_sm101afs2/




https://old.reddit.com/r/freespace/comments/qrcuc8/tried_to_start_knossos_fs1_campaign_coop_but/

 

Offline Cyborg17

  • Moderator
  • 29
  • Life? Don't talk to me about life....
Re: Co-op experience report, nov 2021
I really appreciate your feedback.  I will try to point Taylor to your Hamachi issue, which I have not heard about before, and is a little outside my wheelhouse.  Perhaps Hamachi uses the same network port?

In any case, in game joining is planned but I have not worked on it for a while, to be honest.

I am very excited to hear about no hitbox issues. That is where the bulk of my efforts went.