The Kingdom of Philtopia

Well for the third installment of updates I am afraid there are no real code updates, I took the week off as I needed a break. There is still however some great news relating to Parsec despite my lack of feature updates.

Jason W has made some progress with the SDL remake, he gets a game window, with some graphical issues but it is running. Also Jason got an e-mail from one of the original developers of the game and was given Admin access to the original Sourceforge page. This means we now have a better chance at getting attention driven back towards Parsec. The admin access to the SF page also gives us the added bonus of being able to edit and add news to the parsec.org website which is where anyone feeling nostaglic would potentially end up first.

Jason also gave me developer access to the SF repository so I have committed all of my client/server changes into it so they now come from the same source tree. This is great news because before I was working out of a seperate codebase on my 2 dev boxes and a 3rd one for just the server, eeeeek. But that’s all tidied up now.

So this was still a week of progress and the new Parsec Era draws ever so close.

Changes:

• Got homing missiles functioning correctly server side
• Fixed an issue client side to allow homing missiles to properly animate towards their targets
• Created a new RE_CREATEMINE event client side to handle mines since the EXTRA event is not allowed from clients
• Created handler server side for the RE_CREATEMINE
• Fixed bug where the mines detonated on drop
• Fixed bug where the client would not clean up its own mines upon detonation that was leaving ghost mines behind
• Fixed issue where chat always displayed local players name and not the name of the sender (turned out to be a huge PITA)
• Removed net.server command in favour of connect command
• Removed net.server menu item
• Made Connect button connect to spenced.com server as it is the only existing server at the moment
• Defaulted console mode to talk, all console commands require / now but talking does not require say

Known Criticals:

• If your client is laggy and requires a state sync the server or client may close with an ASSERTion
• Sometimes Mines may cause a client crash, has only happened a couple times

Binaries are up to date with latest changes get them here: Linux and Mac if you need the game data it is here

Another busy week of changes, almost all the items you are given by default on connect now work, the only thing left is the EMP which I will investigate next week. After I get that working I will look into the extra powerups such as the helix cannon or swarm missiles. Jason is continuing his work on a new SDL based client but it is still in the very early stages.

Changes:

• Tidied up the menus to a single 4 menu screen
• Removed Demo/p2p listing in side list, replaced with net.server syntax
• Mac client now uses pre packaged libs for ease of use
• Server now properly handles dumb fire missiles
• Client can now handle Remote events from server for the dumb fire missiles
• Server side collision model for dumb fire missiles implemented
• Split binaries/data into separate files parsecdata.zip, parsec-mac-bin.zip, parsec-linux-bin.zip for easier download updates
• Fixed bug with Missile collision system and now dumb fire and homing missiles can do damage
• Fixed issue with laser upgrades where the server wasn’t recognizing the upgrade resulting in damage to other players always remaining level 0, now upgrade 1 and 2 work correctly
• Fixed issue with repair and energy boost not giving amount defined in server configuration

Known Criticals:

These issues have cropped up during play testing the client/server

• Remote clients dropping mines may abort, This is due to the client trying to execute a ship killed event when the server does not recognize mines so the death is invalid
• Firewalled users filtering UDP that interferes with Parsec may cause a rapid reconnect/disconnect event and the server aborts
• Invulnerability power up becomes permanent, the invulnerability power up has been disabled until corrected

It was a pretty successful week so far, it is starting to become a lot of fun, there was a 5 player battle mid week to test out the dumbfire rocket collisions. Currently the servers player limit is set to 16 I would like to try and max that out at some point.

Jason W who made some of the original changes in 2004 has started working on the windows build. From my understanding he became horribly frustrated and may be working on creating an SDL user layer which would benefit and improve all 3 platforms. I will continue implementing the server one piece at a time and if you want to check in and have a fight feel free to download the files just keep in mind the mac client is exceptionally limited at the moment, linux however seems able to do fullscreen, mouse input and is generally more stable.

If you decide to try it out the server is 212.13.194.182 This address will be changing hopefully very soon, the server just grabs the first IP (fixme) on startup currently, this one will be going away. I’ll update this post if it happens before next weeks update.

Stay tuned

Ever hear of Parsec? probably not, it was a hopeful Internet space shooter back in 1999-2001. The team developing it released a running demo version and 2 LAN builds and that’s all the public ever really saw.

In 2003 they released the source code!

Then nothing happened.

A couple times 1 or 2 people (myself included) tried to fiddle with the source but this usually ended in frustration and giving up.

About a week ago I was searching for any sign of activity ANYWHERE regarding this and I found a mailing list from 2008. It turned out someone named Jason W had modified the source to some degree and had set up a linux build that worked better with the GNU tools than the original distribution and got a linux client to build. Turns out the SVN still worked for his branch and i tried it out myself. Sure enough it did work! I was back in.

Then I took his code and made a mac x11 client out of it
Then I took the original server code and got it to build

The server was fairly broken, it would crash out the second anyone fired anything other than a laser. I did some tweaking, properly defined some objects and I was able to get it to run pretty stable.

Yesterday I had a 3 client match over the internet over the server and clients I had built, something that probably hasnt happened with this code in a long time.

Also Jason W’s interest has been captured again and he is working on getting the Windows build working again.

Sure this is a very old project that technically died long ago, but in that time no one has created anything similar so it is worth a second look.

Linux build: parsec-linux-net-alpha.tar.gz

This was made on Ubuntu, I have tested it on debian as well, other linux distro’s success may vary depending on library naming.

Mac x11 build: parsec-macx11-net-alpha.zip

This requires X11 installed , the resolution currently can’t be changed

Known Issues with clients:

-The menu data is from the LAN build and some options do not work

-Mac client does not do fullscreen or resolution changes

-No joystick support on mac

-Joystick support built in linux client but untested

Current server limitations:

-Missiles do not work (you can fire them but the server doesn’t process them yet)

-No helix cannon

-No lightning gun

However, this is just the beginning and less than a weeks work…And it’s still fun even in this state

In 2669 the TCS Concordia is ambushed by the Kilrathi and disabled. The hulk of the ship crashes on Vespus.

Costa Concordia, run aground in 2012

So I was playing with the boys and I don’t know what the heck these weird block things they have are but before I knew it I had built a broadsword from Wing Commander!

Today I purchased the second of 3 planned locomotives to run on my layout. The first being last April when I bought my DCC system was a Chessie GP40. As you may have noticed if you have for some bizarre reason been reading my blog I like the Chessie System. Chessie however is not my only favorite railroad I also enjoy Canadian Pacific. This latest edition to the fleet is a brand new DCC equipped CPR GP35. The striking red combined with the multi mark stripes on the hood and rear bring back fond childhood train watching in downtown Niagara Falls.

I finally got all the switches on my layout wired. It took about 10min per switch and there are 9 on the layout over the course of a couple weeks when I could find a few min to spare but in the end it was worth it. Now it is possible with ease to do some shunting in the inner junction to build a train for the mainline.  A few more items and it will rarely require the magic giant hand from the sky to come down and manually intervene.

Next step:

• Standardize couplers
• Uncoupling magnet
• Ballast the tracks

Doomsday is continuing on with its longest run of player activity EVER with a brand new round and update!

Bug fixes:

• Fixed error with non formation attacking that could cause a division by 0 error
• Adjusted Asteroid will impact i X days message by 1 day to account for 0 days issue
• Fixed a newplayer error where the id value was blank

Gameplay changes:

• Airstrikes and spy/recon spies being caught will now add to the anti bully retaliation table if the player is significantly smaller
• Added colonist game variable to allow setting a minimum amount of farmers to become colonists to launch with the shuttle
• Added research item to give shuttle a 25% chance to miss a missile that is going to hit
• E-mail notification on endgame() to players who have notification set up

This ones a little far fetched, but for 10 years now I always felt the Windows XP default background looked familiar and it appears the answer has been found.

Mind. Blown.