GENERAL: Integration of Other ANET P2P MPlayer Games

[Fromafar]

Unfortunately, the code archive is still not operational yet.

Download 2005.03.11.anet.zip to get a freshly generated version of the Anet communication DLLs.

It has a modification to solve the problem that Windows XP machines are unable to host a CTP2 game. The source code modifications have been included as well, to comply with the LGPL license, so it may be legal to distribute this version.
But better do some testing first with Battlezone. This version has only been tested with CTP2, of course .

[kewl-1]

I tested the winets2.dll this evening and it seemed to work fine. I was able to join games and transmit damage during Death-Match and Strategy games very nicely. I will include some other peeps in the testing and then let you know how well it functions with several of us it simultaneously.

[Adarious]

anet

I happened upon this thread while searching, now for hours, for some light on fixing a problem with Activision's Interstate 76. The problem .. though I am not sure how specific this will be is quoted:

"The problem with accessing the ANET servers is that the DLL that controls connectivity can't route NAT IP addresses (such as 192.168.X.X)..."

I wondered if a solution might be present here, or if a finger pointing in the right direction may be if not.

[Dx.]

Fromafar, which return lines did you add? vs6 sp6 wasn't complaining about returns for me but while testing i found that players with 100 loss still remain.

Is that a common problem in ctp 2?

Also i noted that the "Update.h" wasn't in the released code, did you get it when you compiled the anet2.dll?

Adarious, are you refering to a home anet server?

[Fromafar]

The changes have been marked in the code, and the zip-file contains all modified code files. Searching for ANET_ORIGINAL occurrences should get you to the modifications.

One of the modifications was indeed a "fix" for the missing update.h. I just disabled the update functionality, since I thought it highly unlikely that Activision was going to provide any updates in the future.

[Dx.]

Fromafar,
Both the original code and your code compile with the same problem, players with 100 loss still remain and never time out or drop their connection.

Any idea what's going on or where to look?

[Fromafar]

Not sure if I have understood you right.

You say that both the original code and the code modified by me behave the same (i.e. do not drop bad connections). Sounds OK to me, since I am not aware of changing anything about this.

Did you expect bad connections to be dropped automatically? If the original (compiled) Activision DLL drops bad connections, but recompiling gives you a DLL that does not do this anymore, there are 2 possibilities:

1. We don't have the exact source that was used during compilation. Not impossible, since the header files included in the released CTP2 source were not exactly identical to the publicly available anet 0.10 source. However, the released CTP2 source was also not entirely correct (being the unpatched version).
2. We do not use the same compiler as Activision. Which compiler do you use?

[Dx.]

Bad connections normally would be dropped automatically in 30 seconds, some where along the line Dan or another programmer changed that.

I read in one of the comments that 1 app. required a constant connection and i think that is why connections are no longer droped but this creates a problem in other games. Dan is not willing to help.

I tracked the last known working anet2.dll in Battlezone 1.4, i haven't tested earlier versions yet. The changed code seems tobe between June 1998 and sometime in 1999.

Dan seems to have customized the anet2.dll code for each game.

Any idea where to look in the code for where it was changed?

I used VS97, VS98 and VS2008.

[Fromafar]

Looking at the release notes, I would suspect:

15 Apr 1999
* Changed how non-responding players are timed out. Only the master does this now; this fixes the "different players have different player lists" bug.

But unless they kept both the "before" and "after" code in conditional blocks somewhere, it could be very hard to recover the old code. However, you might have some luck trying to look for connection handling differences between the master and the other players.

OTOH, this may not be a good idea. They did change this for a reason. What is the problem you are trying to solve? Do you experience many bad connections?

[Dx.]

Anytime someone lags out or is banned, the players vehicle will remain as a ghost in game, some people will see it and joining players won't which means the ghost vehicle can be used to block weapons fire and the other player will see you take no damage.

I should have the older code, just don't know where/what to look for... there are many 30 second timeouts in the code.

[Fromafar]

I don't think we will be able to help you much here. Probably the code has been customised for each game. For a turn based game like Call to Power, the issues you mention (lag, ghost players, banning?) are not much of a problem.

[Dx.]

Can anyone give me a link to your current activenet source code mod update? (including the XP hosting fix)

[Martin Gühmann]

Can anyone give me a link to your current activenet source code mod update? (including the XP hosting fix)

The current state of the CTP2 source code can be downloaded from http://ctp2.darkdust.net/ including the activenet code.

-Martin

[Dx.]

I looked through "anonsvn - Revision 1111: /" and couldn't find it.

[Martin Gühmann]

It's in http://ctp2.darkdust.net/anonsvn/tru...ode/libs/anet/

anet is the name of the Activision net library.

-Martin