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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Force update when connecting to the Official UFO2000 server


meodai

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I have 3 versions of UFO2000 installed so i can play against everyone. I think it would be good to tell the user when he is connection on the official server to update his version of ufo to the last available one. Would this cause any trouble?

 

Now it is very complicated the program just tells you that your version is not compatible with the version of the other client.

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I have 3 versions of UFO2000 installed so i can play against everyone. I think it would be good to tell the user when he is connection on the official server to update his version of ufo to the last available one. Would this cause any trouble?

You should use the latest version, and everyone else should do the same. Basically that's the idea. :)

 

But there may be reasons why people want to stick with some specific version, so example if the tournament is ongoing and they want to use the same version for all the games. In such cases, gameplay and balance changing updates may be undesired. For example there is ufo2000 weapons update pending (it adds new sound effects, maybe changes some graphics, and tweaks stats for some weapons). Needless to say that while such update is a good thing to have in general, it changes weapon stats, and this might be unexpected for some players who are used to the older stats.

 

In addition to a version number, each ufo2000 build also has a version tag (the tag is "beta9" for the current beta versions). The players can see each other on the server only if they have the same tag (for example UTTO has a different tag, that's why it does not get int the way). And it is supposed that the players must use the highest possible version for each tag.

 

Here is also a snippet from the HACKING file from ufo2000 sources (maybe somewhat outdated now, but it describes the general idea):

==============================================================================
== Building and testing experimental versions of the game
==============================================================================

Some patches or other changes might be not stable enough for committing to
SVN and need more real-world testing. Just compiling experimental build
of the game and connecting to the main server can cause problems because
starting the game against normal build user might cause all sorts of
compatibility problems.

In this case it is recommended to edit 'src/version.h' file in the sources
directory and change UFO_VERSION_TAG define to something else, for example
to something like "experimental-mindcontrol". After that you can safely
distribute this experimental binary, connect to the primary server, play
games and do some testing without interfering other users playing ordinary
"release" or "beta" builds.

The server allows different versions to play on the same server without
interfering each other. In 'version.h' now we have VERSION_TAG constant,
only clients which have the same tag see each other on the server, so
changing it to something like "experimental" any other tag and building
the game will ensure that 'normal' players will be able to continue
playing 'beta' versions, but the courageous and curious ones will be
able to play 'experimental' versions. Server status page now also
shows some information about the versions and tags of the players currently
who are logged on to the server.

It should be easy to provide separate stability statistics for each tag
on http://ufo2000.xcomufo.com/results-beta.php page. So now anyone can
checkout the latest sources of the game from the repository, apply some
patch, set some special tag in version.h and put this build for download.
People can download this build and play it, if we see that stability of
this build is acceptable after a reasonable number of games, the patch
can be safely committed to the repository.

 

Now it is very complicated the program just tells you that your version is not compatible with the version of the other client.

The guy who has an older version gets a message stating that he needs to upgrade, and this message contains the required version number :)

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hmmm. Sad. For now i can understand but once the project is out of beta i think it would be a good thing for the official server only of course. Because its annoying to have to switch version just because people prefer to play with an old version for some reason.
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Just refuse to switch to an older version, it's up to you :) Another problem is that we don't have that many players on the server yet, but I guess it is going to gradually improve over time.

 

edit: There is a lot of sense to release a stable "long term support" version for the people who don't like to upgrade frequently, but there are still too many bugs to fix before we get an acceptable quality. It may take a few weeks.

Edited by Serge
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