Maniaplanet 3 Released!

[nailbomb69]

rat in a car you complain to much. are they meant to acknowledge that theyve read every post you write i think that would be more time consuming than trying to fix all these bugs you write about...Chill out for a bit mp3 only got released 2-3 days ago give them a chance to fix stuff. And half the time people try to help you, you jump down their throats.. You seem like a very angry little man.

[TMarc]

rat_in_car, sincerelly, did you ever ask yourself why Nadeo people are not anymore really reacting sacrificially to your posts ?

If you were not always reacting that much pointlessly offending and aggressive, the others would perhaps dare to take the time to investigate your findings and eventually try to help you.

But no, you always complain disproportionately, you even seem to increase your anger against anything that is not working for you, and also against anyone here.
You're abviously not even respectful to Nadeo and the work they're constantly doing.
All you can do is criticise destructively.

Apparently you can't do it better yourself, but you always give the impression you know everything better with your harsh tone.
Now, to say that you don't want to read this and this answer, is really not the appropriate behavior in a public forum
I don't need to know everything in every detail, it is sufficient that I know whom to ask and where to look for.
And if I don't know, I try to find out, even if it takes some time.

Most certainly the day I don't react to any of your queries, you will blame me for not answering.
But be sure no one will care anymore then, if you don't change.

[novationx]

rat_in_car, sincerelly, did you ever ask yourself why Nadeo people are not anymore really reacting sacrificially to your posts ?

Give the man a break nobody is perfect
And if you read closely some of things are actually true. ( I ofc never said I approve this behaviour )

I think 1 line to this behaviour can be enough: Dont behave like this. Warning#1
The other 20lines we can discuss the actual topic ^^

Warning#3 = temp ban.
Life is easy.

[Chris92]

Every controller scripts can ONLY made what gameserver allows. Community can write controller scripts but all that they can use is listed in ListMethods.html file attached to gameserver archive. Write ANYTHING on chat, even using external software, cannot made freezes of any kind if gameserver has no bugs. Again you don't know what are you talkng about, you guessing and answers INSTEAD of someone who should answer here.

I'll try to explain what causes this below, if you don't want to believe me, I'm even willing to demonstrate it to you on a server, so you can see yourself, that server controllers (and them displaying widgets) can very well have a negative impact on the game

The micro stutters are actually caused by a lot of manialinks being re-drawn at the same time as a player connects.

This is mostly due to how widgets (the correct term would be manialinks) work ingame. Each manialink is a standalone UI element that can be dynamically displayed and sort of updated (only sort of, because you can't update only one part of it, unless you use some ManiaScript magic - else, it gets redrawn completely) by the server controller. Now, if a bunch of UI elements are forced to refresh (aka forced to be redrawn) everytime a player joins, that can have an impact on the game. Depending on the amount of UI elements obviously, that impact is either neglegible and barely noticable or a sudden (steep) drop in FPS.

With Records-Eyepiece and a few more, that's about 5-10 widgets that are re-drawn: Player count widget, LocalRecords, LiveRankings, DediRecords and Visitors come to my mind at first - That's on a default XAseco2 install with only Records Eyepiece added.
If the server admin then uses a bunch of others like Server Neighborhood, TS3, etc, that becomes obviously more.
I don't know how undef's code base looks like, but obviously there could be made some changes, so widgets don't have to be re-drawn everytime a player joins, but that would remove a bit of functionality of those widgets (e.g. no instant highlighting of records to show that the player is currently playing on the server, etc)

If you don't want to receive all those re-draws, you can simply disable most of the Manialinks (XAseco e.g. has the /togglewidgets command, on FAST it's /ml) or hide your UI completely (* on NUMPAD).

To make it clear once again: That's not a bug caused by the dedicated server or the game, but rather caused by a lot of stress being put on the rendering engine, which draws the Manialinks onto your screen, because the server controller and its plugins tell your game to do so

[ownmaster]

Shootmania upgrade
- netcode: major improvement thank to an innovative netvision layer
- gameplay: new freelook key, progressive walljumps, more stamina etc.
- many more gameplay blocks: teleport, force field & gates, slides, sound blocker etc.
- many more visual blocks: for bunkers, fences, woods, stones, walls, signs etc.

Can you give detailed information on game mechanics changes? With some video tutorials maybe?

[rat_in_car]

You seem like a very angry little man.

This is very rude. Maybe you're little man (for sure - man who trying to offend other players). I am the man who complain but not offend other players. In real life I'd say more to unpleasant person like you, but here, on this forum, I finish this discussion.

You're abviously not even respectful to Nadeo and the work they're constantly doing.
All you can do is criticise destructively.

I pay for this game. Two of them actually. It's kind of respect that every company expect releasing commercial product. Let they release freeware version of game and I'll write many positive, nice comments.

Criticism is not pleasant - that's obvious. If you play violin really bad and people say that your music is wonderfull, you'll never improve. How do you want to improve anything if you're surrounded by worshipers who think that everything is always ok?

And I was explain why I think that your answers are not what I expect. More - in other posts on this forum you can find few comments who supports my point of view that you should stop give any answers. But is pointless to explain you again and again why I don't want your answers if you don't read what I wrote.


@Chris92:
I understand how it works. I also understand that player can join server and that can made lot of changes in many manialinks. But displaying manialinks procedure is part of dedicated server. Of course that players can write bad code, but good interpreter (main code in game in this case) can handle that (for example - by limit percentage of usage for dispay/change manialinks in every frame). That is possible. It's like in web browsers - of course many people wrote bad html code, but programmers made browsers that can handle even very bad websites. It's easier than force every webmaster to wrote proper html code.

Xaseco exists on TM1 also and I don't get freezes (or, what is more accurate - I can fix that myself; i explain it in proper topic on this forum).

So, I understand that this may be Xaseco fault, but also understand that manialink display procedure can be improved for prevent that type of bugs. Xaseco is most popular and unfortunatelly is not perfect (not even good - has lot of stupid solutions that, for example, disables preloading of next map resources by set map as next from jukebox at the end of current map). I don't expect that everyone now starts to write good php code (also - is not that easy to write wait or check for vertical sync procedure in php - that is possible only in game, so control over how many and how big manialinks are put in server in one frame should be made on dedicated server side), so I expect that Nadeo made some improvements.

Also - we are not really sure that is Xaseco fault for sure, right?

[TMarc]

I pay for this game. Two of them actually. It's kind of respect that every company expect releasing commercial product. Let they release freeware version of game and I'll write many positive, nice comments.

Criticism is not pleasant - that's obvious. If you play violin really bad and people say that your music is wonderfull, you'll never improve. How do you want to improve anything if you're surrounded by worshipers who think that everything is always ok?

I also have paid for the games, many others as well, and you are not the only one who is reporting issues that sadely never get fixed or suggestions which never get implemented.
To have a free game does not automatically make it better. Perhaps the bugs get acceptable more easily, but they would remain the same, and also still very annoying sometimes. Ah, a damn crash!? Bah, it's free, what shall's!?
This can't be.

Honestly, for or a game that costs this little, and where the developpers are continuously working on it, your apparent excessive angriness is ridiculous.

Of course criticism is never pleasant when it reveals others faults. And some are more easily upset if they get confronted with their faults.
It is about the way how you're telling the developpers what they did wrong.

I also told you many times before that your criticism is often out of bounds.
It is not enough for you to repeatedly report micro-freezes or missing support for FxCameraMap, you always nearly insult them why they don't fix any of your reports yet, and this is not ok.

All the player and server managers have simply to accept that not everyhting can be done at once, and that there is a constant repriorization of the bugfixing and features development.
Nadeo is listening to the wishes of the community, but only if they have the impression that this is very important for most of the people.
In the closed beta there were a lot of reports, and when Hylis had a release closer date in mind, he asked the beta testers to help to repriorize because not everything could be done until the release anymore.
But surprisingly, some points that looked to have a relatively low priority got implemented.

Of course we can ask Hylis or Nadeo why they do it like this. Often we get a evasive answer, but this is due to the fact that they often don't really know when they can work on something, or don't want to reveal things before they are sure they could work. Sometimes they take back decisions, or change completely some things.

A clear bug and feature request list on a single point of information would be great, with the possibility to comment and to vote there, this was also requested before by some people.
But here Nadeo would need to change their habits, and I doubt they would do it this soon.

And I was explain why I think that your answers are not what I expect. More - in other posts on this forum you can find few comments who supports my point of view that you should stop give any answers. But is pointless to explain you again and again why I don't want your answers if you don't read what I wrote.

Well, that's life in a forum. There is never perfect harmony, even not in a church choir.
People can write what they want, as long as it is clear what they mean, and as long as they don't attack each other.

At least I tried one more time to give you a hint about something that was discovered recently, because I thought it would be interesting for you, but no, you just deny it without even thinking about.

What makes me wonder, you even seem not to really accept Chris92's answer although he knows a huge lot about servers, but you give some good points in your answer to him.

Would a simple test help to comfirm your opinion?
- join or create a maniaplanet 3 server that has as little configuration as possible and have a simple nascar type map with multilap
- ask a buddy over voice chat or telefone to join that server
- let him leave, disable all displayed items (press * on the numpad)
- ask him to join again
And repeat the same on a populated server.

The question here is how to successfully measure and prove the freeze.
If your PC is that powerful you could record the game in a HD video (not using replay, but something like Debut Video recorder or fraps) and have the network and audio debug display switched on (I don't have English keyboard, its the second key left of backspace).

[rat_in_car]

What I was say is even if I know that MAY BE problem with Xaseco, the same problem may exists in other server control software (like FAST). There is a method to prevent that behaviour both way - to change Nadeo's software or server control independent software. I give you an example - let's say that you have 1000 apples and one machine that made juice from them. And machine has possibility to process only 50 apples at a time. So - there are two solutions - you must put only 50 apples, wait, put next 50, then next 50 etc. Or you can add a mechanical element that divide apples to proper amount and wait until previous apples are processed. So - if TM gets too many elements in one frame (frame - time to render one screen, mostly 1/60 second), should divide process to more frames instead of 20-frames freeze.

And I don't think that is good idea that I test freezes. Even If i do that - I am not TM2 programmer. Some of Nadeo crew should test it - they know better how their code is written.

Last words - I expect sometimes just "ok, we read your post and this bug is on our buglist" - that is enough for me. Waiting over 2 years with no answer is not what I expect if I report bug in paid software.

[Chris92]

Last words - I expect sometimes just "ok, we read your post and this bug is on our buglist" - that is enough for me. Waiting over 2 years with no answer is not what I expect if I report bug in paid software.

I can explain this as well. Maniaplanet is the first game where NADEO has been this open. Why don't they respond to every little bug report? Because that's not the way they used to work. They're now very responsive in beta forums and even in some of the public forums (and even that took them the last three years to come that far, more and more NADEO employees are actively taking part in the forum nowadays compared to 2 or 3 years ago)
Why don't we have a public bugtracker yet? Because NADEO devs actually use these forums for internal communications as well.
It's easier for them to link to the forum threads, instead of having to acknowledge bugs on a bug tracking software, changing statuses on those, etc etc.

I don't know how long you have been around in the TM scene, rat_in_car, but in my first 4 years of playing TMN ESWC/TMUF(up until 2010) I never saw anyone from NADEO reply to any bug reports on tm-forum.com
In fact, the only NADEO posts I saw were about Ladder Servers in TMNF/TMUF, Race of Champions and the FreeZone, that's it.

Maniaplanet changed how NADEO approaches their community, and it's getting better. It changed the way how they work, because before that, you never heard a single peep from let's say Gugli, Fix or anyone else than the guys posting the server updates (XBX) and the Update.exe's for the client (Hylis or Alinoa).

All I can do is ask you to be patient and a little bit more understanding, NADEO is a small company (only about 25 employees in total, and that is including NADEO LIVE) and they are trying their best to deliver us a good game. Of course things can go wrong, but if you're going to complain about a few bugs being left over, I encourage you to checkout DOTA2's bug list, that still contains bugs that are over two years old. It's a free-to-play game, yes, but I know almost no-one that hasn't spent money on the DotaTV tickets or the cosmetic items yet. Now suddenly NADEO's backlog of bugs seems sort of neglegible, eh?
Doesn't mean they shouldn't get fixed though, true! And I'll see what I can do about making some sort of list like that for the Maniaplanet games, so we can have at least some sort of overview.

EDIT: What do you get out of it from knowing that a bug is on NADEO's "list of approved bugs"? You still don't know how high the priority of the bug is, so then you could complain why it isn't fixed after a month, etc etc. It's a vicious cycle

[Pedal]

Have not downloaded this update as I see no changes for my biggest issues with the game.

Can someone confirm that MP:

-Still DX9
-Still just FXAA on nice/very nice shaders
-Still the same unbalanced sound when sliding in Stadium Dirt

Thanks.