Dreamcast-Talk.com

Congrats everybody! What was the final puzzle piece to get it working?

Sent from my Moto G Play using Tapatalk

Played tonite in the scheduled game night. So much fun! I love this game, and it was great having real competition. Amazing work -- but things still seem a little flaky: about 50% of games wouldn't start...they'd just hang long enough for people to give up and restart their Dreamcasts. I found if you waited long enough (7 minutes) it would recover and you could try to join another game.
One person theorized it was certain game options causing the freeze, but I tried to be consistent with game options when I hosted and I don't think that theory is valid. Another might be a particular player with maybe a bad network setup causing everyone else to hang waiting for them... I couldn't get enough data to validate -- although games with just me, pcwizard and Brandon-something seemed to always work.

Lack of port forwarding/DMZ seems like it could be an issue.

colgate wrote:Congrats everybody! What was the final puzzle piece to get it working?

The IRC server adds an extra byte onto each client's message.

Jon wrote:Played tonite in the scheduled game night. So much fun! I love this game, and it was great having real competition. Amazing work -- but things still seem a little flaky: about 50% of games wouldn't start...they'd just hang long enough for people to give up and restart their Dreamcasts. I found if you waited long enough (7 minutes) it would recover and you could try to join another game.
One person theorized it was certain game options causing the freeze, but I tried to be consistent with game options when I hosted and I don't think that theory is valid. Another might be a particular player with maybe a bad network setup causing everyone else to hang waiting for them... I couldn't get enough data to validate -- although games with just me, pcwizard and Brandon-something seemed to always work.

When reading old forum thread it looks like WWP had the same issue back in the days.
Also don't know if people really added the port that you need for WWP to work. Because
like you said I never have issues with certain players which I know have a working setup.

colgate wrote:Congrats everybody! What was the final puzzle piece to get it working?

Sent from my Moto G Play using Tapatalk

1. Needed to add a char to the IRC "who-reply" to identicate if a user is hosting/joining/in-game
2. Replace the IP's exchanged between the clients, the IP was the internal dreampi
192.168.X.98 address.

Shuouma wrote:When reading old forum thread it looks like WWP had the same issue back in the days.
Also don't know if people really added the port that you need for WWP to work. Because
like you said I never have issues with certain players which I know have a working setup.

That's actually the infamous "frozen lobby" bug. It's only present in the Dreamcast version.

Worms: World Party was a decent port from the PC version, except for the atrocious network code. The most notable of the many Game Breaking Bugs was the lobby system bug — if ANYONE disconnected from a lobby at any time (including leaving to another lobby before a match starts, disconnecting during a match, or skipping the post-match wrap up stats) everyone in that lobby would have to power down (not reset) their Dreamcast, or else everyone's game would be stuck forever on the lobby screen the next time it showed up.

Wow, well at least it's not a new issue.

Now that we have all these games online, what we really need is a matchmaking service of some kind, so we can find players to play with. Obviously a dozen people in a flaky lobby does not make for a great experience... but aside from scheduled game nights (and the Skype chat, which rarely helps) there doesn't seem to be any other reliable way to find players.

I would play WWP with anyone almost any time, but I can't sit on my DC waiting for someone to pop up...

Shuouma wrote:

Jon wrote:Played tonite in the scheduled game night. So much fun! I love this game, and it was great having real competition. Amazing work -- but things still seem a little flaky: about 50% of games wouldn't start...they'd just hang long enough for people to give up and restart their Dreamcasts. I found if you waited long enough (7 minutes) it would recover and you could try to join another game.
One person theorized it was certain game options causing the freeze, but I tried to be consistent with game options when I hosted and I don't think that theory is valid. Another might be a particular player with maybe a bad network setup causing everyone else to hang waiting for them... I couldn't get enough data to validate -- although games with just me, pcwizard and Brandon-something seemed to always work.

When reading old forum thread it looks like WWP had the same issue back in the days.
Also don't know if people really added the port that you need for WWP to work. Because
like you said I never have issues with certain players which I know have a working setup.

Seems like if people didnt have DMZ or Port Fwding setup correctly then WWP would recognize that as a "Disconnect" making the lobby freeze I suppose lol (Just my speculation). I'm guessing the freeze bug is hard coded in the software?

Xiden wrote:Seems like if people didnt have DMZ or Port Fwding setup correctly then WWP would recognize that as a "Disconnect" making the lobby freeze I suppose lol (Just my speculation). I'm guessing the freeze bug is hard coded in the software?

Sometimes the game doesn't send out the gameflags, so the joining users don't know
the "setup". Then that will freeze it because it waits for certain strings.

So in WWP the setup is reveresed, that is, the one creating the game will try to
connect to the joined player. If it doesn't get a answer it just sits there, if you are
luck you will timeout