Against the team’s better judgment, we went ahead and put up the update tonight since I had said we would have an update today. It has the major improvements promised but there’s still some flakey custom lobby behavior that will need to be looked at (play skirmish and pantheon for best results).

We had the game staged and testing for a long while but we kept trying to reproduce a bug reported from the beta where ImpulsePlayer was being inserted into lobbies.  Anyway, the temp fix for that will result with some flakey custom game lobby behavior (skirmish and pantheon are fine).  So odds are, we’ll release a minor update tomorrow to tweak that.

The symptom, for those of you who run into it, is players called “test” as well as players not being removed from the connection list. 

More to come.

We’ve got the update staged and we’re just testing testing testing.  Sorry for the delay.  We’re not writing code, we’re just testing.

In late Summer, we plan to release Demigod: Clan Wars. 

So how will it work?

Besides the obvious – creating and joining of clans, the practical meat of Clan Wars is ability to schedule matches.  Right now, everything is in real-time. The functionality that Clan Wars will bring in is the ability to schedule matches at specific times and then join in with your friends into that battle at that time.

As it starts to come together, we’ll start to put up screenshots.  This will be a free download via Impulse for all registered players.

The Pantheon (and by that I mean the overall MP stat stuff) has gotten an update.

We can see that Cataract is the favorite map of players by far.

Fiber. Gotta love it.

On Friday we released a new update that included the “breaththru” tech and got great results for those who were having match making issues. It had one logic bug that we’re fixing now (if you can’t connect to 1 person it’ll stop trying to connect to anyone else) which should make a significant difference.  The plan is to get that update up this afternoon (EST).

After today’s update the GPG and Stardock teams will be working on two different things.

The Stardock team has the developer of Raknet here in the office this week to help us improve the NAT facilitation code.  The Impulse team has come up with ways to make Demigod internally a client/server game without having to change Demigod as well as hooking up the game to the proxy servers. 

The GPG team is working on updates to encourage…better behavior by users in terms of dealing with people who disconnect along with some balance changes and some work on the in-game connectivity.

When that happens, we’ll probably release that as v1.01 and start the second epoch (stats reset, player stats reset with access to their first epoch stats in their account). 

This will be the end of the “Beta” patches (for the foreseeable future anyway) though as we don’t want to split the community.

Stay tuned.

Hi guys,

I spend a lot of time reading through the forums and one of the things that's really starting to concern me is the hostility to the community towards those who don't share the same points of view. That is, intolerance for other view points.

I would ask that you really try to restrain yourself from flaming other people. It's okay for someone to think something is unbalanced or what the game should be more like some other game. If that person has a valid point, it can come through intelligent discussion. Similarly, if a valid counter point can be made, intelligent discussion is the way there.

If you guys can just show respect to one another both in game and out of game, we can all have a much better time. 

I love Demigod. I've poured my heart and soul into it.  I know it's a great game. It doesn't bother me if someone feels differently or wants something changed as long as those who disagree are able to put together intelligent and thoughtful responses.

So please, don't call people names or insult people who don't agree with you.  Thanks.

Greetings!

Last night we released an update to Demigod and marked it as beta. The results have been very encouraging with a massive improvement in connectivity plus a fixes to a wide range of issues that users had reported.  We’re getting a great deal of very good feedback that we can use to update for a Monday release.

Here’s a summary of what beta testers have found along with what the solutions are:

1) You have been disconnected because the NAT has failed. There appears to be a logic error in the new connectivity system. If you fail to connect to someone who enters the lobby, you won’t connect to anyone subsequently. This is basically a case of a very late night if/then logic needing to be tweaked.

2) Some people are getting massive favor points values. Obviously way better than not working at so those of you who are getting it enjoy it while you can and I hope I don’t get into any games with you. Should be relatively easy to fix on Monday.

3) Sound settings not saving.  (http://forums.demigodthegame.com/350188/get;2195602). This will have to be looked at.

4) Scattered reports of people getting into the lobby fine but not able to connect to some of the other players.  This is not going to get fixed by Monday (except for those affected by problem #1).  If you can run ImpulseReactorOptions in the bin directory, mark the ports say 6000 to 6200 as ones to use and then on your router port forward to those. See http://www.portforward.com/ for more on how to do that.  Now, we don’t expect people to know how to do that, this is simply a quick way to solve it for most people.

So what’s the plan?

Well, based on feedback, I think the 108 hour week we put in last week won’t need to be repeated (and yes, I mean literally we clocked in 108 hours in the past 7 days at the office).  Everything else from here on out is relatively easy comparatively.  I am going to ask our architect to write a paper when things calm down explaining the rather impressive new technology of proxy sockets that we designed that allowed us to let Demigod to see all players with 1 socket without GPG needing to modify 1 line of code in Demigod. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

So here’s the basic outline of what I see happening:

On Monday, we’re going to take care of item #1 above and item #2 above and then release this new build as a public version and eliminate betas. This will recombine the communities back together.

Late next week we will likely release an update (probably less than 1 megabyte) that adds in support for the Proxy servers and improves NAT. The developer of Raknet is visiting us this next week.

Is it safe?

So is Demigod safe to play online for normal people? In my opinion, the Monday release will probably put it there. The beta we have works pretty well other than issue #1 above which, admittedly, throws a big monkey wrench into custom games right now.

After Monday, it’ll be diminishing returns as we add in proxy servers for people who just can’t connect and lots of other things.  Then we’re going to start focusing on Demigod: Clan Wars (free expansion) and lots of in game tools to let people filter who they play with.

See http://forums.demigodthegame.com/351222

The BETA is up. We plan to push this to release on Monday as it’s massively better.

What’s new in this beta:

• Massive connectivity optimizations and updates
• Favor Items fixed
• Favor points fixed
• Major optimizations to audio on low fidelity settings
• Fixed bug that occured if you used an ability after issuing an attack command. This is the "won't chase the demigod I clicked" bug.
• Achievements properly vaulting on Impulse
• Sending deltas for partially completed achievements.
• Each player now saves their own achievements and favor items
• Fixed partial Achievement saves bug.
• Fixed a bug that occurred if you accomplished an achievement in game.
• Fixed a bug in disconnect dialog that would try to update it even if we had determined we did not want to show it.
• Fixed sound performance issue (for users who were having to run without sound)
• Changed resample rate to 24k in Low settings
• Delayed FMOD initialization until audio LOD is set via options
• Disabled hitbox interference from announcer messages.
• Life's Child no longer removes Inner Grace (Sedna fix)

If you want to try the beta (and like I said, we plan to release this on Monday when we’re back):

You will need to tell Impulse to show pre-release versions:

Have fun! I’ll be around this weekend to play! I think you are going to like this update…