post game wrap up

[Zachary Uram]

Thanks to everyone who showed up for our monthly netrek game. We had 5x5 for 90 minutes. We had 2 newbies there and I think they had a lot of fun. Next game will be Sunday June 7 at 6pm EST.

Zach

--

http://www.fidei.org

[John R. Dennison]

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 07:39:18PM -0400, Zachary Uram wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who showed up for our monthly netrek game. We had 5x5
> for 90 minutes. We had 2 newbies there and I think they had a lot of fun.
> Next game will be Sunday June 7 at 6pm EST.

I would like to see this event become a weekly event rather than monthly
if we can continue to get some people in for t.

Nimret, do you think you can reach out to the RCE folks and see if any
of them would be interested?






John
--
I for one welcome our new computer overlords.

-- Ken Jennings a former "Jeopardy!" quiz show champion, writing on his
video screen as he faced certain defeat by IBM's Watson computer.

[iggyvolz .]

I was one of the newbies! (iggyvolz) :D

I was only able to stay for about half an hour... I had almost no clue what I was doing.  I just found a ship from the other team, went to Warp 11 (Warp 12 is broken on MacTrek for some reason) to get close, and then engaged.

Sorry I disconnected multiple times... MacTrek has a few bugs where it crashes on death, one especially when you die when cloaked.

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[Toyam Cox]

I was another newbie (aviator) and had a fun time. Could use some tips though...

I wish cow worked on Gentoo. Don't have the time to port it to the modern day, though.

--

- Toyam

[Zachary Uram]

Sadly I'm pretty sure the MacTrek client is no longer being actively maintained/developed.

Some tips for newbies: don't worry so much about trying to kill the enemy ships, dogfighting takes times to master. You can be helpful by calling enemy carriers and escorting your carrier (has armies).

http://www.fidei.org

[Jonathan Blow]

P.S. I livestreamed the entire game for anyone who wants to see (starting about 20 minutes before)... as the game starts to get real I narrate what I am doing/thinking, etc.

http://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88/b/655887744

[Jonathan Blow]

gg. It has been a *long* time since I tried to play seriously. Apparently I have an account on pickled, but I don't remember the password!

I kind of sucked, and didn't watch the message board well enough, and my team lost, but I took a few planets and nailed a few carriers. So that was something.

- Hell Peacock

On Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 4:39:59 PM UTC-7, Zach Uram wrote:

[Zachary Uram]

Very cool Jonathan!

Zach

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[James Cameron]

All of the new players grew in their skills over the game. It was fun
to see that happening.

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 09:55:31PM -0400, Toyam Cox wrote:
> I was another newbie (aviator) and had a fun time. Could use some
> tips though...

No comment. With my patches to the client, there's no easy way I can
identify you. ;-)

> I wish cow worked on Gentoo. Don't have the time to port it to the
> modern day, though.

I'm the maintainer.

If you're willing, talk to me off-list about this. You are probably
lacking something that I may recognise.

Debian has a package, which is fairly modern day, and may be useful
for understanding the dependencies.

Gentoo is the IKEA flat pack of operating systems, and my guess is
there's a screw missing.

--
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/

[Lawrence Brass]

I had a great time, felt some dormant neurons ticking again. Must check the keymap and practice.

Good game, thanks you guys.

LarryX.

[Nimret Sandhu]

Sigh, I couldn't make it. I will definitely try to make the one in June! I'll teach out to karthik also to see if he has any emails for the RCE folks.

Glad to see t-mode though!

[Bill]

On Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 10:16:22 PM UTC-4, Jonathan Blow wrote:
> P.S. I livestreamed the entire game for anyone who wants to see (starting about 20 minutes before)... as the game starts to get real I narrate what I am doing/thinking, etc.
>

Nice, very surreal to watch someone streaming while playing against (I was F3) me while using the netrek software client I wrote (Netrek XP 2010).
By the way, you focus too much on keeping kills, just attacking the nearest enemy in your space will make you a better player. And stop cloaking and keep shields up.

[Toyam Cox]

When warping, is it best to keep shields down until they are needed?

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[Zachary Uram]

Yes, unless it is likely you will pass within  torp or phaser range of an enemy ship.

http://www.fidei.org

[Niclas Fredriksson]

On Sun, 3 May 2015, Toyam Cox wrote:

> When warping, is it best to keep shields down until they are needed?

You always keep your shields down until you need them. There are several
disadvantages for keeping the shields up. For instance, it takes more fuel
and you can't repair hull damage with the shields up.

--
Niclas

[Niclas Fredriksson]

On Sun, 3 May 2015, Jonathan Blow wrote:

> P.S. I livestreamed the entire game for anyone who wants to see
> (starting about 20 minutes before)... as the game starts to get real I
> narrate what I am doing/thinking, etc.
>
> http://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88/b/655887744

That's a cool idea. I should do that for the next game, although I don't
have a camera.

My favorite part:

"5 knows I'm carrying. He's coming after me now. Who is that, is he anyone
I know? Banisher. Don't know him".

(Banisher is a bot)

Sorry I didn't communicate much during the game, with my team or anyone
else. For some reason my message window wouldn't update with new messages
unless I hit the scroll button which I only did when someone on my team
was carrying so that I would know where they wanted to go.

--
Niclas (As If By Magic)

[Jonathan Blow]

Hey man, I am not a newbie. I used to play netrek all the time, and I played in the fabled UCB-CMU game mentioned on Wikipedia. It's just, hey, if you don't play for 20 years, it is easy to become at least a little rusty...

[Lawrence Brass]

Just watched the stream Jonathan, nice work. Very interesting and useful, your comments were cool too.
A lot of insight can be obtained watching replays: flaws, strategy, etc. In my case I confirmed my suspicion of being phaser fodder during the game, specially for Yoda.

On your last comments about your interest in evolving the game, my opinion is that the right people for the task is already around, probably with less spare time than years ago but I would bet that there is a genuine and common interest in the same direction. I remember a few years ago in this forum someone trying to revive netrek. He had this "entrepreneural" stance, too ambitious in my opinion, never gathered steam as far as i know. Instead, I would propose a humbler and incremental approach, one that would follow the lines of netrek history and tradition. Being "old" is cool these days, a lot of ancient console 2D games have performed better (from a business POV) than huge 3D titles in the mobile industry. So I think this is a good time to infuse some new life to netrek, in the form of small, incremental but directed steps.

I would like to hear what the client and server mantainers have to say about this. Can we unify the clients' source (Win,OSX,Linux) in some way?, or at least align them on the same specs?

Regards,
LarryX.

[Mikey Ng]

In general, I think broadcasting netrek is a good thing.  Either through twitch or even recording videos and uploading them to youtube.

[John R. Dennison]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 08:08:24AM -1000, Mikey Ng wrote:
> In general, I think broadcasting netrek is a good thing. Either through
> twitch or even recording videos and uploading them to youtube.

In the future please let it be known before that such recordings are
taking place to give people a chance to opt-out if they so wish.





John
--
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest
of us would have to settle for something else.

-- Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca (15 October 1924-), American industrialist,
former Chrysler CEO

[Jonathan Blow]

The tough thing about the late game was that we were down below core and we had 3 people playing scouts ... it is pretty hard not to get steamrolled when the other team is all in cruisers and you are all in scouts. (We actually tried an all-scout strat once in the INL ... we sort of made it work better than you might expect, but still lost by a considerable margin.)

About evolving the game and my comments on the stream about how fun it would be to revive netrek ... it would be fun, but I am not sure how serious I am about that personally, because I have way too much going on right now. But if I were to do it sometime, it wouldn't be an incremental step -- it would be a full rebuild, because I think that is what's necessary to really achieve good quality. I run a game company and for a living I build projects that are much bigger and harder to produce than Netrek, so this isn't as outlandish an idea as it might seem.

*However*, I don't know if I will ever do that, and in the meantime, if some community energy were to gather together to rev the clients a bit, I would be all in favor of that. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem, as you sort of need to revive the player base in order to make that seem worthwhile to potential contributors...

On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 7:02:42 AM UTC-7, LarryX wrote:
> Just watched the stream Jonathan, nice work. Very interesting and useful, your comments were cool too.
> A lot of insight can be obtained watching replays: flaws, strategy, etc. In my case I confirmed my suspicion of being phaser fodder during the game, specially for Yoda.
>
> On your last comments about your interest in evolving the game, my opinion is that the right people for the task is already around, probably with less spare time than years ago but I would bet that there is a genuine and common interest in the same direction. I remember a few years ago in this forum someone trying to revive netrek. He had this "entrepreneural" stance, too ambitious in my opinion, never gathered steam as far as i know. Instead, I would propose a humbler and incremental approach, one that would follow the lines of netrek history and tradition. Being "old" is cool these days, a lot of ancient console 2D games have performed better (from a business POV) than huge 3D titles in the mobile industry. So I think this is a good time to infuse some new life to netrek, in the form of small, incremental but directed steps.
>
> I would like to hear what the client and server mantainers have to say about this. Can we unify the clients' source (Win,OSX,Linux) in some way?, or at least align them on the same specs?
>
> Regards,
> LarryX.
>

[Jonathan Blow]

Oh, sorry about that, I didn't even think anyone might feel weird about it. These days it is generally common for folks to stream gameplay (as you can see from the front page of twitch.tv) and I wanted to show netrek to the folks who follow me (about 60-100 people watched live over the course of the stream).

But, point taken.

[Bill]

> In the future please let it be known before that such recordings are
> taking place to give people a chance to opt-out if they so wish.
>

I fail to see how streaming on twitch of an organized game is any different than cambot recordings of organized games as was done in the past. The only meaningful difference is lower barrier to entry for replay of the game footage, which is a good thing.

[James Cameron]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 11:02:37AM -0300, Lawrence Brass wrote:
> I would like to hear what the client and server mantainers have to
> say about this.

I'll wait to see the code. ;-) I wrote the client Gytha, which is
cross platform, and as accessible for self teaching as I could make
it. Being cross platform is not a huge driver for demand.

> Can we unify the clients' source (Win,OSX,Linux) in some way?, or
> at least align them on the same specs?

No, not really. The only commonality is the network protocol. It is
written up.

For mobile platform development, the best bet at the moment is the
HTML5 Netrek client by Andrew Sillers. This work began being
discussed around February 2012 on the development mailing list.

I look forward to a steady stream of new players forced to use
touchscreen, compass, accelerometer, and gesture input. We can pit
them against our mice, keyboards, and foot pedals. May the best input
device set win!

[Lawrence Brass]

I was not referring to a full rebuild really, that would be an industrial undertaking. As you say "rev the clients a bit" would be the idea, getting them in line.

Just checked netrek-dev and the last discussions were about choosing languages to move on, that was in 2011.

Would like to know what John, Zach and Bob have to say about this.

Saludos,

LarryX.

Btw Jon, just watched your presentation at indie-dev, very interesting. 

[James Cameron]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 07:13:33PM -0300, Lawrence Brass wrote:
> Just checked netrek-dev and the last discussions were about choosing
> languages to move on, that was in 2011.

http://mailman.us.netrek.org/pipermail/netrek-dev/ has more recent posts.

> Would like to know what John, Zach and Bob have to say about this.

Bob?

[Lawrence Brass]

I will post in the dev-list to get more pointers.
I suppose Gytha sources are on your site, just found Andrew's place in github!

James, thanks so much!

[Lawrence Brass]

Sorry, I meant Bill of netrek windows XP client.

[Lawrence Brass]

And James, you can't deny that smashing and iPad to det torps would be fun!

[Zachary Uram]

I think getting a mobile client going would be awesome. But finding someone willing to put in the time and effort is the problem.

Zach

--

http://www.fidei.org

[Lawrence Brass]

I agree, the matrix has us all. 

I browsed the COW-XP client sources last night and liked what I saw. It seems that the game logic is isolated from the video stuff, the "W_" module implements the glue code between the classic Windows API, GDI graphics, inputs and the game. Keyboard and mouse events are enqueued in a (single?) event queue. Very clear and classic C, even with Allman bracketing style! (tip of the hat).

If the "W_" module graphics functionality is reimplemented in say, openGL(ES), and the proper native framework code is used to capture the events and feed them into the game event queue, is very probable that the "game code" could be ported almost untouched to OSX/iOS, Plain C is actually a subset of objC and fits nicely.

On Android I am not that sure (of the cost). The same strategy could be applied using the NDK to hold the C game loop and logic, and feed the input event queue from the native framework, but it may be harder. Porting from the Java clients is a competitive alternative for Android. 

The nice thing about this *hypothetical* scheme is that the game, network, and video(using openGL) code would be common and game and network stay almost 

untouched.

Sounds crazy?

Sorry for posting this on this thread, it should be on netrek-dev.. but that room is so cold.

Saludos,

LarryX.

[James Cameron]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 05:19:33PM -0300, Lawrence Brass wrote:
> I agree, the matrix has us all.
> I browsed the COW-XP client sources last night and liked what I
> saw. It seems that the game logic is isolated from the video stuff,
> the "W_" module implements the glue code between the classic Windows
> API, GDI graphics, inputs and the game. Keyboard and mouse events
> are enqueued in a (single?) event queue. Very clear and classic C,
> even with Allman bracketing style! (tip of the hat).

Yes, in those days we did peer code reviews. The "W_" module was
added to the client on Unix before it was ported to Windows in 1996.

> If the "W_" module graphics functionality is reimplemented in say,
> openGL(ES), and the proper native framework code is used to capture
> the events and feed them into the game event queue, is very probable
> that the "game code" could be ported almost untouched to OSX/iOS,
> Plain C is actually a subset of objC and fits nicely. On Android I
> am not that sure (of the cost). The same strategy could be applied
> using the NDK to hold the C game loop and logic, and feed the input
> event queue from the native framework, but it may be harder. Porting
> from the Java clients is a competitive alternative for Android.
> The nice thing about this *hypothetical* scheme is that the game,
> network, and video(using openGL) code would be common and game and
> network stay almost untouched.
> Sounds crazy?

Yes. Especially because the input devices are entirely different.

The "W_" API presumes too much about the input devices and the
underlying graphics libraries.

> Sorry for posting this on this thread, it should be on
> netrek-dev.. but that room is so cold.

Guess that means you do not wish to collaborate with other developers.

Let us all know when you have something ready. I think this is the
best way, because we are quite sick of proposals and no action.

With today's tools and languages, writing a new client is only a few
days of coding. It's no big thing any more.

[John R. Dennison]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 08:50:09AM +1000, James Cameron wrote:
>
> Guess that means you do not wish to collaborate with other developers.

I would very much prefer development issues to be discussed on the
development list; this list is geared more towards users. If people
want to follow the discussion they are welcome to register for
netrek-dev.

> Let us all know when you have something ready. I think this is the
> best way, because we are quite sick of proposals and no action.

To be honest...

What I am reading in this thread is more to my liking than most all of
the past proposals over the course of the last 10 years or so. I am
hoping that something comes out of this.

> With today's tools and languages, writing a new client is only a few
> days of coding. It's no big thing any more.

Zach, get busy.




John
--
Given sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.

-- Woody Page, Denver sports columnist

[Lawrence Brass]

I will register in the dev-list and continue there.
Regards,
L.

[Tosil Velkov]

Hi,

Maybe it will be better to modify the client not to show players IP's and/or DNS if we want to stream and record comfortably

[Lawrence Brass]

On the contrary, I wish to open a technical discussion about a viable course of action.
*I already subscribed to the dev-list*, the room being cold comment is about that when I checked, the last posts were from a few years ago.

> Let us all know when you have something ready. I think this is the
> best way, because we are quite sick of proposals and no action.

As I said, this is just an hypothesis, the first idea that came to me after browsing the code, I just want to discuss and hopefully validate those thoughts.

> With today's tools and languages, writing a new client is only a few
> days of coding. It's no big thing any more.

Language and tools are defined by the target platform in my opinion, it would be nice to have Phyton for iOS and Android, that way we could use gytha! But the reality is that the native tools and environement usually perform and integrate better. Recently

I have fallen many times into using "new" technologies just to find months later (not days) that the "new" fails and then I start to hear lame excuses like: "Oh, you are putting too much pressure on the garbage collector", "No, you cannot do that, that's *unsafe*", etc.

C runs the world, you know. ;)

>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
>