GZDoom 3.8.1 Multiplayer issues

[MysticalMist]

So a friend and I had recently gotten the latest GZDoom build and planned on doing some co-op. I was unable to host, so I had my friend do it instead. We connected successfully, however some big issues popped right away.

For starters, we could not use the weapons at all. No weapon sprites were visible on the hud and weren't even accessible, yet the rest of the map stayed the same aside from Deathmatch weapons (ex: BFG's, rocket launchers and chainguns scattered everywhere). There was also text at the top of my screen saying something along the lines of "Out of sync: 1".

Our methods varied from the batch files/CMD method to ZDL. Can anyone help me out? Thanks!

- Mist

[drfrag]

It was a very serious bug i fixed yesterday, what a coincidence. No one reported it until now.

I've just fixed a very important bug both in the legacy build and LZDoom, multiplayer was broken since long before 3.8.0. Exactly since "- replaced the assignment operator in player_t with a named function." I missed "- removed unnecessary variable clear" somehow, it was a later commit (i was merging a ton of them those days) and that line actually broke it.

Probably that "- removed unnecessary variable clear" commit didn't look important.
So it's fixed, for now you could use 3.7.2_legacy or the next gzdoom-vintage devbuild. I will do a new release soon.

[Nash]

So a friend and I had recently gotten the latest GZDoom build and planned on doing some co-op

3.8.1 is not the latest... that's waaay out of date. :P The latest version is 4.1.3.

Yes, that bug you are talking about is known to old versions (I was one of the people who had to wrestle with it before figuring out what was going on to be able to report it).

No one reported it until now.

False. :P

[phantombeta]

So a friend and I had recently gotten the latest GZDoom build and planned on doing some co-op

3.8.1 is not the latest... that's waaay out of date. :P The latest version is 4.1.3.

Yes, that bug you are talking about is known to old versions (I was one of the people who had to wrestle with it before figuring out what was going on to be able to report it).

Except 3.8.1 is the latest version of the vintage build. There was never any 3.8 of "modern" GZDoom.

[drfrag]

It's not out of date, i assumed he was using the vintage build becouse at least one of the two pcs was not fast enough to run the main build.
No one reported it for the vintage build specifically and i missed that report, may be i thought it was not affected. That bug is pretty recent.
Anyway they were a ton of commits to merge in a short time and the subject was not descriptive enough, besides i'm not in a very good shape.
BTW now fake splitscreen works in LZDoom and i could add it to the legacy build too.

[Nash]

Well I need to learn y'all's mind-reading techniques because just by reading the OP alone, I have NO idea this user was limited by vintage hardware. :P

[Rachael]

The Raspberry Pi 4 just recently came out. For $35 (or $55 if you want the 4GB RAM model) you can get hardware that, theoretically, can run modern builds of GZDoom.

If this theory is correct (and I should be getting my hands on one very soon), I will after that point have *NO* sympathy for people who can't run modern GZDoom builds. OpenGL 3+ capable GPU's are getting cheaper and cheaper, you literally have no excuse to be hanging on to that old piece of shit clunker from more than 5 centuries ago. You've just gotta upgrade, that's all there is to it.

[drfrag]

I suspect it won't cut it besides the 2 GB model will cost 45$ and won't replace a windows pc.
But this time it's about two pcs to play multiplayer and it's typical to use an old pc lying around for multiplayer games. And in fact you need an old XP pc with a slow cpu to play a lot of old games but that's unrelated.

[Rachael]

The $55 4GB model is already good enough to replace most of the 10+ year laptops that are still in use today. And sure, maybe it can't run Windows - but Linux is not as demonically hard as people make it out to be. In fact, I can drop most Linux environments in front of a total novice these days and they're productively using it within minutes of introducing them to it, without even having to teach them how to use it.

The point here is - if a cheap pocket-sized hobbyist computer can outperform an old laptop that you're still hanging onto for whatever odd reason - you've had that laptop way too long.

[Graf Zahl]

The Raspberry Pi 4 just recently came out. For $35 (or $55 if you want the 4GB RAM model) you can get hardware that, theoretically, can run modern builds of GZDoom.

If this theory is correct (and I should be getting my hands on one very soon), I will after that point have *NO* sympathy for people who can't run modern GZDoom builds. OpenGL 3+ capable GPU's are getting cheaper and cheaper, you literally have no excuse to be hanging on to that old piece of shit clunker from more than 5 centuries ago. You've just gotta upgrade, that's all there is to it.

I mostly agree, but the retro gaming community at large seems to disagree. I just recently set EDuke32 up for compilation and the code looks like something from the early 2000's. Zero abstraction, everything coded to the metal and ClunkerGL (i.e. 2.0 or less) support are important bullet points.
The icing on the cake is that in order to save memory they upload paletted textures and then combine the colors in the shader. The problem with that approach: It completely disables texture filtering, including mipmapping, resulting in horrible aliasing artifacts. And the code is such a mess that changing it may be a problem.

The point here is - if a pocket-sized hobbyist computer can outperform an old laptop that you're still hanging onto for whatever odd reason - you've had that laptop way too long.

Yeah, but try to convince any retro developer from stopping that retro stuff... They take great pride getting stuff to work on systems that are well beyond their expiration date. No disrespect to drfrag, but all this work sounds like a major waste of time to me, considering how few people are affected.

[Rachael]

Some people are just too far gone, and they're just not worth worrying about.

[phantombeta]

Going to be quite blunt here.
Yes, in your countries, that's true, such old hardware is only used by stupid retro gamers who can't let go of shitty, old tech/hardware. Except you forget that poorer countries exist. Here in Brazil, the Raspberry Pi 4 would be at LEAST 300 bucks. Hardware is extremely expensive here due to our customs office's absurd import taxes.
The way you people talk about this is extremely dismissive of people living in poorer countries, and I find it outright offensive, myself.

[dpJudas]

I do feel sorry for people that are truly unable to buy new hardware. I can't comment on Brazil, but for countries in Europe or for the US it is virtually never the case. There almost all of them have chosen to prioritize differently (bought something else they'd rather have instead). Which is fine, as long as they don't come claim its because they couldn't afford it. That is virtually always bullshit considering what other things cost in those countries.

Keep in mind that "modern" GZDoom actually means roughly 10 years old hardware by this point.

[Graf Zahl]

Modern GZDoom means at most 13 year old AMD and NVidia hardware and at most 8 year old Intel hardware. My CPU from 2012 has an Intel HD4000, which is capable of running modern GZDoom.
The vintage build is only needed for standalone graphics hardware from before 2006 and integrated hardware from before 2011 - or for some more modern systems of the lowest price point meant for less demanding tasks than playing games. The last survey from Summer 2018 had roughly 3.5% user share on such old hardware, but over time the newly added data points for such old hardware declined far more rapidly than the data for modern high end hardware.

[MysticalMist]

Hey guys, Sorry for the late reply! But I read everything recently. Here's my update:

So a friend and I had recently gotten the latest GZDoom build and planned on doing some co-op

3.8.1 is not the latest... that's waaay out of date. The latest version is 4.1.3.

Yes, that bug you are talking about is known to old versions (I was one of the people who had to wrestle with it before figuring out what was going on to be able to report it).

No one reported it until now.

False.

Whoops, I apologize! I forgot to say it was the vintage version, my bad on that.


So with that in mind, my friend and I finally got the ACTUAL latest build and after some minor wrestling with ZDL, our coop server worked like a charm! It solved all the problems we had with our last attempt at a session. Thank you all SO MUCH!!!