Priority #1 UDP Support

I bet UDP was scrapped partly because flash doesn't support it(?).

It wasn't supported on other platforms as well. Graal's use of UDP wasn't optimal anyway. Ideally Stefan would spend time implementing UDP in the way that it would benefit the game most—but that seems unlikely since it can't be used in Flash and probably won't be used with the iOS devices (although I think it could be).

About file scanning: v6 is loading files from the location where it would download them to, also reduced the number of file access operations to make it fast.
About UDP: the complex part is the peer-to-peer nature of the old UDP mode. We have plans to introduce a server-based UDP system sometime (data exchange server independent from the actual graal server), like we do in our game Dinosmash.

What about some hard-coded interpolation for player/NPC movement?

Would this new UDP mode make players smooth again? The V5 and before UDP made the game very smooth, would be nice to see this again.

Few things I've been noticing on v6 or would like to see:

Scripted RC:
-The playerlist button on it doesn't work (I'm using external playerlist on v6)
-I want the scripted RC to open as an external window and appear in the toolbar (would be nice if it also stayed in the bottom-right toolbar like old RC does)
-Seems like the server options window's resize doesn't save when you re-open it.
-/openrights window doesn't resize its contents properly (stays small even though the window gets bigger)

Font:
-Still a bit strange. I find player chat to be more readable and closer to v5 when you change the size to 20 on v6, even though on v5 it's size 24.

For Facebook Graal:
-Remove the first loading screen and where you select a server, because currently you can only click one server and that's iClassic. Make it so it automatically begins loading your game like on the iPhone.
-Remove the loading song, it's not required and the client should load much faster without the first loading screen, loading screen map, and song.
-Option to hide the bottom friends bar. It's nice that it stops refreshing but it's only wasting space and players don't use this bar. When they want to contact Graalians they either use Facebook's own messenger or they use Graal's in-built friendlist.

It'd make players consideribly smoother than what we have right now in v6, but not to the same degree as the peer-to-peer UDP in v5. But peer-to-peer stuff has no place here, from a programming, security, and arguably gameplay perspective.

I don't see why not. UDP between the client and the server (and not between clients) is going to do very little to improve the game unless you commonly experience packet loss. You won't get better connections to people geographically closer to you like you used to since they still have to go through the server (rather than directly connecting to you).

Crono was talking about the smoothness. Packet loss is what causes jaggedness when you have a TCP connection , not latency. All latency will cause is a fixed delay.

So, I disagree with you. Switching to UDP will consideribly help smoothness over a lossy connection (which is the cause of jaggedness 95% of the time). Presumably, that's an improvement to the game.


To eliminate delays, yes, peer-to-peer connections would be required. But aside from the security nightmare, it's annoying to get working properly (you need to do NAT punchthrough, and then hope they don't have any bad firewall rules, other sorts of filtering, evil NAT, etc.), and more importantly, I think it's actually detremental to the gaming experience (although this is an opinion).

I think it's detremental because, although it might help eliminate delays in certain cases, it will increase delays in other cases, and it will also totally destroy your ability to predict other people's movements when you're fighting multiple people, since the delay will vary incredibly highly, and it'll be impossible to get a good idea of what other people are seeing on their screens (it's already hard enough to explain to players how hit detection works without introducing peer-to-peer connections).

Basically, you'd be trading the predictibility of the client-server model for improved delays (in some cases) -- and being able to accurately predict things is half of the fun, at least on traditional servers like GTA.


But that aside, I think even from the security and programming perspectives it wouldn't be the best idea ever.

You're right and we don't disagree—I just didn't read what he said carefully and figured he was talking about latency. UDP still is probably not going to help much, though, since packet loss is comparatively rare. It will get rid of some overhead, of course, but in my experience it doesn't trim down on latency by much.

UDP helps tremendously on V5 with smoothness as well as registration.

Isn't v5 using peer-to-peer UDP, though? I was talking about server-client UDP for stuff like movement data.

Ya, v5 uses peer-to-peer. As a player, the only concern I have is smoothness. I do suppose that it's just part of Graal's nature to have lag and jaggy-movement. Graal isn't an RTS game or something where everything can be made serverside, so it'll always have this issue. Sadly. :(!

No sound when you open the playerlist.