Well, you can't say that I don't love computer gaming. I just spent a whole freaking day trying to figure out why I can't play online with my High Heat Baseball 2003 game.
What is happening is that ultimately every game that I play online results in a lock up of both machines (me and the client, or vice versa). Here are the frequencies of where the lockups occur:
MOST: during the player introductions and the virtual panning of the baseball stadium
SOMEWHAT: the batter steps up to the plate, and guess what happens? lockup, maybe being able to get back to the desktop where with some effort I can kill the program.
RARELY: after one or two outs in the top of the first inning (I or my human opponent never make it to the bottom of the inning) the frame-rate comes to a screaching halt, eventually it looks like you are playing a high class Pentium game on a 486e computer. The end result of trying to get out of that mess is, drum roll please, a full blown lockup. Windows doesn't even need to ask me to reboot this time.
What magnifies my frustrations are this:
(a) 3DO is near or at bankruptcy at the moment, so they're not going to do squat for providing technical support. they may provide a long distance support phone number, but you won't get anything more than an assisted run down of the components on your system. More like a marketing tool than anything. And, their online support? It's useless. The questions with answers are nothing like someone having serious, mind boggling game playing troubles would experience;
(b) 3DO put out a High Heat Baseball game that should have been the patch to their last game. Looking back at the online photos they posted of their 2003 version of the game back in early spring, it turned out the photos were airbrushed, and were only photos from their 2003 version. How sad;
(c) There are so many variables that go into making an online gaming product work. You get to deal with protocols, operating platforms, DirectX versions (I think), Internet connection speeds, IP versions, Latency frequencies and intensities, on and on and on.
So, my question to myself and the rest of the open source community is this:
Is there a way to write a software product that is, to put it in a nutshell, pluggable to the games currently in existance or at least compatible with future games? You know, the software writers would just worry about the game on a single game basis, writing the game in such a way that it can take advantage of network gaming utilities?
This is something that I want to look into, hopefully the far more experienced programmers out there can offer me some pointers.
chipx86 You know, I thought we had established that out of fairness until you apologized for your actions directly and rescinded your comments about me - since you indeed were the first one to post a diary entry to www.advogato.org about the conflicts occuring elsewhere on the Internet, among other things - there is absolutely no reason for me to remove my rating of you and rescind my responses to you.
The ratings I assign are based both on how I feel someone contributes to the open source community technical-wise and personal-wise and how I feel about the person in general. Someone who strikes me as a kind person away from the open source community is one that I feel has the potential to contribute more greatly (if the technical skills are high) within the open source community.
That's really all there is to it, and I feel it is a policy that many both within and away from the open source community would adhere to. Really, I don't care to discuss this any further. I've had a pretty good week so far.</b>