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1

Gold Mine / Re: War2Combat 4.6 Released. Happy Birthday, Warcraft II!

« on: December 09, 2019, 07:22:41 PM »

At the moment with the current development stage the programmers decided to release it only for private testing given to certain players only.
It will be posted in the forum for public testing when it is ready for that stage.
So, it will not be posted publicly yet.
People who have been invited to test it, but are scared of being hacked, should just wait until it's ready.

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Gold Mine / Re: War2Combat 4.6 Released. Happy Birthday, Warcraft II!

« on: December 09, 2019, 07:12:56 PM »

@Equinox:

It is 100% safe, there are several players already using it and you can check such things at https://www.virustotal.com
Unless someone gives you a virus claiming it's Superwarlat, that's why you should only trust certain players.
However, it is only a testing version yet.
Better version will probably be released in next Combat update soon.
It only works when everyone in the match has it.
Otherwise, it auto-disables itself in order to keep compatibility with no drop.

3

Gold Mine / Re: War2Combat 4.6 Released. Happy Birthday, Warcraft II!

« on: December 09, 2019, 07:05:13 PM »

Keep in mind people that this update does NOT add Superwarlat which everyone has been talking about. While Superwarlat makes the game's units respond far faster than with the normal Warlat, all this current update does is add Autowarlat, which simply automatically turns on the slow old Warlat we've known for many years now.

It is most likely that iL will include Superwarlat in a future update.

This current update 4.6 might cause lag in some big games, in this case, press F5 and enable High latency while in the game.

@iL You should make the next installer automatically delete Autowarlat if it includes Superwarlat, since it is superseded by Superwarlat which also includes a patch for these same bytes of code but takes a smarter decision on whether to enable it or not.

4

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 20, 2019, 01:33:38 PM »

@fois Overlay is now ready and has everything necessary for its purpose, if you want to review the code before it starts being used it for tests go Discord

5

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 17, 2019, 02:24:52 AM »

Glad you're having fun.

Thank you, Lambchops.

Server ping times are irrellevent. It's a p2p game, so in an 8 player game you have 56 different ping times to consider (yes they can be different from either end of the same connection). Also you need to be testing with UDP packets, ICMP is handled seperately by many servers.

You misunderstood what I said. I'm not talking about ping times to war2.ru. I'm talking about ping time between player to player. The game stores it in memory, so there's no need for us to send custom packets to calculate it. And also, if you read carefully, I explained how I would get it to consider the 56 ping times. That's the point of auto-sending chat messages -- to exchange info on that.

If you want help making plugins I can advise you on how to adapt things to use the plugin framework.

Like what?

6

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 16, 2019, 10:26:12 AM »

Only one problem -- found the address for chat log but it's changing every game, have to track down a pointer to it.

Problem solved. Inject code at 00407E67, ESI will point to string of chat message being sent.

7

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 16, 2019, 07:57:04 AM »

@Lambchops
You said my plugin idea was hard to develop but guess what.
I just found how to get ping from all players in the game, the game already has the ping for all players in some memory addresses.
I also found how to send a chat message to other players.
And I found how to read chat message log.
These are all the elements we need, the coding job is simple now.
So actually, let's dump the game name idea.

Let's just make a plugin which, before game start, calculates a latency to use based on worst case ping to any player, reports it to chat as "warlat5" for example right before game starts (for plugin compatibility in case a different version calculates based on ping value differently since we always trust worst case latency), then if every player sent a latency message then people use the worst case latency specified, but if one player didn't report a latency value, it means he doesn't have our patch so game just uses normal War2 latency.

Because War2 is P2P is required to do it like that.

That way we don't need game names, it's 100% compatible, it picks the most optimal latency possible for a game, and it's all automatic, transparent and requires zero effort from the user.

Here's some info
4D157C --> Ping in milliseconds for 2nd player in lobby screen for Top vs. Bottom game type (maybe only this address if you're host/player 1?) (does exact address depends on other settings like team size, resources setting, etc. or just game type TVB? In any case if you change the settings the ping ms value's address just moves by a little)
1E80084 --> Specify message to be sent as string here, then if you press "Enter" game will send that message (so just have to find function which triggers it)
Only one problem -- found the address for chat log but it's changing every game, have to track down a pointer to it.

You in or out @Lambchops? All this information proves the plugin now turns out to be 100x easier to develop than you expected, and not only that but will work optimally removing the drawbacks out of all previously suggested ideas and yet having even more advantages.

@fois helped find these addresses BTW.

P.S. If we found another way to communicate, like not game chat messages before game starts, then it would be 100% transparent and perfect.

8

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 15, 2019, 12:48:37 PM »

Ok what do you people think about this: If player joins game "gow #L1" with latency hack on, the patch spoofs your own name so you have a symbol at the end of it that indicates you have the patch on, then host kicks everyone without it and starts. Would cause any problems? Seems like a clean solution, no chat messages dirtying up stuff, no need to scroll up to check everyone's messages etc.

9

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 15, 2019, 11:11:05 AM »

Probably yeah, the players need to check the connections between each other anyways and report the highest ping to the host (the host can't know what setting to choose otherwise).

Actually my "automatize the check" comment was regarding the situation we didn't do the ping thing and we relied on my other idea.
And how to communicate? Embed as game message?

The game has a ping command (the Note bot that checks if your port is forwarded is using the ping command too), so maybe you can use that without any external ip list. Maybe lambchops knows if there is a list with all pings somewhere?

Ok so how do we make a program that runs within each player's machine ping everyone else? Simulate game packets and then read the results? How do we know what IP to send the packet to?

Just made a auto warlat plugin, didn't test it much yet but seems to work fine on both of my pcs

If only one player in the game has it installed will it enable Warlat for everyone?
No compatibility problems with only one player having it in a game?

10

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 15, 2019, 05:51:58 AM »

I don't like the idea of the custom named games and sending messages to the channel and having the host manually verify that all players have the patch, this is not going to work (it's way too complicated, no one will use it).

I don't think that's the best solution either, but it's a pretty good one, and it's what they had over at SC1 for years. First of all maybe iL will auto-update Combat for everyone and then everyone's gonna have the new Combat. In that case you just host games with the latency setting you want in the game name and everything's fine!

Also the most immediate use of #L1 would be 1v1, it's no problem to set up there, you wanna 1v1 someone you know so you know they have patch for sure, live close enough for sure etc.

Of course it would be hard to setup for non-arranged big team games, but that's not the primary use case.

Could we automatize the check if everyone has the patch before enabling somehow, based on detecting the messages that have been sent or something?

We need a zero-config solution that automatically detects if players got the patch + automatically checks the pings to apply the best setting for the lowest possible delay. That's going to be a lot of work, but if you want to try it then go ahead.

Okay, glad to see you like one of my ideas. Please tell me how we could go about implement this.

iL would have to make PHP script with all IP addresses in a match and then I make a program that pings them, communicates with them and auto-coordinates latency based on that? On game port maybe? Since if it's UDP multiple programs can use it?

11

Server.War2.ru / Re: War2 graphics for Win Vista/7/8/8.1/10/2012 fixed

« on: November 15, 2019, 05:47:56 AM »

About all the other problems you reported, I can't reproduce any of them. What OS are you using?

Windows 7 with Aero disabled

12

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 14, 2019, 08:28:51 PM »

@Lambchops

Let's be rational here for a second. The game interface may have that but unless everyone uses the patch it would drop. With my easy-to-implement idea, the latency setting is specified in the game name like in SC1 and only people with the patch join so there are no drops or problems.

It's as simple as hooking join_game and create_game which your plugin library allows for, checking game name "#L3", "#L5" etc. and just changing latency based on that. You're talking about failed attempts but this can be coded in a short time and poses no practical problems. If you don't want to do it I will, because it makes perfect rational sense.

Just tell me if you're on board with doing what makes sense or you're essentially just gonna end up telling everyone to hop on warlat5.w2p or something because you "feel" that's better because of some imaginary fear of how the community will act or how things will work that doesn't stand to reason or comparison with similar games with similar systems.

I'm happy to discuss this with substantiated arguments so that we can all reach an agreement on what is best, it just seems none are being brought to the table.

Why would what worked for the SC1 plugin not work for the War2 plugin?

If two people know each other, know they live close and want to arrange a 1v1 together why would we stop them from using "#L1" and having much better micro? If people are gonna host a 4v4 they're gonna know to use either no code or "#L9" or whatever. Why force everyone on an unhappy medium which is gonna cause lag for some players and unnecessary delay for others?

13

Server.War2.ru / Ladder not working!

« on: November 14, 2019, 07:26:31 PM »

Ladder not working. Game reports not working. Since days ago there are no updates at all.

Is it possible to both restore it and add the games from days ago that weren't recorded? Maybe through a script?

14

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 14, 2019, 07:24:39 PM »

@Lambchops

Ok, I see. So should I start programming it myself or wait for you? If you tell me by when you expect to have it done I can make the decision. Don't mean to pressure you, I just wanna streamline this process so War2 community doesn't have to wait around forever (I don't wanna wait 2 months for you, 6 months for iL to put it in new Combat, ... I could save the first 2 months by writing it myself.)

I think it's very unlikely it fragments anything, case in point SC1, in iCCup where "LAN latency" is enabled by default and is a server supposedly for "pros" who you'd expect to be picky about latency, people from the various continents were playing together frequently. In any case people should have the freedom to choose all of this.

People rarely enable Warlat anyway. They play with the awful default latency. It's highly unlikely that this would fragment the community. And things would be even more likely to be fine anyway if we did the auto ping idea or the lobby commands one.

We don't need a medium, we need to change latency depending on who we're playing with so that we can have the most optimal game possible with each person!

15

Mods & Development / Re: Improving Warlat

« on: November 14, 2019, 04:01:50 PM »

So far latency 1 worked without any lag with 1500km distance with the in-game menu on default "Low" setting, but lagged on the "Extra Low". Even on "Low", units responded a lot faster than with the current version of Warlat people use. But Europe<->USA latency 1 was laggy, even when the in-game menu was set to "High" latency. All tests were 1v1.

When one of the players didn't have the patch installed, there was an instant disconnect.

Latency 1 will be highly relevant and very useful, especially for playing 1v1 games between people who know they are nearby, so it definitely needs to be an option easily accessible by the user in the end product, without the need to swap files or anything like that.

Looks like delay is 5-10 frames when using both latency 1 and "Extra Low". That is pretty good. Fois said "26 frames" is "not bad". But pulling peons fails at an incredibly high rate with the old Warlat, and the delay for units to respond in a battle represents a huge portion of the total fight time, limiting unit control potential severely. That needs to be clarified in order for people to understand how much this new patch will change.

The way this game is played will change. Much more skill will be involved.