Leeloo

I don't know a thing about openGL, but does it draw something when you remove those lines?Does it flash when you use the same color for all four vertices? Not sure if it draws something or not, as it's the draw_sky_background that gives the problem, and seeing the sky is not that easy... I guess I should be able to see it in the water, but I'm not sure if there is any difference. But at least it's better than flickering until the problem gets solved. Tried making all four corners the same color, but that didn't help either. However, I just noticed that as long as the camera is turning it doesn't flicker, only when it stays in the same position. I don't think that happened yesterday though. But how would a bug in the drivers know if the camera is moving or not? The drivers only see still images. The only thing that knows that is EL, could it be a bug in EL afterall, one that only happens with DRI drivers? Something like the old "pressing tab in a place with no map makes a random texture disappear" bug that only happened on Linux?

Tried replacing GL_QUADS with GL_TRIANGLES, and the flashing is back. It's only when the glBegin() and glEnd() lines are removed that it doesn't flash.

I tried two triangles, and the flashing almost went away. Before, I had constant flashing, each frame would have the opposite textures lighted wrong, that doesn't happen now. But once in a while (a few times per minute), a single frame will flash, but at my current framerate I'm not able to see if it's even the same kind of flashing. So, it's a big improvement I guess I'll have to do the same thing later with the cave function (right now I'm more or less in bed with a cold). Interesting that OpenGL just sends vertexes without defining which are supposed to fit together... I had expected some kind of triangle function that would take three vertexes. Just sending vertexes makes it easy to remove one vertex and have everything screwed up because it just picks a the first vertex of the next triangle.

It seems (at least on IP in darkness) that draw_sky_background is where the problem lies. Commenting out glBegin(GL_QUADS) and the matching (I assume) glEnd() makes it stop flashing. What does GL_QUADS do? Just tell OpenGL that it should expect 4 vertexes instead of 3? And in that case, can I just remove those two lines and send 6 vertexes instead (to make two triangles)? As mentioned before, I know nothing about OpenGL

If you ask nicely, I'm sure number 3 could be arranged You want me to test before I commit? That's what the test-server is for

The musician should probably be done as a positional sound.

you mean all those poor coders that learned C before c++ existed will never be able to put up with time? I had a C++ teacher who mixed the two languages. Classes, char *, iostream for screen output, stdio for files. The result: I never liked C++, I ended up teaching myself C just to get away from that. Another thing I've found out, (at least among the people I know) people who love Java and hate C++ have learned the same terrible mix of C and C++. When I had an argument with a friend who loves Java, I ended up showing her a C++ program written with std::* and everything, and she thought it looked like a Java program.

Connections per user? We're talking about Rolan4, right? I assume this is a bot, without any way of extract information from the EL server. For the EL server itself, finding out when someone last logged in is as easy as checking the modified date of that users datafile (one file per user).

The ping-pong method is not more network intensive per packet, but since it sends twice as many packets of the same size, it does generate twice the amount of network traffic I'm not sure about your calculations, if the 160 is a rounding error, my (or rather Windows') calculater says about 170 (170 if you use 1024, 166 if you use 1000), and it's still bytes, not bits. lag that leads to resyncs is caused by downstream data packets being delayed and then arriving in a group, if upstream data packets are delayed, you just don't move until the packets reach the server. Lag can be both, as you can't tell if the packet from the server is delayed or hasn't been sent because the packet to the server is delayed. However, as the protocol is TCP, there are also the ACK packets that complicate the matter, as they move in the opposite direction of the data packets, and can be a part of other data packets. And then there is the resyncs that are caused by the PC being too slow to keep up with the data stream.

If you ask nicely, I'm sure number 3 could be arranged

No, it's also to make the game less repetitive.

The protocol is designed specifically to be low bandwidth. In the old days (ok, we didn't have that many users back then), the server ran on a residential ADSL, something like 512/128 I think. An example: A simple thing like the server pinging the client to see when a a connection is lost (the grue) is normally implemented by the server sending a packet "ping" to the client, which then responds with a reply "pong". In the EL protocol, only the "pong" packet is sent, the client knows when to send it and the server will drop the connection if it's not received within 15 seconds after it should have been sent.

Where would he get the IP adresses?

The point is not that that you'll learn C anyway, but that C++ compilers accept C code, so if you start with C you will never learn C++ for real. Why use std::string when you are used to char *? And why use vector<int> when you are used to malloc(BUFSIZE*sizeof(int))? The C++ ones are easier to use, but if you already know C, the other ones are familiar, you know exactly how they work. And then there is pointers. An important part of programming, but not something for beginners. In C, you can't to much without pointers, with a good C++ book, pointers should be reserved for the last two chapters. Even Java isn't this newbie friendly, because although Sun claims they got rid of pointers, they really just renamed them to references - which can be confusing to a C++ programmer, because C++ has something different called references - and you can't do much in Java either without pointers references.

Me?

I know it's a driver problem (Or possibly a hardware problem, since other people have reported the same problem with the ATI binary drivers). But the point is it only happens in EL, not in other games, so EL must be doing something different. If we can figure out the difference, it should be possible to fix (or workaround if you prefer that word) the problem in the EL code.

You mean KBITS... baud is something to do with modulation, not the data transfer speed.

Since when did it become so populat to call everyone "him"?

I wasn't talking about you specifically, but about every high-level player who suggested that a stats wipe would be necessary. As for your last comment: I worked for those stats. I didn't work for the items, they are only a means to the end (or completely useless).

It looks like it's mostly the people who have high levels who want a stats wipe. I can think of a few possible reasons: - They leveled up fast, they know they can do it again. While the rest of us who spent years to get to level 20 will have to spend years again - They find leveling up fun and having high levels boring, so they want to do it once more (yeah right ). - They hope that by arguing for a stats wipe, they will get more people to vote no to random spawns Being only about level 20 myself, I don't want a wipe. Not again, I haven't even reached my pre-crash levels yet. But I want random spawns, otherwise I will never reach them. I'm tired of spawn-camping wolves, but I can't take on a goblin yet. Random spawns would at least get rid of spawn-camping, giving me a reason to do start fighting again, so I can get away from the wolves. Where as a wipe would put me back to rabbits, training towards being able to fight wolves, instead of getting away from them.

Seems I didn't wrote what I thought I wrote, no wonder I didn't get the expected replies :lol: What does EL do different than other games when it comes to lighting? EL is the only one I have the problem with, all the other GL-based programs and games I tried work fine. I tried comparing the lights code with Armagetron, which use the some functions, but with different values for e.g. diffuse, but I didn't have any luck solving it. Yes, I'm trying to solve the problem myself, but I don't know anything about OpenGL programming, so I need lots of help

Yes, level 8 can be reached in a few hours by a power-gamer. Maybe it should be changed to something time-based. Like 56 hours, that will be a week if you play 8 hours per day, and two months if you play 1 hour per day

Well, since only mods have access to it, everyone else will still have to post their ideas and reasoning here The advantage of #hint is that it goes away once you reach a certain level, #bc doesn't. I believe most people are glad that they don't have to look at the same message over and over again once they reach level 8, and this is defeated by #bc'ing it. Basically, you send it out not only to the ones who need to know it, but also to the ones who already know, and who are tired of seeing those messages over and over again.

They scroll by no faster than all the other text. And there's really nothing we can do about people who ignore helpfull information. Moving it from #hint to #bc only causes people to start ignoring #bc instead.

If the #hints are confusing, they should be updated to a less confusing version. I.e. instead of broadcasting the same thing over and over again, let's put your text in the hints. And that's for any newbie info that's broadcast regularly. I think the hints are server side, so they don't need to wait for the next client update, only a server restart, which happens a lot more often.