There NEEDS to be a way to re-connect to a game if your connection fails.

Do you have an exemple of a RTS game where this feature is effective and working well? I don't remember any having it, and it's not just because devs are lazy.

How about Zero Hour? If a player disconnects, other players have a choice to wait for him to reconnect or they can just kick him.

Originally Posted by Falterfire

How about Zero Hour? If a player disconnects, other players have a choice to wait for him to reconnect or they can just kick him.

That's just standard timeout in RTS. If it's just a lag spike, the player has a few seconds to recover, but if he is really completely disconnected from the game, he is gone.

Battleforge has a timeout, but it doesn't show anything for it, but should your connexion recover from the lag, you can notice the game suddenly go into speed of light mode for couple seconds to rapidly display what happened during the few lost seconds.

i still hate this.
i have played almost 30 ranked PvP matches so far, and my only loss is still: the disconnected game -.-

also i had to finish bad harvest advanced "alone"
2 guys dropped and the last one was afk or something.

also stuff like this MUST NOT HAPPEN!


so far the difficulty isnt the enemy but the server

Originally Posted by Adita

it's technically next to impossible. that is because the state of the game is only kept local at the clients. the only data that is sent from and to the server are the game commands (that is what is stored in the replay file, that's also why those replay files are so small)

So the only way to "reconnect" would be to replay it from all the commands & fast-forward until you are in sync again. Maybe on a fast computer you would have a chance to achieve that, but on computers that are on the lower end of the required specs, it'd take forever.

Nope. Games not not done locally. Each game had a game ID registered with the server. All that would happen is disconnected players units just stand still and then when player tries to reconnect and get back into the game via the game ID provided by server,

As for the stuff about replays, nope you are wrong there. All that a multiplayer program needs is a packet detailing unit location and ownership, something that is about 5k in size at most. Ask anybody with programing experience in games why the heck they would want to replay everything on reconnect? Its more complex to program such a thing!

Most RTS games do not bother with this since games are hosted locally and tunneling via NAT is not feasable for all situations.

i Prefer only to give time about 60 seconds ... otherwise already stressed players will leave the game ^^ Therefor better having one guy missing, than the whole game lost ;>)

Originally Posted by Escandiel

i Prefer only to give time about 60 seconds ... otherwise already stressed players will leave the game ^^ Therefor better having one guy missing, than the whole game lost ;>)

Yeah, a lag timer is intresting. Also a indicator on loading screen so we know how far people have loaded

Originally Posted by War-A-Tron

Nope. Games not not done locally. Each game had a game ID registered with the server. All that would happen is disconnected players units just stand still and then when player tries to reconnect and get back into the game via the game ID provided by server,

As for the stuff about replays, nope you are wrong there. All that a multiplayer program needs is a packet detailing unit location and ownership, something that is about 5k in size at most. Ask anybody with programing experience in games...

... That would be me, thank you.

Get a clue, the Bf servers don't do any simulation. What they do is pass around player commands, and make sure the simulation (that is done locally on each client) stays the same on all clients. (if not you get a desync)

Also about sending the packet containing game state: the server doesn't have it, so it would have to ask one of the clients. 5k is way too optimistic. With number of units+buildings easily being 1000, and each unit having lots of numbers that have to be stored ( not only position and life, but also current target, current action, time until ability available again, effects on unit, number of void energy attached to unit, and possibly much more internal variables we don't know of.

If the server would do the simulation, then reconnecting would be possible.
But then it would also
- have to send updates to the entire game state every simulation step (10 steps a second i think)
- need computing power to simulate thousands of games simultaneously

I.e. You would need a lot more server power, which would be hard to pay for without a subscription model.

All that just to enable reconnecting?
Might sound good if you have a bad connection.
I'm not sure if that is so good for all the others. Not all disconnects are technical, might as well some had to shut down. He won't come back, but now you also have to wait. Not really better than before in this situation.

you can always initiate a kickvote too.

for example: have to wait 45 secs in PvP and more if you like (or kick)
and 30 or more in PvE. i guess the timeout is something like 20 secs isnt it?

this number could be altered if that person logs in imediatly. if he is not online, initiate the vote after a fixed time.

this way you can still let buddys reconnect.
i do for example lose the connection to BF but skype still stays, so he can tell me "hey wait a second"

Originally Posted by War-A-Tron

As for the stuff about replays, nope you are wrong there. All that a multiplayer program needs is a packet detailing unit location and ownership, something that is about 5k in size at most. Ask anybody with programing experience in games why the heck they would want to replay everything on reconnect? Its more complex to program such a thing!

This thing is more grazy you may imagine. Think about you have to save ALL positions of ALL units in the game for EACH time tick. Your file will be filled amazingly fast! You also have to save the player commands active on each tick.

In moment the replay is just replaying a game, you can't jump to a specific place in the file.