🚀 go-pugleaf

bx304@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeff Epler) writes:
>>The second game-mode is a duel between two
>>players connected by serial links (as in the original LineWars).
>
>Will the two-player mode have the multiple fighters per side, (I think
>that would be neat) as an option, or will it still be one ship per
>side in that mode?

Yes, that would surely be neat, but I am running into a bandwidth problem
there. I need to send around 20 bytes of information per ship (including
ship's coordinates, direction and speed) per frame. As the game runs at
around 35 frames/sec, this means data transfer rate of 700 cps. This speed
is quite easy to achieve on a 9600 bps modem, but at 2400 bps it is a bit
of a problem. And that is only for one ship per player. Of course lower
cps rates just mean that the opponent ship movement is a bit jerky, so it
is not a great problem. I could possibly change my game to transmit only
the information that has changed since the last frame, but that would make
the routines unnecessarily complex. Currently I can use even 115.200 bps
rate with NS16450 UART chips while using a joystick and playing digitized
music, and even though about 70 per cent of the received blocks fail due
to Receive Data Overrun Errors (I have to disable interrupts for up to
1 ms to read the joystick), this does not effect the game at all. If I
were to send only the changed information, loss of transmitted blocks
would be much more serious.

I'd like to hear how others have implemented the two-player game line
error handling and this bandwidth problem.

Patrick Aalto
ap@tukki.jyu.fi

will not