Hi forum members!
Almost 2 years ago I set up three DosBox systems to play Redneck Rampage in multiplayer coop mode with my girlfriend (same room, i.e. LAN) and my cousin across the Internet via DosBox' IPX tunnel facility.
Yesterday I tried it again for playing LAN only with 2 PCs.
In general it worked quite well, but as my girlfriend and me wanted to play through the whole game in many sessions (like 2 levels each evening), we tried the SAVE GAME / LOAD GAME feature for a networked coop game.
Unfortunately, that didn't work. :(
I could save it, but restoring them didn't work.
(Of course I can't verify if the game was _really_ saved, so maybe the problem lies even in the save feature, and not in the loading code.)
Some annoyances are: Sometimes, when saving the game from the ESC menue, the game is afterwards PAUSED, sometimes it is not.
So I wonder what influence that occurence does have of having a working savegame saved!?
I tried PAUSING the game right before saving, that doesn't help either.
But, as I said, we can play after saving fine.
Just after loading, the game gets messed up: Usually, the second console player gets a "Out of Sync"-message afterwards.
It doesn't seem to be always _immediately_ after loading, but just when that player tries to move.
Sometimes, the screen just hangs. The whole game seems to hang at that time. Only CTRL+F9 for killing the DosBox altogether will help then.
This occurs only for console player #2. I as the host can ESC and mess around in the menues or quitting the game fine.
I remember though of having these problems already back in the old DOS times. IIRC Duke3D was the only one, in which coop MP savestates worked.
However, yesterday, I even got a more strange reaction: Console player #2 exited to DOS (i.e. DosBox) with the message:
DAGNABIT GAME PACKET!!! (2 too long bytes)I don't remember having seen this message any time before, although I was messing with COMMIT.EXE back in the 90ies for long times playing Duke, SW, Redneck, and Blood etc. with my friends over an IPX network.
So it might be that the IPX-UDP-wrapper of DosBox also adds to this whole mess. :-\
BTW, for any non-native speakers (like me), the BIT in DAGNABIT is _NOT_ related to bits and bytes or the network stuff at all:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dagnabitA rather nice alternative to "Damn!"
:P
So I just want to know, if anybody has a solution for saving in coop games or some tips for sane handling of COMMIT.EXE.
Maybe if any sector stuff is done at the time (i.e. swinging doors), the savegames will be corrupt etc.
Or if any enemies are seen on screen at the time.
That way I could think of some workaround.
Maybe even Ken reads this and knows more stuff of it, as he was the original author of the networking, too (correct me if I'm wrong, please).
I could even think of coop savegames not being tested for Redneck Rampage, so they will ALWAYS go out-of-sync (maybe because this two bytes=?!), as they just used the Duke3D code without updating some structures, or anything like that.
Thanks for some suggestions, guys! ;D