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Topic: Ghost monsters in Coop  (Read 6911 times)

Offline 40oz

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Ghost monsters in Coop
« on: March 08, 2013, 19:14:22 »
I'm sure a fix for this is on the way, but I'm just curious what's causing it and what can be done to avoid it.

On multiplayer coop games with lots of monsters, many of the monsters appear invisible. They make no noise, but they can still attack the players and they can still be shot, but they're still invisible and don't count as kills.

The reason I ask is that I was using Odamex to test some of my WIP maps on multiplayer. Out of the five maps that I tested, the third one was the only one that had ghost monsters. The server host had a constant 344 total monsters, but the client had a different number of total monsters on the map when viewing the automap each time we played it. I reloaded the map and the server several times, and each time, the monster count for the clientside was a different number. Like anywhere between 30 and 150 monsters were snipped from the map.

The other maps were fine each time though. What's the reason for this? Is there some way to work around it?

Offline Dr. Sean

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Re: Ghost monsters in Coop
« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2013, 22:54:24 »
That's a pretty big discrepancy between the server's monster count and the client's! Odamex's current code tries to send the client messages to spawn every monster at the start of the map. For 300+ monsters, that becomes a lot of data and it has to get split up into several packets, which can sometimes cause problems with message reliability.

We're working on netcode improvements that will handle packets in a more robust manner as well as only send messages for clients to spawn monsters when the client can see them or the monster has been awakened.
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