Great game, some minor quibbles

[Kolya]

I like Rymdraket a lot, so much in fact that I wrote a review in the Free-Games-section on our forums, to incite others to play it (with me :) Thank you for releasing this great game for free. I think a lot of work went into it and it shows.

Still I have some minor quibbles:
It would be nice if the server could use UPnP to get past a router. I think that's pretty much common place these days. Also if you can, put up a permanent server, at least until a small community has built up.

The other thing is about that short moment in gameplay when the ship reaches zero hull points and (if it doesn't explode) ship-control is suddenly taken away from the user and the ship nose-dives into the ground. That's actually a cool idea, but most of the times that happens I find myself just wondering what the heck is going on. It always takes a second or two until I realise: "Duh! Hull: Zero!"
If you would add a sound for this event, so players instantly know why they cannot steer their ship any more, that'd be great.

[Kolya]

So I forwarded all the ports in my router and still couldn't reach the masterserver with my dedicated server. Connecting to my LAN IP worked though.

Then I read this in the manual:

If your server is on a LAN with local IPs you won't be able to see the server from outside the LAN. Computers that are connected to the same LAN will be able to see the server.

Now most computers are behind a router and hence on a LAN nowadays. Does this really mean there's no way to publish my server? I guess this would explain why there are never any servers published on the master list.

Any help here?

[admin]

Hello!

Sorry I have been on vacation a few days and not been able to regularly check the forums for new posts. The game is sadly quite old and hence use Microsoft Direct Play library. This forces the network communications to use a bunch of sockets.

So I forwarded all the ports in my router and still couldn't reach the masterserver with my dedicated server. Connecting to my LAN IP worked though.

Then I read this in the manual:

If your server is on a LAN with local IPs you won't be able to see the server from outside the LAN. Computers that are connected to the same LAN will be able to see the server.

Hmm, that is very strange. It is possible to publish servers that are behind routers. The server I'm occasionally running is behind a router. Here is a screen grab of my port-forward screen in the router settings. One thing to notice is that the "Application Name" field is RRDedicated. This parameter can also be Rymdraket depending on what type of server you are running. I am sorry this has been left out in the manual Maybe it solves your problem?

portf.png (132.93 KiB) Viewed 739 times

The ports aren't all visible but they are these:

• TCP: 2300-2400, 30000, 47624
• UDP: 2300-2400, 30000, 47624

The other thing is about that short moment in gameplay when the ship reaches zero hull points and (if it doesn't explode) ship-control is suddenly taken away from the user and the ship nose-dives into the ground. That's actually a cool idea, but most of the times that happens I find myself just wondering what the heck is going on. It always takes a second or two until I realise: "Duh! Hull: Zero!"
If you would add a sound for this event, so players instantly know why they cannot steer their ship any more, that'd be great.

I could do an update to alert the player if the controls go offline but right now I have a lot of other projects that takes up much of my time.

Your review is much appreciated! I am very glad people like to play Rymdraket. Maybe we could meet up for a dogfight some evening? =)

[O-san]

Forgot... Before the recent release of rymdraket the published IP was the local IP in the LAN (if there was a LAN). This has since been corrected in the new version of rymdraket (ver. 1.03). It now publishes the WAN address. This has to be corrected in the manual aswell.

[Kolya]

Mmmh, just tried it again. And again the server says it's published but it never pops up on the masterserver.
I gave myself a static IP in the router and then forwarded all the necessary ports.
Eventually I just added my own external IP and sort of connected...though with an error:
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/8046 ... 001603.jpg
Would be nice if one could paste the IP into the window btw.
Then I entered "localhost" for an IP and connected without a problem.

Anyway, I see you have a server up now.

And it looks like you could find my server as well. That's odd, I can never see it on the master-list.

[admin]

I get that message when I have my Windows (win7) firewall on. Me and my brother played on your server this morning and had no problems connecting. It was fun but a bit laggy with packet-loss sometimes. We also got timed-out due to high ping but that might be expected as we played from Sweden. I guess your server is located in Germany?

[Kolya]

Yeah, Germany. I had already fully allowed Rymdraket and it's dedicated server in my firewall. Anyway, as long as others can see my game, I guess it's fine. After all I can still connect to it, even if I can't see it on the masterserver.

I trained with bots a bit and noticed that 1 hard bot is probably the most difficult to beat. Even harder than 3 hard bots set to gang up against me, since they still fight each other when I just stay away.

[Kolya]

I realise that Rymdraket's development is probably closed for the most part, but here's another thing that would useful:
Say I want to keep up a server whenever I turn on my computer. After all it's really small, barely over 1Meg in RAM.
Then I can put a link to the server in my autostart folder, but that doesn't start/publish the server yet. So it would be nice if the server had a check to automatically start up & publish with these settings on next start.
Well maybe sometime.