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You can play Armagetron over a LAN or the Internet. It uses the UDP connectionless communication mode of the IP protocol, so make sure you have TCP/IP installed.
How do you start a LAN game? The fastest computer in your network should act as the server. There, go to the network menu and hit the "LAN Game"- menuitem. After a second, Armagetron should tell you that there are no servers currently available, but offer a "Host Game" item. Press Return on it. In the following menu, you can select a name for your server and the game options. The game options here are completely independent from those in single player mode. After everything is to your liking, you can hit the "Host Network Game" menuitem and the game will start on the server and run just as in single player mode.
The other computers will be the clients. On them, you activate the "LAN Game" menuitem, too. This time however, there should be the server you just started visible in the server browser. Just hit Return on it to connect.
Theoretically, an internet game should work the same way. Unfortunately, there is not yet a master server available to give you a list of all active servers...
If the server browser does not work for some reason (i.e. no master server available), you can still connect to a server if you know its network adress or hostname and the port it runs on. The "Custom Connect" menuitem in the network game menu serves that purpose.
You are not limited to one player per computer; on each of them you can play with up to four people. In the precompiled version, there is a limit of 16 clients if you compile Armagetron yourself, you can change that limit in the file "network.h". Just change the line
#define MAXCLIENTS 16to whatever you like.
If you are behind a (masquerading) firewall, you cannot act as a server. (Since your computer is then unreachable from the outside.) That is the only restriction; the clients may be behind a firewall. (I am, and I can connect to outside servers; of course, the firewall must not block Armagetrons network port 4534.) Do expect heavy problems if you try to connect to a server through the same firefall with two computers at once (Note: it should work now, but I can't test it anymore...)
Following the model of Quake 1-3, there is a special binary version of
the game available for download (or compile it yourself giving the
option --disable-glout to configure) that has all input/output
features disabled. If you start it, it will read the normal configuration files
set up a network game according to the settings in
the game menu (Number of AI players, game mode and finish mode), and
it will limit its output badwidth to the value set in the network game
menu. A dedicated server takes input from the keyboard and interprets
it just the way it does with the
configuration files;
additionally to the usual configuration files, the dedicated server
will read the file everytime.cfg
before each round;
it may be comfortable to place quickly changing settings there.
You can join the game on the dedicated server just the way
described above.
The advantages of this solution are:
I maintain a list of the dedicated servers I know of (usually: none) on this webpage.
This is the configurable part of my "equal ping" technology. In short, if you have low ping and your opponent has high ping (ping: the time it takes a message to travel from your computer to the server and back, usually measured in milliseconds), you can take over some of his ping to make the situation more equal, and stop your opponent complaining about your big advantage. So, if you have ping 60, your opponent has ping 160 and you set the ping charity to at least 50 (more does not change the situation), you will take over 50 ms of his ping, giving you both ping 110. If you set your ping charity to 20, you will end up with ping 80, your opponent with ping 140. Of course, you may be greedy and set ping charity to zero, leaving your world as simple as it is in other network games. I suggest leaving it at the default value 100.
Of course, there is a security problem; players may exploit this
feature, using modified versions of Armagetron (perfectly legal thanks
to the GPL; this is the point where other people's freedom can be
annoying..), pretend they are poor ping 400 players (while in reality,
they have a ping of, say, 90), and use your generousity to get as low
as ping zero.
IF YOU PLAN TO DO THIS: Even a novice hacker will find out how in
about 15 minutes, so noone wil congratulate you on your hack. PLEASE
DO NOT SPOIL THE GAME FOR EVERYONE ELSE! Ahem... back to normal.
If you suspect someone of cheating that way, try to talk him out of
it. If that does not work, simply turn your ping charity to zero as
long as you play with him. Maybe I will find a technical solution.
Yep, found one that may make it a lot harder; so if this problem will
appear someday, a simple server update should get rid of it in most
cases...
How does that "equal ping" thing work? It is not that complicated, but for now, I rather keep the secret buried in the source code (too lazy to explain it right now...).
In the player menu, there is the "Specator mode" toggle; If you just want to watch an internet game, connect to the server with spectator mode enabled. Note that you will be almost completely ignored in spectator mode: the other players won't know you are there at all, and you can't chat, the dedicated server will not bother to start a game if only spectators are online (all you are going to get is a black screen). Only the server administrator will get a message that a client connected.
In a multiplayer game, every crucial action makes you gain or loose points; after
If you are the only person on a dedicated server, a special
single player game is started (its parameters are determined in
the SP_* variables in "settings.txt" on the server) to keep
you busy until someone else connects; the highscores in
this mode may be published by the server administrator.
The highest scores collected in a single player game are collected
in the file "highscores.txt", the people with most won multiplayer
rounds/matches are stored in "won_rounds.txt" and "won_matches.txt".
A ladder (still experimental) is stored in "ladder.txt".
As in any software downloaded for free, you can't be completely
sure whether Armagetron has secret functions that, for example,
spy on your system internals, exploit known Windows bugs to
get to your ISP's password, etc... and send this information
to the author. Of course, Armagetron does not do such a thing,
and you can check that in the sourcecode. You may even rely on the fact
that someone else would find those hidden functions in the sourcecode,
and I'll get into big trouble if that happens, so I it would be
utterly stupid do do such a thing.
But Armagetron DOES send some information to me: If you connect
to a server for the first time, Armagetron will send
BIG_BROTHER 1
BIG_BROTHER 0
If you are interested in network programming yourself, you may want to read the network subsystem documentation.
This document was created by Manuel Moos.
Last modification: Fri May 24 06:36:39 CEST 2002
First Start | Network Play | Configuration | FAQ | Bugs | Todo List | Changelog | Compilation |