id_notes/John C/1997-12-10_1997-12-11

[idsoftware.com]

Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.4!

Name: John Carmack

Email: johnc@idsoftware.com

Description: Programmer

Project: Quake 2

Last Updated: 12/11/1997 23:41:03 (Central Standard Time)

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Dec 11:

The Quake 2 public code release is up at:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/source/q2source_12_11.zip

This source code distribution is only for hard-core people that are going to

spend a lot of time pouring over it. This is NOT a how-to-make-levels-for-q2

type dsitribution!

This should keep a bunch of you busy for a while. :)

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Dec 10:

BIG BUG IN Q2 NETWORKING!

If you run multiplayer servers, download:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip

A serious bug got through... I thought the QuakeWorld master server

code was completely disabled, because I was planning on putting a

modified architecture in place in the point release. It turns out

that the code is still in there, sending heartbeats to a unix

machine here at id that isn't even running a master server.

That wouldn't normally be an issue -- a packet every five minutes

from all the servers.

Except....

Cyrix has a new processor that is significantly faster at single

precision floating point calculations if you don't do any double

precision calculations anywhere.

Quake had always kept its timebase as a double precision seconds value,

but I agreed to change it over to an integer millisecond timer to

allow the global setting of single precision mode.

We went through and changed all the uses of it that we found, but

the routine that sends heartbeats to the master servers was missed.

So, instead of sending a packet every 300 seconds, it is sending one

every 300 MILLISECONDS.

Oops.

To a server, it won't really make a difference. A tiny extra packet

three times a second is a fraction of the bandwidth of a player.

However, if there are thousands of network games in progress, that is

a LOT of packets flooding idsoftware.com.

So, please download the new executable if you are going to run any

servers (even servers started through the menus).

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip

This isn't the real point release -- there are no new features or

bugfixes. I just went back to the release codebase and recompiled

with one function commented out so we wouldn't have to worry about

introducing new bugs with our current untested code.

Btw, all bug reports should go to Christian (xian@idsoftware.com),

NOT to me, Brian, or Cash! We need a central point to funnel

things through. Hopefully we can set up a web page or something

to make public what we know about, so we can cut down on email

traffic.