Cube World & Us

Monday, August 12, 2013

3rd Party Hosting Experiment

We've decided to give some kind of hosted private servers a go.

We were looking for something Australian-based and both Richard and I scouted around a little bit with the googles and came up with "ZeusHosting".

So far the experiment says 'watch this space' and we haven't yet gotten over the first hurdle.

I signed us up and a minute later received an email saying: "Your Cube World Server has been provisioned on our network." Sweet! I quickly logged on to the IP address provided in the email and loaded in to a brand-spanky new random-seed world (note there was no facility to pick a seed). I quit immediately and didn't do anything at all except check that it had loaded.

This was unfortunate because later there was trouble and it would have been nice to compare to see if it'd been completely working at that stage.

When it came time for us both to do the chicken-wavey dance to connect several hours later general sadness was experienced -- we couldn't connect.

Eventually we figured out that we needed to restart the server in the "Game Panel". The server had somehow borked itself.

After that we could connect, yay! but it was unplayable, boo! ...

So to reiterate: watch this space.

View Ticket #864754

Department	Date	Subject	Status	Urgency
Support	12/08/2013 22:23	general server borkage: Multiplayer, NPCs, maps	Open	Medium

Elena Williams
Client

12/08/2013 22:23

Hi there,

Me and my friend in another city are trying to play cube world together using your service.

When we both logged on using the IP address provided (derp.derp.derp.merp) we both connected, and the game loaded but was basically unplayable.

We had the following big, obvious, unplayability issues:
* We were *not* in the same game instance, ie we weren't playing together
* There were *no* NPCs, mobs or any dynamic features
* Couldn't collect/pickup anything, could see harvestable items but not interact with them
* no labels on the map

Having no mobs is a bit of a big deal, but not being able to play together makes the server useless to us.

We successfully played Cube World together using other servers without any of the above issues but were having bad latency/connection issues which is why we though we'd check you guys out.

Is there anything we're missing to getting this to work?

Thanks!

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Cube World Server Bandwidth

I believe I've figured the problem: Cube World's server just loves it some bandwidth. My upstream is limited to around 700kbp/s. While Elena is connected to the server the upstream is running between 600-700kbp/s almost solidly. I reckon that the inability of my Internet connection to supply a consistent 700kbp/s connection is probably the cause of the problems.

I hope that the networking code is seriously optimised very soon, and perhaps also that the resilience of the client/server communications can be improved.

Server woes fixed!

An update on the server woes: ~~FIXED~~! Scratch that, not fixed.

I ran Windows Update. ~~I am pretty sure that fixed it.~~ That did not reliably fix it.

On the AA and view distance front: I actually had the game set to 50% view distance and no AA. When we first played the game successfully I had AA on and 100% view distance. So I set those back up to maximum and the game still worked.

I also removed some antivirus crapware from the system. There's a small chance it was to blame. One of these things did it though!

And so here is a shot of me riding my black cat Susuwatari out in the wilderness :-)

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Cube World Server Woes

As hinted at in previous posts we've been having some issues running our own Cube World server.

We started playing about 4 days ago with me running the server on the system I play on, and port forwarding set up so Elena could connect. It took some fiddling, and the eventual complete shutting down of Windows Firewall, but we got there. And played for hours.

It really is a heck of a fun game :-)

Only then the next night we started experiencing some troubles. In particular, at some point after successfully connecting and playing, it would seem as though we would become partially disconnected from the world. I, running the server, would see Elena stop moving. I wouldn't be able to interact with anything (pick anything up, open any doors, talk to anyone or shoot anything) but I was able to wander around and explore new map segments. Elena would see me disappear from the world but otherwise continue playing the game as though nothing had happened, including fighting things (though strange glitches would happen like her being hurt by things she couldn't see) and picking things up.

Very odd.

To make matters worse, I experimented with playing by myself on the server, and found the same thing still happened.

There are multiple threads on cubeworldforum.org about this issue. Suggested solutions will be tried to see if they have any impact:

Run Windows Update,
Turn off anti-aliasing,
Reduce draw distance, and
Run the game (and possibly server) as administrator.

I don't expect any of these to actually work (well, maybe Windows Update but I'm usually pretty up to date), but I guess they're worth a try. I'm also going to scour my computer for anything that might be messing with networking (say, some antivirus crapware installed without my knowledge that's trying to run a firewall alongside Windows Firewall...)

Monday, August 5, 2013

Cube World Bugs Encountered

At first impression Cube World is really mature.

We walk around most of the time going: "This game is amazing!" and "Wow!". This game is great fun.

The distribution of stuff and bosses is great, for me there is the perfect amount of constant intrigue. This game is pretty close to done.

But on first impression if I were to only focus on negative stuff I would probably come up with the following:

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Focussing on the Negative

(This information does not give an impression of the game! It's merely notes about functionality.)

It works really well -- there seem have been no glitches encountered in the game so far.

On the other hand there seems to be some application level glitches.

Despite being a "native" windows game (I'm using Windows 7) it doesn't feel 100% stable. Quitting seems most unstable and at this stage quitting freezes my computer for anything up to minutes.

Attached is after waiting about a minute in to trying to quit -- note the windows (not responding). The whole machine is unresponsive at this time. The quitting time tends to range from 10s of seconds (say 30-60) up to many minutes.

Goodness knows what it's thinking about.

--
The other thing circled here is the lack of icon, which seems odd -- could just be my installation.

--
One other thing is fullscreen had problems. Switching out and back in fullscreen mode killed my computer one time (nyaw, black screen, reboot).

--
Capture/print screen did not work correctly for me at all from fullscreen mode. I got a range of different results using built-in Prt Sc. Sometimes it captured an 800x600 windowed version -- it seemed to do this most consistently though not always, one time it captured a full windowed sized box with no rendering in it, one time it captured black.

Obviously it's fine in windowed mode as you can tell from all the screenshots.

--
In windowed mode the graphics seem to be positioned in not quite the right position on the canvas.

It's barely perceptible, but must admit it was one of the very first things I noticed (look at me all fussy about pixels).

Main title is flush with the icky top windows pane.

It doesn't do this in fullscreen mode, and generally looks lovely.

Overall though, I'm happy the developers have focussed on getting the game itself working awesome first. Good job guys!

---

The only other mentionable things would be that the UI seems not that intuitive -- but this is a user problem I think :)

The crafting/spell/inventory window system is very confusing. The windows look very similar and the controls seem obfuscated (right-click does ... wha? ... shift-click ... where? huh?).

Though hopefully I will learn.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Cube World Multiplayer Networking

You can easily play singleplayer mode, but playing with others is fun and works perfectly.

Personally I reckon there seem to be 3 methods to online multiplayer:

But note that cube forum reckons very differently to me.

1. Pick a Random Public Server
(easy but sketchy)

Omfg there are so many public servers out there:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cubeworld+servers

If you're going to do this: try to pick a server that's in your region.

I'm not sure if there are any risks associated with joining random servers, but will note them here if I come across any.

2. Set up a Server Using Hamachi

(medium, extra installation required)

There seem to be a lot of tutorials suggesting using Hamachi:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cubeworld+hamachi

It seemed easy, though this method didn't actually work for us. We spent some minutes mucking around. We could get to the "installed" and going (per box to the right), but couldn't seem to connect using the IP from here.

Meh.

3. Run You Own Server and Use Port Forwarding
(kinda tricky)

This is what we did.

We used the "port forwarding" method. R did this in ways very specific to his router. There's a great resource for setting up port forwarding covering a bunch of routers and games at portforward.com.

As a client all I had to do was:
~ click "Connect to Server

~ put the IP address in to the "Server Address"
(don't need port, just numbers and dots)

Boom!

R spawned in water the first time. Then he got attacked by giant bees. How awesome is that?

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Windows F@#$* Firewall

Per usual with these things it was a fair amount of mucking around. The magic bullet was turning off windows firewall. Don't turn off your firewall unless you have no other choice and if you do remember to turn it back ON.

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The Game Remembers!

Note: the game seems to remember the servers you've connected to for all these methods.

Henceforth they are listed after you select your character, in the "Multiplayer Worlds ..." button at the top right.

This is what it looks like if you've successfully connected to one before.

See how this says "Singleplayer" in top right
once you've clicked on "Multiplayer".

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Addendum: these are the super-simple instructions currently going:
http://cubeworldforum.org/topic/5623-shdwflms-super-simple-server-guide/#entry121767

This is COPY of the bit that matters from the above in case these disappears from teh webs, but this content belongs to them:

ShdwFlm's Super-Simple Server GuideSearch your computer for cmd and run it; type in ipconfig and hit Enter.Write down of IPv4 Address and Default Gateway; close cmd.Paste your Default Gateway into the address bar of your web browser and hit Enter.Type in your router's username & password; if it has never been changed, RouterPasswords has defaults.Look for a section called either "Port Forwarding", "Applications & Gaming", or something similar.Info: External/Internal Port 12345; Protocol Both; To IP Address = Your IPv4 Address; remember to save.Visit CanYouSeeMe to get the IP your friends will need, listed as Your IP; keep the site open for a moment.To check if everything's right, enter 12345 and hit Enter; if it works, close it; if not, check previous steps.Open Server.exe, located where Cube World is installed; something similar to C:\Program Files (x86)\Cube World.Start Cube World, select your character, and hit Connect to Server; type 127.0.0.1 and hit Enter.Get your friends to connect to the IP you got from that site, listed as Your IP. Voila! I hope everything worked well for you. =) If it did, leave a friendly reply! Notes:CubeWorldForum.org & I hold zero liability regarding use of the information above.If any of the above information is wrong, or it simply didn't work for you, I may not be able to help you.This information should be accurate as of July 4th, 2013, but no guarantees for later.If you got lost on the Port Forwarding, this WikiHow guide may help.Some ISPs might block port 12345; UAE & Belgium might be most affected.Special thanks to kbasten for his significant tutelage. =) Also, thanks to Naruske & Switch0r.(Original Thread; duplicated by request.)