FS-UAE Net Play
 

You can now test the net play feature of FS-UAE :)

You need version 0.9.9beta4 to use net play:

http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-...a4-windows.zip
http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-...-macosx.tar.gz
http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-...ta4-0_i386.deb
http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-...a4-0_amd64.deb
http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-....9beta4.tar.gz

Instructions, documentation and server download is located here:
http://fengestad.no/wp/fs-uae/net-play

Please let me know if you spot any errors in the documentation (oh, and other problems, of course :)).

Thank you very much for your work on FS-UAE and for introducing net play :great Big kudos and I'll surely test this very soon :)

Indeed, I second that.
Now I can finally whip Horace's a**e at lotus, :).

Excuse my language, but fan-fucking-tastic!

Excellent work Frode. You're time on this project is very much appreciated.

Fantastic! Finally a new netplay for Amiga emulation! :D Can't wait to test it! FOL - HH still making online packs?! ;)

Great work! We will test it very soon!! :great

Frode: Do you know if the savestates are supported using the netplay mode? :)

Yes! Let me know when you're online! :P You might have to guide me through the screens as I can only see the emulation, the rest is just white and blue bars!

LOL,

We still have on site if your after them, ;).

Of course I know :) But the answer is no: you can try, but it will instantly cause a desync. It is quite easy to implement, so it might very well be supported in the future, along with synchronized floppy swapping.

The menus are not of much use during net play since neither save states nor floppy swaps can be done (safely) currently.

If the net play feature becomes popular, these features are very likely implemented.

Tested ... works well. No desyncs, but the packet checks ?slowing down emulation. Ping was 60ms or less between 2 computers. Might have to try tweaking the settings to disable non essentials e.g. sound to see if it speeds things up?

Okay, thanks for your quick answer! We have tried FS-UAE online :)

The good:

-It works! :great (the most important)
-It appears to be stable


The bad:

-It's slow (you already know and it's a beta)
-No savestates (it would be fantastic to add this feature in the next releases!)


About the emulator: It would be really nice to add custom keys (instead of real joysticks)

Thanks a lot and keep up the good work! :spin

60ms one-way or 60ms round-trip time? FS-UAE currently display one-way ping time in UI (will probably change to round-trip time).

Two possible reasons for slowdowns:
- Your computer is too slow or barely fast enough -for net play, it should have some spare CPU time, so it can speed up emulation a bit to catch up if it drifts behind for some reason.
- There is a lag control mechanism in the server which pauses the game if one clients get's too far behind. Currently, this setting is probably set too agressive for the latency you have on your connections:

If you open fs-uae-netplay-server.py in a text editor, there is on line 14 or thereabouts:
I now recommend increasing this number, for example to:
This will tell the server to allow for more lag before pausing to let clients catch up, and will prevent slowdowns on connections with some latency.

Well, I don't know it's slow, -it isn't supposed to be :) But see the answer above. It isn't really possible to make it much faster (unless bugs, bad implementation, or similar slows things down uncessarily), but as said, the server settings should be tweaked a bit to allow higher latencies before throttling.

As I said earlier, save state load/save synchronization is possible to do. Transferring save states through the server is also technically possible, but (1) is more work, and (2) has some copyright issues.

Custom input mapping is planned!

Based on the relatively high latency, I believe the aggressive max_drift setting caused slowdowns for you.

If you saw a lot of this in the server output:
Then it was the max_drift setting which slowed down the emulation. In the next release, this setting will default to about 15, or perhaps more. max_drift is measured in frames, so you can set this as high you like, e.g. 50 for 1 second.

This settings was most useful in earlier betas. FS-UAE will now automatically try to keep the emulation lag to a minimum, and this setting is really a fallback setting to allow clients to catch up with each other if one gets too far behind to be able to easily catch up by sleeping less between each emulated frame.

EDIT: I have updated the server (download at http://fengestad.no/fs-uae/files/fs-...ay-server.py):

• max_drift increased to 25 (500ms)
• ping times reported to clients are now round-trip times (RTT)

Great! ;)
We will try your tweaks soon :agree

Hopefully max drift update will help resolve the slowdowns... Can't wait to test! AmigaOnline ... you're AmigaOffline atm lol.

I think I've used this pack for SP2 testing as there was desync issues but resolved if one user used joypad rather than keyboard!

lesta_smsc: "soon" does not mean "now" :crazy
We will probably try the tweaks today or tomorrow, only if I'm available and if I see you "online"/"connected" via Hamachi :great (not like yesterday evening)
I've made a package in order to test some games online easily by just swapping the .adf files ;)
I hope that .hdf files will be supported as well :)

Amiga netplay with no lag?? surely not :D (will be testing soon too) thankyou

One correction to the net play page: I wrote that you needed version 0.9.9beta4, but it should have said version 0.9.9beta4 or later. I recommend, of course, the latest version.

.hdf files are supported right now. Only make sure that the hdf-files are identical (run a checksum on them and compare). Differences in HD content could case desync.

I know I warned against HD setups on the net play page, but I was mostly concerned about virtual folders. It shouldn't be a problem if they are identical, but even small differences (time stamps?) on individual files could in theory cause the server to stop the game because it notices Amiga memory is not in sync.

No lag?? I don't know where you got that from :) The input lag should be roughly your ping time to the server + an average of 10 ms (because input events must be synchronized to frames). Because of an internal issue in FS-UAE, there is an additional average 10 ms input lag, but this additional lag will disappear when I optimize the input system for net play.

So if you now have a ping time (RTT) of 30 ms, you will experience an average input lag of about 50 ms, but soon this will be reduced to 40.

We've already tried to use virtual folders, and you're right it's a source of problems/desync ;)
Now we use .hdf virtual hard drives only (with a read-only attribute to make sure that the content will always be the same for all players).