Update: I've played a couple of games with a reduced screen resolution setting (1600 x 900) in my "Display Preferences." This has largely eliminated the two key symptoms indicative of the skid/dead button issue. I have not observed any skids or freezes when controlling the worker during the development and auction phases of the turn. I also have not experienced the 2-3 seconds "blocking" of the button during the land grant phase.

Another symptom, that of a consistent 1-3 seconds lag in the posting of my chat messages, has been reduced to a smaller lag of less than 1 second. In addition, the "glitch" associated with switching between fullscreen and chat-screen modes is also reduced from over 5 seconds to about 2 seconds.

These observations have not been impacted by altering the keyboard repeat rates or repeat-onset delay settings, which were targets for my earlier attempts to remedy the problem (approx. Sep. - Oct. 2010). They are also insensitive to the viewing mode choice: the improvement observed is identical in fullscreen and chat-screen modes.

All of this points to the likely inability of my computer's graphics processor to drive a large number of pixels while maintaining the quality of responsivity to user input that M.U.L.E. requires. For my fellow arithmetic enthusiasts, the reduced resolution setting uses only 39% of the virtual pixels compared to the maximized native display resolution setting. It appears the NVIDIA GeForce 320M is the little engine that can't, if it's trying to lug over 3.5 megapixels uphill at 60 FPS.

I don't have any suggestions for further investigation but I welcome expert advice and if asked I will assist the game developers in any way I can.

Thanks,

Nannerpus

[Nannerpus]

I just played a full tournament game in chat-screen mode. (Where the **** is that Wampus?) I was hosting. Log here: http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41377 (How's that for a close finish, BTW?)

Throughout the game I kept an eye on the FPS counter, it was at 60 with occasional drops to the 55-59 range.

I experienced three major skid/freeze events. During two of them the FPS never dropped below 58. I was not checking the FPS counter the third time.

More info: My computer is driving an Apple 27" HD LED display. I forgot to brag about this earlier  The screen resolution is set at 2560 x 1440 x 32bits. I will try another game at a lower resolution & see what happens.

The computer indicates that the graphics processor is an NVIDIA GeForce 320M on the PCI bus. It has 256MB VRAM and I don't know if any of it is shared with the CPU or if that full amount is solely in use by the GPU.

Thanks,

Nannerpus

In all of my tests playing training games against three A.I. robots, there is never any skid/dead button problem.

Occasionally if I am hosting a tournament game with three live players I will experience the skid/dead button problems. I can't recall any notable difference in frequency of occurrence compared to games I play in but do not host. It seems pretty random but tends to occur more often under high network loads (i.e., during the "day" here in the U.S.A. when playing against U.S.-located opponents). And for some reason it seems like lots of chat activity can exacerbate the condition, particularly at the start my development phase. At those times my worker just stands in place, frozen & unresponsive to my movement commands while the timer bar creeps down at its normal rate.

I have not observed FPS changes because I usually play in fullscreen mode, but I'll take a look next time I'm playing.

Thanks,

Nanner

Fair enough.

[firewalkwithme79]

firewalkwithme79 you got your win, congratulations. If you hadn't said you were never going to sell regardless of price, I would not have kicked you. You pretty much threw down the gauntlet there, so accept my apology. I'm not happy that I kicked you, BTW, and I've never tried to assert it was the right thing to do. The fact that you got the win anyway should satisfy everyone: you got what you were pursuing with your tactic and the rest of us at least had a chance to make things interesting for ourselves through the remainder of the game. I'm glad you got the win, though I think your robot saved it for you by switching to ore which was selling for a high price throughout.

Cest la vie.

Mt-Wampus: Only one player got greedy with ore. It was not a colony-wide greed outburst, it was hard luck, runaway mules, zero nrg production, etc. that precipitated the starve. I know it sounds like players got greedy, but that wasn't really the situation at all. Check the detailed log reports, you will see.

Maplefish: I've taken lots worse losses & not had a problem with it. The tactic persisted at least four turns by my inspection of the log, maybe even five turns. That seems a bit high but check the logfiles, I think 4 to 5 turns is correct. No need to misattribute any PoliSci 101 left-vs-right debate here. Yes, it is a competition but it is a game first and foremost. Good on you for defending your roomie.

[firewalkwithme79]

Yes. I agree with you about strategic selfishness and collusion. I had made the mistake of removing a food mule from a plot when I was at zero energy (that game was very hard to start off). So instead I wound up making three plots of energy & nothing else. Energy which I sold (in part) to other players, in the hope of getting enough cash to buy surplus food in the future.

FWIW firewalkwithme79 let all of the players starve for at least 3 if not 4 or even more consecutive rounds. There was also a declaration that this would continue, even if the amount offered was $2000 or $3000 per food unit. Aside from being spitefully nasty, if the stated intention was true (and another colonist had over $6500 cash, so $2000 or $3000 per unit was plausible if the price could be run up that high) then it was also pigheadedly foolish. Really, turn down a single-unit sale that could swing an overall delta > $4000? Come on, now!

Anyway that's all I should say about it.

This community is too much fun to let one bizarre experience detract from it.

Viva M.U.L.E.!

Nannerpus

[firewalkwithme79]

I agree with every point you make, Mainstream, and I readily acknowledge how lousy it seems for me to have kicked out firewalkwithme79. I won't assert it was the right thing to do either. It was the best I could do to at least make the game enjoyable for more people than just firewalkwithme79.

Look at the chat transcript again. Had the game been hosted by one of the bots, rest assured firewalkwithme79 would have been at risk of a vote-out. Although I failed to articulate this in my initial post, this did factor into my thinking at the time. IOW, had there been no host to take direct action, the other players would have voted to do so anyway, and I think the transcript makes this unambiguously clear.

Of course everyone makes development choices and must play on with whatever consequences those choices bring. All actions have consequences, and for firewalkwithme79 to assert that selling even one surplus food to a starving fellow colonist (or to the store) would have jeopardized a "certain victory" (or not, IMO) is utterly incorrect and thoroughly short-sighted. Again, as you will see on closer inspection of the chat log, the possibility of a CPU-killed colony (which could have occurred had firewalkwithme79's single food-mule run off) was of no consequence to firewalkwithme79. And I question whether firewalkwithme79 would have sat still & stayed in a game if the roles had been reversed. My money's on a petulant abandon after the second or third consecutive turn of being deliberately starved. I maintain my earlier position that if any player wants to win a game unopposed, there are Training games for just that purpose.

Let me repeat: I don't think what I did was the right thing to do in any general sense. I don't think it was inherently wrong, either, given firewalkwithme79's clearly stated intentions. I posed the question of many-vs-one to the Planet M.U.L.E. community as a whole, and I am grateful for your response. I hope others will chime in, too.

Thanks,

Nannerpus

[Is there ever a time when the needs of the many outweigh the rights of the one?]

There aren't very many questions in (on?) Planet M.U.L.E. that have philosophical significance outside of the game itself. Some may disagree with this statement and claim there are exactly zero. But I think I've found one from the real world (Planet Earth, I think it's called) but has poked it's bony finger into out little world here, too. Namely: Is there ever a time when the needs of the many outweigh the rights of the one?

I think I've observed one such case, here's the game log: http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41290. Here's a game log with a bit of followup from the initial discussion: http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41295. I was the host of the first game, and I decided to kick out a player on Turn 8. I was a pregame "guest" chatter in the second game.

IMO there's only one über-rule on Planet M.U.L.E.: Have a good time. That's it. You don't have to be nice, but it helps. You don't have to play well, or play often, and if you want to play only to win there's nothing wrong with that. But all players come here to have a good time, period. Any other reason to play is secondary, and if it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

Ask the other people who've played against me here multiple times before, they'll tell you I try to be a good host and as a rule I do not kick out players for no good reason. I'll kick someone if they're being especially abusive in the chat, although I don't tend to view in-game chats much anymore. Obviously I'll kick someone who's become frozen or who's had a disconnection.

So, was I right to kick firewalkwithme79? I did not want to, but I felt like I had to choose between the reality of one player's tactical decision to make three players miserable and the über-rule. On inspection of the game log it is obvious there was probably not going to be any change in firewalkwithme79's play, so rather than play host to a rotten game (BTW the end score speaks for itself) with three unhappy players I made the ugly decision to kick. I'm not proud of it but I won't apologize either. Given the final outcome (firewalkwithme79's bot surrogate got the win), I feel no guilt whatsoever.

If firewalkwithme79 wants to assert it was booted because it was "winning," puh-lease. Only in your own mind & on Charlie Sheen's scorecard. Again, check the log. Your M.U.L.E.-Fu is weak, firewalkwithme79, and the spread between 1st & you (2nd place) at that point was thousands of dollars. It's possible you would have lost had I left you playing, since you were not making the optimal development choices given your commanding advantage. You should have been developing ore plots, you would have caught up to Deathfish much sooner. Your replicant saved you by swapping out Crystite plots to ore late.

Nevertheless, I feel that I acted in the interests of the majority, even discounting my own vote: it was better to play with one unhappy player (kicked) than with three unhappy players (starving forever). I truly could care less about losing, but it isn't fair to waste other players' time solely for your own satisfaction. If you want to win a game against three other helpless players, try a Training game, that's what they're for.

Solomonic? Probably not. But as my (least) favorite weepy, orange U.S. Congresscritter once said, "So be it."

Yours,

Nannerpus

P.S. [edited 05:53 Irata time]: LOL I didn't even see that "Charlie Sheen" line in the second game chat until just now. I guess I'm not the only one that saw things that way...

Peter,

Is there anything I can do to help the Turborilla team as far as collecting data from my computer while P.M. is running a game? Maybe there's a trace or profile operation I could perform, I'm not sophisticated enough to imagine one up but if you can direct me I'm glad to give it a try.

I do know that the bugs I've described don't show up in practice games, so there's something about the interaction of my system with other players across the network that's taking place, I just don't know where to start looking.

At your service,

Nannerpus

Hello everyone, it's been a long time since I played, it is good to be back.

Unfortunately, it seems that a problem I reported long ago has not been dispatched. I reported that my player frequently "skids" during the development phase of my turn. In other words, he continues to move in a previously commanded direction even though I have either stopped pressing movement keys or I have attempted to change the player's direction of motion.

Additionally, it is almost impossible for me to command proper plot selection during the first few seconds of each land grant phase. Typically I notice that my button press to choose a plot will go totally unacknowledged until at least three seconds have elapsed during the land grant. Only occasionally can I shorten this delay by holding the button before the cursor begins to move. And I almost never get stuck with a later-selected plot as one might expect if this were a simple lag issue. It just seems like I'm temporarily "locked out" until a certain time has elapsed, and then things function as they should when I try to select a plot.

The skidding problem occurs with varying frequency; sometimes it will hardly happen in a game, while other times it will be a major difficulty throughout an entire game. The button latency issue occurs during every turn of game in which I attempt to pick from one of the first three to four plots available during the land grant.

The skidding problem also occurs during auction phases. Then, the player will overbuy (oversell) even though I have commanded him to either stop buying (selling) or I have commanded him to reverse his course. Similarly, there is occasionally a delay of 2-3 seconds before the player will begin to move as commanded during sale price negotiations, causing the player to stand still when he's been commanded to move up or down.

Please have a look at my recent game logs, as each of them has demonstrated this problem, occasionally severely (i.e., every turn or nearly every turn has a skid event):

http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41218
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41205
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41071
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41065
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=41055
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=40999
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=40993
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=40986
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=40982

I don't think this is a network lag issue, in most of the games above I have had a very decent ping, usually under 500 ms.

To refresh everyone's memory, I first started experiencing this problem last year (Sep-Oct 2010) after switching to a new computer. It is a Mac Mini, 2.4 GHx Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM. It runs Mac OS X 10.6.6 and has always run 10.6.x since I first began using it. The current Java is Apple's Java SE 6, both 64- and 32-bit available, with 64-bit taking precedence. The Java is based on version 1.6.0_24-b07-334. My previous computer was an older Mac Mini, a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, running Mac OS X 10.5.8 with Apple's Java SE 5, which I believe was based on a different Java version, but I cannot remember the Java version number.

BTW in almost all of the games linked above, the machine was not running any other applications, perhaps a single browser window at the most. I made sure to unmount all my external hard drives and power them off. I also disabled wireless networking and deactivated my screen saver.

One other noteworthy performance degradation I've noticed while using my current Mini: switching from "chat screen" to "full screen" map viewing mode incurs a horrendous 5-10 seconds delay, during which any music or activity sounds continue looping as though time has frozen.

I first observed this problem while using P.M. version 1.3.3 and also observed it under 1.3.4 before I took my long break.

I'm not knowledgeable about Java but if there's anything I can do to help solve this devilish problem please let me know. I'm astonished I managed to win even one game with this occurring so frequently, but usually it winds up costing me a significant loss of development time for at least a few turns each game.

Thanks & sorry for the long post,

Nannerpus

[Java Deprecation]

Peter - I found this relatively recent announcement in the Apple Developer Pages for Java:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

In case that page cannot be reached (it may require a registration, which is free) here is the text:

Java Deprecation
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.

This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.

Third Party JVM Support and Locations
Java Preferences now shows all discovered JVMs in a single list in the General tab. This list shows the name, vendor, architecture, and full version of each JVM (8146434). It also coalesces multiple versions of the same major platform version from the same vendor and architecture into the same line. Clicking on the version at the end of the line shows a popup menu which chooses between these multiple versions.

Java SE 6 Locations
The location of the Java SE 6 runtime home has changed to /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home. JDK bundles provided via the Developer package, developer previews, and 3rd party JVMs should be installed in /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines or ~/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines. Developer previews of Java can now be installed and uninstalled without affecting the system JVM(s).

Java IDEs
In testing, some Java IDEs have shown problems navigating into the new JDK bundle structure, and persisting the location of the new JDK bundles. Some IDEs may have to change how they prompt users to locate a JVM on Mac OS X, and should ideally present a list of JVMs generated from /usr/libexec/java_home --xml, which outputs each discovered JVM, and orders them according to the user's order in Java Preferences.

Developer Package
The Java Developer package now supersedes the Java Documentation package (3672275). The developer package contains a copy of the Java SE 6 JDK bundle with all JavaDoc and source jars included inside of it. The Java Developer package also contains documentation for the Java tools in /usr/share/java, such as Ant, Maven, JUnit, and Derby. If you do JNI development, you must install the Java Developer package, since it contains updated headers for the native JavaVM.framework and its sub-frameworks (8421130). The Java Developer package is available from http://connect.apple.com.

Redesigned eAWT
The com.apple.eawt.Application class has undergone a significant redesign of basic Mac event handling (4083709, 4623624, 4714211, 5445495, et al.). Most of the operations handled by ApplicationListeners are now processed by a single delegate handler:

setAboutHandler(AboutHandler)
setPreferencesHandler(PreferencesHandler)
setQuitHandler(QuitHandler)
setOpenFileHandler(OpenFilesHandler)
setOpenURIHandler(OpenURIHandler)
setPrintFileHandler(PrintFilesHandler)

You can also register multiple listeners for each of these listeners with the addAppEventListener(AppEventListener) method:

AppForegroundListener
AppHiddenListener
AppReOpenedListener
ScreenSleepListener
SystemSleepListener
UserSessionListener

The JavaDoc for all of the Apple Java extensions (including the eAWT) is present in the appledocs.jar file of the Developer .jdk bundle in /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines.

Sudden Termination
Java applications on Mac OS X 10.6 can now opt-in to being suddenly terminated by the OS to speed log-out and shut down. Apps can raise and lower their sudden termination count with the enableSuddenTermination() and disableSuddenTermination() methods on the com.apple.eawt.Application class. More information on Sudden Termination is available in NSProcessInfo Class Reference. (5756768)

Default Quit Action
Applications can now request that the eAWT send WindowClosing events to all open windows instead of calling System.exit(0) when the user choose Quit from the application menu. By setting the apple.eawt.quitStrategy system property to CLOSE_ALL_WINDOWS, the eAWT will send a close event to every window in back-to-front order (3198576).

Improved Garbage Collection vs. Virtual Memory Paging Behavior
In Java SE 6 on Mac OS X 10.6, a new optimization has been enabled that prevents garbage-only heap pages from paging out to disk when the system is under memory pressure. It should improve overall system responsiveness when switching between apps, because Java will not be spending time paging heap pages with only garbage to disk (2830171).

I also thought about network lag, but prior to this recent spate of problems I was using an older Mini equipped with the Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics module, running OS 10.5.8. The GMA 950 shares its memory with the main system memory, which was 2GB. So in all respects my prior machine was inferior and I never experienced this skidding problem before, regardless of the ping value in the games I played.

I'm not saying that lag is not an issue, but I have a hard time believing it is the only culprit, given my prior system's outstanding performance irrespective of network delay. In my limited testing using the new (skid-prone) computer, I have not observed skidding during my test games - training games with three robots - so I've not adequately observed enough high-lag situations to discern a repeatable pattern of behavior in real-game situations with high network lag.

I'm very grateful to the Turborilla Team for their attention to this issue.

The problem is really impossible for me to compensate for. No matter what settings I use for keyboard repeat rate, it keeps happening. I can't play the game when it does, dropping mules turn after turn with no chance to recover. Worse still, some keystrokes get "prolonged" (leading to the skid) and then the skid blocks other keystrokes from being properly applied, so even if I'm skidding & over the center of a plot I can't release the mule until (of course) it is too late.

Sorry folks, I'm going away & staying away until this bug gets fixed.

Peter - yes, skids like he's on ice & can't change direction or stop when he's commanded to. He continues to move even after I've stopped pressing the arrow key. Generally I have to release all motion keys and wait for him to stop, if I have the presence of mind to do this while scurrying around.

Dan - I'm on a desktop system so I don't think anything's going on with the power management system.

Obligatory smug Freetard quip: switch to Firefox (or should it be Chrome for the proper level of smuggery?)

Now for the serious answer: have you tried deleting your local cache directories for IE? What about cleaning up the "temporary internet files" folder, that might do the trick. Probably some little thing's been downloaded & cached on your machine and it's acting up when you visit the planetmule page.

Hope This Helps