Lacewing Ping

[DizzyDoo]

Hey, I have two ping related questions I'd love to know the best solutions too.

1) I have a player connected to the server, to show the connection speed every second I send a UDP stack at the server, and it sends one back, and the time between them is displayed in a counter. However, since my MMF2 app only updates 50 times a second, this means I can only display a ping in multiples of 20 milliseconds. The minimum ping one can have is 20. Is there any better method? Sounds like a thread is needed.

2) I have a Master Server, written in Python, that contains a list of IP's running Lacewing Servers for my game. A player can get this list to see all the games they could join. I'd like to display the time it takes for a ping from that player to an individual server. Is there a method to send a UDP packet to a Lacewing server and have it reply, without that player having to go through connecting, setting a name, and then sending a message? For a list of 100 servers, to do that for each one would take a while.

My current method (for both issues) is to be using the Python object to open a socket connection and do pinging on a different port. I don't think this is as pleasant as using the Lacewing objects and just using one port, hopefully I'm just missing some feature buried somewhere.

Thanks!

[Phi]

No, seems quite accurate, although Darknet object records ping in a similar fashion, Lacewing object is single-threaded basically because you don't need it to be otherwise.
You can game the system by bumping the frame rate, but frankly I've never got better than 400 fps, which gives me the minimum ping of 2.25ms.

For idea 2, I suggest having a time-based ping update process instead of a message-based process. You can do this in a thread, but I'm not experienced enough with Python to go into detail, but I did use threads in the Anaconda ZlibStream port.

[DizzyDoo]

No, seems quite accurate, although Darknet object records ping in a similar fashion, Lacewing object is single-threaded basically because you don't need it to be otherwise.

I meant for counting the ping, it needs to be outside the MMF2 loop, since that's too slow. Python scripts can be run outside of this ('non-blocking') anyway, but it'll hang while it waits so I could use a thread. Actually, now think about it I could just save the time and compare afterwards.

You can game the system by bumping the frame rate, but frankly I've never got better than 400 fps, which gives me the minimum ping of 2.25ms.

Setting the frame rate way up just isn't good enough, though I did contemplate it. It makes the rest of the game coding more complex (since you want that to run at 50fps) and where as I can get 500 or so on my main machine, my laptop can only get about 300.

For idea 2, I suggest having a time-based ping update process instead of a message-based process. You can do this in a thread, but I'm not experienced enough with Python to go into detail, but I did use threads in the Anaconda ZlibStream port.

Not sure what you mean by this, but I'll just keep going for now with what I have in Python so far.

It would be nice to have a pinging/check-server-is-alive feature in Lacewing, but not completely necessary.

[James]

1) Sorry, no (it's a limitation of the MMF event system that everything has to happen in the gameloop).

2) You can send a server message as soon as you connect, no need to set a name. But you do need to establish a connection before blasting anything (so using a separate server might be the best you can do).

[Phi]

Doesn't liblacewing automatically mange pinging to check that server is alive?