0xDEADBEEF

+1 on leaving the scan zone where the contact was lost. Kudos for your great work Razbam! Can't wait to try the radar (hopefully) tomorrow!

Oh yeah, once last thing to point out: we had a very interesting moment on the finals, when we captured Tiblisi, and blue was seemingly still able to spawn aircraft in Tiblisi for a lot longer than 5 minutes. I suspect a glitch in the code enabling them to do that. Maybe you can have a look at it. I didn't see it myself, but there were constant reports of this happening in TS.

Ahhhh this was the best blueflag ever! (and the worst at the same time, but that certainly not blueflags fault). Huge thanks to everyone who spent so much time putting this together! The value this game-mode addds to DCS is just indescribable! I also enjoyed it heaps to fight the 104th so much. I have to admit that your teamplay-displays were nothing short of amazing to watch. It was great learning fodder for me everytime I got taken down. Can't wait for the next time! I gotta admit too I was suprised that after all balance was quite even, not even close to what I expected it to be. This is a very good sign. I also think there should be a max-players per team cap, and I agree that this limit should be a soft as possible. Ideally, if red and blue have an even pilot-force of 60/60 ready to fly, it is not good if the actual player diversity on the Server is 45/15, just because one coalition was faster with getting pilots online ... I have trust in the buddy-spike team that they will come up with a good solution for this ;) Also kudos to the blue-team to show red the difference between being organized and not. Especially in the first week I think you guys outperformed us not because you were the better pilots (you likely were) but because you got everything organized better than red. I'm glad we could learn from that in the second week and strike back. I would not deny the fact that a lot of blue pilots lost motivation after a lag-fest or two in the second half of the second week and I personally find it a pitty. I would not have minded outnumbering blue less than we did, although this would have reduced hour odds at bringing home the victory. Anyway, putting all emotions apart. Blueflag 5 was simply amazing! Huge thanks to everyone who contributed, participated and sacrificed! Last but not least, i would like to point out bootysweats performance on the very last day. This dude was hauling fuel nonstop in Pak3 while we were doing the final push. After the last server restart before the lag-nuke I was off the helipad enroute to Vaziani within 1 minute, going max speed with emergency governor on. 5 minutes before I arrived Bootysweat delivered the first load of fuel to Mozdok, which I found was a very funny moment :D (we really had enough fuel to go through the last push) I think this guy deserves an extra medal for that! :thumbup:

I didn't even know you could do that :huh:

Yeah, its weird. I was told its gone after you reconnect, and I wont get in ...

I'm afraid the fact that we're all human keeps this from happening. But I'll do my best to comply with your request!

So 96 connections are enough to DDoS DCS ... no I'm not going to say what I was about to. I think I'm going to send prayers for improvement instead, even though I usually dont do that, maybe it helps ... Thanks for your hard work ciribob and the team! Love what you do!

besides not the server itself being the problem, 8 core would not help much more, as dcs only utilizes 2 cores (1 for audio) Dont take it as an offense, but if we also count how many times the server sometimes restarts before its actually running longer than 2-3 minutes, 30 is not very far off the shot. And I have not witnessed many server-rounds that lasted the full 3 hours. Again, this is no attack on you, just facts layed out, i am very aware that you guys are doing the best you can and I cant thank you enough for that! :)

To add something positive to the whole discussion, you guys have created something that keeps people busy although the foundation you built it on crashes about 30 times a day. This is a remarkable achievment and I would like to thank you for that once again. Your efforts are massively appreciated!

While I really like the idea of the fuel system, I have to underline what others say. It creates artifitial imbalance, and with the server-instabilities it simply kills gameplay and motivation for red and blue. I hate to say this, I really like the idea, but it is far from balanced and what it does the most is keep us from having fun (and I'm not talking the other issues we can only solve with patience). We would need an army of choppers to keep the north-east supplied especially taking the crashes into account ...

Even if we would assume the scripts are the cause, DCS should be easily able to handle it. It's no complicated maths and we have i7s and SSDs. Once the problems are resolved, the scripting engine will deliver us a lot of joy, made by the community. I see blueflag as a taste of the future of DCS. Yes, I'm rather new and overly optimistic, I know. I like dreaming :) I can only second that!

While I don't know the netcode itself, this info from maverick adds another piece to my puzzle of how it works. It obviously fails at predicting positions when there is packet loss but is still using quite a lot of cpu to calculate that warping. I've also noticed that putting a load on a server (like going to F10 and zoom around on a server, everything keeping the cpu busy) will cause warping on the clients. Also if the client alt-tabs, takes a screenshot or whatever, keeps dcs (the client) from sending packets. So whenever the server has to deal with packet loss it fails and seems to put load on the server, the more load the less good the server can handle everything and the more warping you see. I got no clue what kind of code they implemented that causes behaviour like this, but this is the behaviour I observed. The only thing the game would need to do in simple speaking is: "i got no packet, lets guess the next position the airplane might be and dont bother much more until the next packet". I'm still missing pieces of the puzzle to understand the current algorythm, like does the server calculate physics at all, or is it all done client side (which would make prediction less easy, but reduce cpu-load on the server). Also, if it was as simple as I described it would be relatively easy to fix/the fact it wasnt fixed yet indicates its not that simple. In any case I would be surprised if these observations are very far from the truth.

I agree with Maverick on this, his solution sounds very plausible and seems to work (the 104th server indeed does not have this kind of warping problems). I would like to strongly encourage you to at least give this technique a try!

I hear you Maverick and i agree wholeheartedly. But I also agree with greg, no scripting = no blueflag. The only one who can help is in fact c0ff when he finally finishes the new netcode and dedicated server (c0ff please take as much time as you need, but do it as fast as possible ;) I understand how hard the task is you're assigned to). Seriously, the scripting and respawning and whatever blueflag does in terms of game-development is not overly complicated and must not be the reason that causes lag, because if it was, we would be doomed to dogfight from A to B like on most other servers, which is not a very attractive option in my opinion. The scripting engine has soo many goodies left for us that we haven't even scratched, and I'm really looking forward to help creating interesting scripted missions that add more dynamics to flying DCS. In 2-3 years this is going to be awesome! Unfortunately right now its quite a pita.

Theres two blades on the sword. One side is that DCS is not very good at handling packet loss, and packet loss usually increases with the ping. High ping itself is not the major problem. The scripts itself are very lightweight and optimized, xcom, ciribob and greg did a great job there, unfortunately theres a couple of gliches in the DCS-code that starts bringing up problems with time and playercount. A lot of features have already been taken out to increase stability (like hover-pickup of crates). Keep in mind that there have been major improvements (new 3D engine first and foremost) in DCS which naturally introduce new bugs, and there just wasn't enough time for ED to fix those, and ED is not a 250+ man company like some major gamestudios.

Me too. With a proper prediction code and and better packet-loss handling the MP experience should skyrocket. Unfortunately the requirements of a flight-sim netcode are a bit more complicated than "the ordinary fps netcode", so I have a good understanding why it takes a while (I spent 5 years coding games before my twenties, also did a lot of research on netcode implementations, but this was more than 10 years ago)

Server has crashed once again 5 minutes into the game and is frozen at the same servertime (visible, but not joinable)

ahh at least I'm not the only one with that problem. Oznerol, keep in mind it's not the servers fault, the scripting is not very heavy and the guys spent a lot of effort optimizing it. The code of DCS is just not yet able to handle it without freaking out. I'm positive this will change (hopefully) soon. A lot of things have been improved already in the past 6 months. We'll have to give ED some time. I have to admit though it hurts really bad sometimes, blueflag is just too good, and round 5 is the best blueflag ever!

Oh boy, tonight for me was the worst lag I've ever experienced in DCS. I got disconnected twice in the air, then killed myself once by stupidity, and this is how I lost my last live. i was getting seriously claustrophobic, and I have absolutely no explanation what was going on: I was chasing an F15 about to get a solution when this happened. I had absolutely no more control about the plane. Edit: I got no idea why the video doesnt work, heres the link: https://youtu.be/w48wF8IRvtw

me too, like the past rounds, ВАРЯГ has done an amazing job (in fact all of the guys you named), and I would be sad to see him joining blue-side. I also cannot think of any reason that would make him joining blue-side make sense ...

seems the server crashed again. we waited for 30 minutes till we could finally get into fighters to fight off the blue strikers that already took off from sochi, when we got on station the game froze for all of us. Server is displayed up and full with all the dropped players on it (including me, according to the app)

everything is closed after restart, except minvody, sochi and gudauta plus a couple of farps ...

yes, choppers are now bigger than ever!

I have a mission in the works which borrows the basic gameplay principle of blueflag (and a bunch of code) on a much smaller scale (less distance between the objectives, all all objectives are in the mountains around inguri valley). It will be up for testing when blueflag round 5 is finished. It will be called "The Kaukasus Offensive". I agree, have observed this many times. 2.5hrs seems to be the magic time.

The script thinks slot "MV_red_SU27 33 Minerlye Vody" is a reserved slot, although theres no clan-tag attached.