MemoryWatcher only works on Linux and affects emulation determinism due
to scheduling additional events, which causes NetPlay to desync.
Considering that this interface is a rather specialized use case, the
communication with it is kinda crappy *and* it's affecting emulation, I
think it's best to just axe it and come up with a better implementation
of the functionality.
The logic didn't account for the case where a player leaves, so the
host would be left in a dangling state where the UI is disabled but the
game won't start, requiring a full restart of Dolphin to fix.
We can't join a detached thread, so NetPlayIndex gets deleted before
the notification thread exits, creating a race condition. We switch to
using Common::Event because just sleeping leaves the UI hung on the
thread join for a few seconds.
This is an extension of host input authority that allows switching the
host (who has zero latency) on the fly, at the further expense of
everyone else's latency. This is useful for turn-based games where the
latency of players not on their turn doesn't matter.
To become the so-called golfer, the player simply presses a hotkey.
When the host is the golfer, latency is identical to normal host input
authority.
This eliminates the clutter of checkboxes at the bottom of the window.
A QAction within a QMenu cannot have a tooltip however, so they have
been removed and the options will be documented on the wiki.
Calling deleteLater in MainWindow's destructor doesn't work, as the
event loop will stop before it gets around to deleting these dialogs.
Seeing as this is a QObject destructor, we should already be on the
event loop anyways, so simply using delete should be safe.
Small addition of NetPlay code in Core.cpp was needed to set the
extensions at the right time, as init would override them otherwise.
This solution is more elegant than modifying the user's INI files on
game start.
This makes it possible to gracefully force stop emulation rather than
having to kill Dolphin completely when NetPlay deadlocks in the input
loop. Without a graceful stop, Wii saves do not get flushed to the main
NAND, and are left in limbo in the temporary NAND.
Doing pretty much anything in the controller config breaks NetPlay
(desync and/or deadlock), as saving the settings reconfigures
controller interfaces, which NetPlay doesn't expect.
The implementation of peer initialization would hang if the initial
packet was never received. This fixes that issue by deferring the
initialization to the packet receive loop.
This sends arbitrary packets in chunks to be reassembled at the other
end, allowing large data transfers to be speed-limited and interleaved
with other packets being sent. It also enables tracking the progress of
large data transfers.
Its usage was inconsistent, confusing, and buggy, so I opted to just
remove it entirely. It has been replaced with PadIndex for the
appropriate instances (mainly networking), and inappropriate usages
(where it was really just a player ID) have been replaced with the
PlayerId type. The definition of "no mapping" has been changed from -1
to 0 to match the defintion of "no player", as -1 (255 unsigned) is
actually a valid player ID.
The bugs never manifested because it only occurs with a full lobby of
255 players, at which point the last player's ID collides with the "no
mapping" definition and some undefined behavior occurs. Nevertheless, I
thought it best to fix it anyways as the usage of PadMapping was
confusing.
The interface address isn't particularly useful in most circumstances
(playing over internet), and we have a way to get the external IP now,
so displaying it in the dialog is useful.
Switch to using additional overloads of sf::Packet, so we can eliminate
some of the messy code and just use the normal syntax for
BigEndianValue.
We can't avoid helper functions with u64 due to SFML's non-standard way
of defining 64-bit integer types.
Xlib supports many mouse buttons, though there are 9 standard buttons, and they aren't arranged like other mouse APIs. Using only 5 buttons was preventing the use of buttons besides left/right/middle click and the scroll wheel. Here's what all the standard buttons are:
1. left button
2. middle button (pressing the scroll wheel)
3. right button
4. turn scroll wheel up
5. turn scroll wheel down
6. push scroll wheel left
7. push scroll wheel right
8. 4th button (aka browser backward button)
9. 5th button (aka browser forward button)
The remaining button indices are non-standard and device-specific, and technically far more than 32 are supported, but this seems like a reasonable limit to avoid cluttering the list with tons of useless mouse buttons. What mouse has more than 32 buttons anyways?
Currently, each player buffers their own inputs and sends them to the
host. The host then relays those inputs to everyone else. Every player
waits on inputs from all players to be buffered before continuing. What
this means is all clients run in lockstep, and the total latency of
inputs cannot be lower than the sum of the 2 highest client ping times
in the game (in 3+ player sessions with people across the world, the
latency can be very high).
Host input authority mode changes it so players no longer buffer their
own inputs, and only send them to the host. The host stores only the
most recent input received from a player. The host then sends inputs
for all pads at the SI poll interval, similar to the existing code. If
a player sends inputs to slowly, their last received input is simply
sent again. If they send too quickly, inputs are dropped. This means
that the host has full control over what inputs are actually read by
the game, hence the name of the mode. Also, because the rate at which
inputs are received by SI is decoupled from the rate at which players
are sending inputs, clients are no longer dependent on each other. They
only care what the host is doing. This means that they can set their
buffer individually based on their latency to the host, rather than the
highest latency between any 2 players, allowing someone with lower ping
to the host to have less latency than someone else.
This is a catch to this: as a necessity of how the host's input sending
works, the host has 0 latency. There isn't a good way to fix this, as
input delay is now solely dependent on the real latency to the host's
server. Having differing latency between players would be considered
unfair for competitive play, but for casual play we don't really care.
For this reason though, combined with the potential for a few inputs to
be dropped on a bad connection, the old mode will remain and this new
mode is entirely optional.
Most settings which affect determinism will now be synced on NetPlay.
Additionally, there's a strict sync mode which will sync various
enhancements to prevent desync in games that use EFB reads.
This also adds a check for all players having the IPL.bin file, and
doesn't load it for anyone if someone is missing it. This prevents
desyncs caused by mismatched system fonts.
Additionally, the NetPlay window was getting too wide with checkboxes,
so FlowLayout has been introduced to make the checkboxes take up
multiple rows dynamically. However, there's some minor vertical
centering issues I haven't been able to solve, but it's better than a
ridiculously wide window.
This is accomplished by having SConfig::GetDirectoryForRegion no longer
return nullptr, as doing that was kind silly, considering we never
check for nullptr.
Basically everything here was race conditions in Qt callbacks, so I changed the client/server instances to std::shared_ptr and added null checks. It checks that the object exists in the callback, and the shared_ptr ensures it doesn't get destroyed until we're done with it.
MD5 check would also cause a segfault if you quit without cancelling it first, which was pretty silly.
This adds the functionality of sending the host's save data (raw memory
cards, as well as GCI files and Wii saves with a matching GameID) to
all other clients. The data is compressed using LZO1X to greatly reduce
its size while keeping compression/decompression fast. Save
synchronization is enabled by default, and toggleable with a checkbox
in the NetPlay dialog.
On clicking start, if the option is enabled, game boot will be delayed
until all players have received the save data sent by the host. If any
player fails to receive it properly, boot will be cancelled to prevent
desyncs.
We don't want to write this setting to disk, as SConfig has problems
with leaking settings changed by GameINI into the base configs. The
result of this is that if someone plays an N64 VC game (or other game
where we disable this setting) the branch following option can get
unintentionally disabled globally, which will reduce performance in
many games and cause NetPlay to desync with users who still have it
enabled.
This stops clients randomly deadlocking when a spectator leaves, as the mappings construct is not thread-safe and should not be written while the game is running.
This packet is only used by the host to detect desyncs, and we don't really need to know the exact frame we desynced on (unless you're debugging, but you can just recompile for that), so it's perfectly fine to just send it less often. This makes it so the timebase packet is sent only every 60 frames, rather than every frame, which further cuts back on unnecessary bandwidth consumption.
This should make the NetPlay dialog appear as a separate window in the taskbar on most systems, which makes more sense than a parented dialog as the user will leave it open for an extended period.
We want this setting to invalidate the cache because it may affect the appearance of textures in the rendered scene, therefore one would expect changing it while the game is running to have the expected effect immediately.
This will avoid effects being unexpectedly broken in these games if the user disables the option globally. This list is by no means comprehensive, these are just the games I could confirm use custom mipmaps.
Normally, SI is polled at a rate defined by the game, and we have to send the pad state to other clients on every poll or else we'll desync. This can result in fairly high bandwidth usage, especially with multiple controllers, mostly due to UDP/IP overhead.
This change introduces an option to reduce the SI poll rate to once per frame, which may introduce up to one frame of additional latency, but will reduce bandwidth usage substantially, which is useful for users on very slow internet connections.
Polling SI less frequently than the game asked for did not seem to cause any problems in my testing, so this should be perfectly safe to do.
Selecting Dummy or Memory Card would pass wrong values to EXI::ChangeDevice and not work as expected
Changing path had no effect until device was changed as it didn't call EXI::ChangeDevice at all
Techjar