Civ4 PitBoss Available

[tals]

Gyathaar - as ever excellent tip - *goes off to try**

Tals

 

[BrutalusMaximus]

Based on posts in this thread and my in game experience there is a bug with techs that give your a "free tech"

Others have claimed to have gotten a wonder or tech that gives a free tech and not recieved it.

I built the oracle during a session so I was online when the turn went through and I was allowed to chose my free tech.

When I researched liberalism I was NOT online when the turn processed and when I logged in I was not given a choice of free techs or any such thing.

It appears you have to be logged in when the turn processes to choose something like this.

Short term fix.

Do not end your turn when you are supposed to receive your free tech if you need to log off. In otherwords be the last person to end the turn so you are insured of being there when the turn processes. Bad for speed of game but a "workaround" for the bug.

 

[the oob]

Well I left the pitboss running overnight as a test (with no one on it, I hadn't gone on it at all), when I got up this morning (well, around noon ) it had already crashed, as expected. I ran it as an internet server, so there may have been people would tried to connect from the in-game browser (along with all the other games there), but wouldn't know the password. The last change to the log files was made at 4.15am, the file is network-2056_2-2-2006_0-49-19.txt

Contents are as follows:

- - - - - - - - -
[33513.781] DBG: HOSTING a MULTIPLAYER, NEW, INTERNET game!
[33514.812] DBG: Adding active connection-level player info for NetID 0
[33516.218] DBG: Adding NetID 0 to Portal!
[33518.218] DBG: Got NetworkReady from NetID 0
[33518.234] WRN: Not responding to NetID 0 NetworkReady (state == INIT_SENT_READY)
[33518.234] DBG: Checking if we're connect complete! PeersReady=yes :: AlreadyComplete=no
[33518.234] DBG: Got our last outstanding network ready message! Sending Version Verification! (m_bConnectComplete=true)
[33518.718] DBG: Got Verify Version message from NetID 0!
[33518.718] DBG: Sending Pitboss NetID to NetID 0
[33519.218] DBG: Received pitboss info message from NetID 0
[33523.046] DBG: Got MapScriptAck from NetID 0!
[33523.062] DBG: Got MapScriptAck from NetID 0!
[33525.156] DBG: Sending sync start message everyone
[33525.171] DBG: Got a sync start from NetID 0
[45866.578] ERR: We were disconnected from the matchmaking server - Reason: Disconnected
- - - - - - - - -

I'm now going to try it as a Direct IP server to see if that makes any difference.

 

[the oob]

Ok I think I've found the problem: I was losing my connection (my router has been unstable lately) and it crashes the server. I've tested this twice and it's happened both times about 10 minutes after reconnection.

This only seems to be happening with internet games though, not direct ip games.

 

[Niessuh]

I am trying to connect as a player to a pitboss game set by a friend of mine. I get these two messages, then it crash to the desktop.

Both have 1.52f clean, no mods

 

[ForesterSOF]

What I do for PB is I made another account using Civ4 so I log into the PB with ForesterSOFPB and then the game with ForesterSOF and play on a PB that I created.

As far as the Inter games I had no problem with them at first but if no one was on them then it seemed to lock up and the timmer did not cycle to the next year.

 

[transpetaflops]

Why is my Pitboss running at 20% cpu when noone is connected to it?

 

[ForesterSOF]

must be something else for mine went into hibernation with no problem

 

[Jarnhestur]

As previously mentioned, I think it would be great if in the next release PitBoss would allow you to edit the turn timer for games.

Also, this would include setting a turn timer for PBEM games or changing the style from consecutive turns to simulatneous turns.

Thanks!

 

[tals]

Cheers - it's something I use a lot with the UT2004 servers I host, and would make rolling out Civ4 instances a bit easier.

Can it also be asked to make it possible to have more than one instance on a server at a time? I would like to use one server in my datacentre to hold all the PB games I have running.

Out of interest Screes turn notifier now supports multiple pitboss games.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=153509

 

[scree]

Ok, latest issue...

Running a pitboss game and occasionally pitboss hangs but not obviously. The countdown clock (turn timer) is still running and you can still login to the game via gamespy. However the message I get flashing on the screen (client) is that you are waiting for other civilizations.

The setup is a pretty normal game with time limits on the turns set at 4 hours. I played the first turn and the other human player did not. Neither I or the other human player logged in to play the second turn. The "waiting for other civs" message showed up when I logged in during the third turn. The autosave did save the 1st turn but not at the closure of the second turn. (suggests to me that pitboss hung before it got around to saving at the end of the second turn)

Restarting pitboss seems have cleared whatever issue was happening (I loaded from the last save) and I was able to login and play my turn.

Any thoughts? Is this a real issue or somthing I don't understand about how to setup pitboss.

As noted previously- I believe this happens when you disconnect from the network. I have my PB server running through a wireless network off my laptop, and sometimes it will drop the wireless connection. Once in a while, PB will then hang. Restarting PB fixes it.

I hope the Civ4 team can use this feedback to isolate the bug.

~Scree

 

[ForesterSOF]

If I set a PW for each civ then cant log back in inter but if no civ pw is set can get in no problem.

 

[tals]

If I set a PW for each civ then cant log back in inter but if no civ pw is set can get in no problem.

Thats a known problem with this build- i'd guess was posted on the first page of this thread. Don't go into options whilst playing a pitboss game or it will damage the password. The resolution is to kick the player which will allow him to rejoin the game - as long as you have take over AI set.

Tals

 

[ColonelSanders]

You dont need a seperate civ4 directory for each instance...
<SNIP>

now run pitposs from this shortcut, and it should create some files inside the dir you made.. among other things a new civilization4.ini file

Hi Gyathaar, this is very useful information.

Could you tell me if these "shortcut" directories are independent enough for mods to be installed in one without affecting the other? So far, I have avoided installing any mods as I wish to keep my PiTBoSs server running the basic civ game.

Thanks

Andy

 

[KayEss]

I thought I'd join in and do some testing of my own. I have a few servers here (Windows 2003) and was wondering about running Pitboss on them and what I'd need to do.

The good news is that it looks like you can get Pitboss to work. I haven't tested any of the features, but as it runs and gets to the start game screens I have no reason to suppose that it should fail in any way other way than it does in other circumstances.

Because these are servers one thing I certainly didn't want to have to do was install Civ4 or install DirectX on them. I have a development server that I use for testing my web applications so I was happy to try to run Pitboss on it, but not to install anything on it. I expect the development to die during from time to time as I experiment with things, but it also has to keep a configuration pretty similar to what my clients are running on their servers. Strangely enough they seem to want to run their mission critical business systems on it and not copies of Civ...

Anyway, the basics are pretty simple. I just copied the entire install directory from my desktop onto the network where it was accessible from the server. In order to get it to run I also copied the following files from my windows\system32 directory to the network Civ 4 directory:

• msvcr71.dll
• msvcp71.dll
• d3*.dll (It only asked for d3dx9_26.dll, but I gave it all of the DirectX DLLs)

The first time I ran it I couldn't get in to a game properly, but I suspect this is because I used bad options when setting the game up (it was the first I'd done). The second time I tried it worked fine.

I have no reason to suppose that this won't work on any other computer (at least one that can in principle run the game if installed on it) you want to use as a Pitboss server but not install anything to.

I also deleted all the sound assets and it still worked fine.

 

[tals]

You can delete the art assets directory as well which should bring the footprint to around 512MB.

Tals

 

[KayEss]

You can delete the art assets directory as well which should bring the footprint to around 512MB.

Tals

Yes, I suspected as much but didn't test it. Again, no reason to expect this sort of execution of Pitboss to very different to any other sort once the game is running.

BTW, the server is a twin PIII (quite old now, but a solid worker) and the game was running at around 50% on one of the CPUs (25% overall) even with nobody logged in. This unfortunately is unacceptable for a server application (normally the machine idles at between 2% and 4%). I guess they have some busy waits in the code (polling) which they need to get rid of to make it a serious hostable game platform with proper game servers.

 

[tals]

Yes, I suspected as much but didn't test it. Again, no reason to expect this sort of execution of Pitboss to very different to any other sort once the game is running.

BTW, the server is a twin PIII (quite old now, but a solid worker) and the game was running at around 50% on one of the CPUs (25% overall) even with nobody logged in. This unfortunately is unacceptable for a server application (normally the machine idles at between 2% and 4%). I guess they have some busy waits in the code (polling) which they need to get rid of to make it a serious hostable game platform with proper game servers.

Yep i've noticed this - my machine runs at 70% constantly - i'd be interested in others posting what there pitboss server and specifically the pitboss application is running at.

Tals

 

[KayEss]

Yes. Given the lack of need to install anything I'd be happy to run this on a production server if it wasn't for the busy wait. That completely rules it out.

Otherwise I would consider running a few instances (now that we know how to do that) here in Thailand to see how it goes (I used to do the same for Steam/Source/HL2 games before the ISPs started hosting their own servers).

Although I'd also need to check memory footprints out properly and the admin overhead (I expect that would be somewhat higher here as games must be individually set up), but I wouldn't expect any of them to be showstoppers in quite the way that the too high CPU utilisation is.

 

[ForesterSOF]

My PB is in the same directory as the civ and runs at an average of 45% on my P4.