Big Bug!
BIG BUG IN Q2 NETWORKING!
If you run multiplayer servers, download:
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip
A serious bug got through… I thought the QuakeWorld master server
code was completely disabled, because I was planning on putting a
modified architecture in place in the point release. It turns out
that the code is still in there, sending heartbeats to a unix
machine here at id that isn’t even running a master server.
That wouldn’t normally be an issue — a packet every five minutes
from all the servers.
Except….
Cyrix has a new processor that is significantly faster at single
precision floating point calculations if you don’t do any double
precision calculations anywhere.
Quake had always kept its timebase as a double precision seconds value,
but I agreed to change it over to an integer millisecond timer to
allow the global setting of single precision mode.
We went through and changed all the uses of it that we found, but
the routine that sends heartbeats to the master servers was missed.
So, instead of sending a packet every 300 seconds, it is sending one
every 300 MILLISECONDS.
Oops.
To a server, it won’t really make a difference. A tiny extra packet
three times a second is a fraction of the bandwidth of a player.
However, if there are thousands of network games in progress, that is
a LOT of packets flooding idsoftware.com.
So, please download the new executable if you are going to run any
servers (even servers started through the menus).
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip
This isn’t the real point release — there are no new features or
bugfixes. I just went back to the release codebase and recompiled
with one function commented out so we wouldn’t have to worry about
introducing new bugs with our current untested code.
Btw, all bug reports should go to Christian (xian@idsoftware.com),
NOT to me, Brian, or Cash! We need a central point to funnel
things through. Hopefully we can set up a web page or something
to make public what we know about, so we can cut down on email
traffic.