Other players' skaters and skateboards showed none of the game's skater
effects: not the trail or fire a costume or deck comes with, and not the
sparks, dust and puffs of a skater touching the world.
Costume and skateboard effects. The game gives another player's skater and
skateboard the right effect sets by itself, but builds them before their
outfit is on, so nothing showed. They are now built again half a second after
the outfit is applied. An always-on effect that a skater's item puts on the
skateboard's wheel joints (the Ghost Skater trail) follows the skater's own
copy of those joints, which only this player's skater keeps up to date: for
other players it is taken out of the skater's sets and built on their
skateboard, which has the same joints.
Contact effects. They come from a skater touching the world, which only
happens in that player's own game. Each game now captures its skater's
contacts (position, velocity, surface normal, surface material) and sends up
to three a tick in a new unreliable packet, PacketKind::effects. Other games
play each through the game's own function, so the effect is still chosen from
the surface and the speed. A contact is shown as late as that player's poses
are, only within 30 m of their skater, and only for a material the level's
table has: the game reads that table without a bound.
Server. A dedicated server relays effects packets to players within 150 m of
the sender, at most one packet a tick from each player. New setting
players.sync_effects (default true), console and admin command
"effects on|off". Off: the server relays none, and the roster tells games
neither to send their contacts nor to build other players' costume and
skateboard effects. Player-hosted lobbies relay through the host and always
share them.
The roster carries one more byte for the setting. Still protocol 45, which
has not been released.
New console command "mp effects": what has been captured and played, and why
the last contact was refused if one was.
Server: remove players who have been away too long
A dedicated server can remove players who are away from their game.
- "afk_kick_minutes" in the config's "players" section: 1 to 1440, or 0
(the default) for never. "afk-kick <minutes>|off" from the console or an
admin; a change is saved and applies at once.
- Away is doing nothing a player at their game does: not moving or turning,
not speaking, not sending chat, and not placing, moving or removing an
object.
- A minute before the limit the player is told in chat; at the limit they
are removed with a message saying why and that they can join again. The
log has an "[afk]" line.
- Admins are never removed for it. The time starts once a player's game has
loaded the map, and starts over after a map change and when the setting is
changed.
Votes on a dedicated server show as a card above chat instead of being
followed through chat lines.
- The card has what is voted on, the Yes and No counts, how many are needed,
a bar of how far Yes has got, and the seconds left. When the vote ends it
shows Passed, Failed or Cancelled for four seconds.
- Yes and No are two buttons, labelled with the player's binds. The answer
given is highlighted and can be changed. They can be clicked whenever the
cursor is free (chat, menu or console open).
- Two new binds, "Vote yes" and "Vote no", in the binds list: F1 and F2
unless changed, to keys or controller combos like the others. They are
read only while a vote is running, and not while typing.
- /yes and /no still work and show on the card. The player a kick vote is
about sees the card and has no vote in it.
- Console: "mp vote yes|no", "bind voteyes <n>", "bind voteno <n>".
Server:
- The roster carries the running vote (id, kind, tally, seconds left,
starter, target, label) and the one just finished with how it ended.
- A chat line is no longer sent for each change of the tally; the lines for
a vote starting and ending stay.
Fix: a dedicated server's roster may list more players than its limit.
The extra slots for reserved players and admins (33 of 32) made a roster the
protocol refused to encode, so with one in use the server logged
"Server error" every pass and stopped part-way through each one until
somebody left. Lobbies hosted by a player are still held to their size.
Fix players freezing on dedicated servers; reserved slots are extra slots; bone scale limit 2
Players stopping and jumping (1.1.6):
- The new sound messages begin with the same four bytes ("RMS1") as the
pose updates games send each other over their direct links. The game
took those pose updates for sound and discarded them, so a directly
linked player moved only when a whole state arrived.
- Game: only messages from the dedicated server are read as its sound,
pose or acknowledgement messages; anything from another player is
decoded as what it is.
- Server: poses and sound go through the server to every player, whether
or not two games have linked to each other. This fixes games still on
1.1.6 without an update, at the cost of more outbound on small servers.
Reserved slots:
- "reserved_players_slots" no longer holds slots back. Anyone joins until
max_players are on; the listed players and the admins can still join
after that, each adding one slot beyond the limit (33/32 and so on).
- An admin who is also listed counts once, and the total never exceeds
what a session can hold.
- The list holds up to 1024 players again. "reserved" in the console shows
how many extra slots there are.
Server:
- "bone_scale_limit" is 2 by default. The game's own skater height is a
bone scale, so 1 showed everyone at one height. A config that already
has 1 written in it keeps it until changed.
Server config:
- Written in sections, in reading order: server, access, maps, players,
anti_cheat, network, votes. A config from an older version, flat and
under older names, is read as it is and written back this way on first
start; only settings that are really new are reported as new.
- Renamed: no_bail, noclip, boosts, parties, voice_chat to allow_*;
global_bans to use_global_bans; welcome to welcome_message; speed_check
to speed_hack; score_check to modified_scoring; score_allow to
allowed_scoring_mods; map_pool and map_rotation_minutes to maps.pool and
maps.rotation_minutes. Console and admin commands are unchanged.
- Bans are kept in data/bans.json beside the config. A config that holds
them has them moved there; a bans file that cannot be read stops the
server from starting.
- Reserved slots are one list, "reserved_players_slots": a slot is kept
for each listed player who is not on. "reserved_slots" and the
"reserved slots <n>" command are gone; admins may take a kept slot but
none is kept for them.
- "tps" is no longer in the file: dedicated servers run at 20.
- "bone_scale_limit" is 1 by default: resized body parts are off unless a
server allows them.
- New: "pack_ms" (10), how long Steam may hold a message to pack it with
others; "finger_distance" (25); "steam_debug", which logs what Steam's
networking says, for connection faults.
Poses and skater sound between a dedicated server and its players use new
formats. Lobbies and the links between games are unchanged.
Poses (pose_codec.h, pose_batch.h):
- A pose is rounded once (rotations to 0.08 degrees, positions to a
millimetre) and sent as its differences from a pose of the same player
the receiver has acknowledged. Several players' poses share one message.
- The receiver acknowledges messages once a tick; the sender builds only on
acknowledged poses, or on the whole pose it sent reliably. Loss costs the
poses in that packet and nothing more.
- Fingers are not sent to players further than "finger_distance" (25 m).
- Games upload their own poses the same way, and the server acknowledges.
- About 300 B a pose at full rate against about 660 B before.
- The server no longer rounds rotations by distance: it saved little.
Sound (sound_codec.h):
- Each sample is sent as what changed since the one before, numbers rounded
to 1/1024. One reliable message a tick carries every skater a player can
hear. A stream is sent whole at its start and every two seconds.
- About 106 B a message against 368 B before, on a recording of real play.
Direct connections:
- "connection": "relay" (default) or "direct", with "direct_address" and
"direct_port". A direct server listens on UDP and is listed with its
address; players still sign in through Steam.
- Games connect straight to servers that offer it and fall back to the
relays after 5 s. Setting and "mp direct-connections" to turn it off.
Server:
- "bone_scale_limit" is 1 by default: resized body parts are off unless a
server allows them.
- Logs Steam's relay network status at start-up and in "net", and watches
the Steam sign-in.
- "pack_ms" (10): how long Steam may hold a message to pack it with others.
- "steam_debug": logs what Steam's networking says, for connection faults.
- "relay_everything": sends poses and sound through the server even between
games that have linked, for testing with few players.
- "net" shows pose sizes by rate, the share sent without fingers, and whole
poses sent.
Game:
- Only ReSkate's nametags are shown; the game's own are removed.
- "mp pose-dump <seconds>" records the local skater's poses and sound.
Tests: pose_codec_tests covers exact round trips, chains of differences,
held fingers, damaged input, the sender and receiver over a link that
delays, loses and reorders, and the sound format; with a recording as its
argument it prints sizes on real play.
Protocol 44: servers and games must both update.
Game
- Player distance (Settings > Interface, "player-distance"): how far
away another player is still built as a skater, 50 to 1000 m, default
120. Past it they keep their nametag or dot. All the way up shows
everyone. A player already shown stays until 15% further out, so one
skating along the edge is not built and taken down over and over. The
game ran a full skater for every player on the server wherever they
were, which is most of a frame on a full one
- Nametags are always ReSkate's own. The "ReSkate nametags" toggle, the
"Nametag style" button and the nametag-style command are gone; the
game's own nametags are never shown
- Nametag distance ("nametag-distance"): how far away a name still
shows before it becomes a dot, 10 to 500 m. Default 120, was a fixed
150, so by default the name and the skater go at the same distance
- Nametag dots ("nametag-dots"): off hides the dots for far players and
the ones at the screen's edge for players off screen
- Friends' nametags only ("nametags-friends"): only Steam friends get a
name or dot; chat bubbles still show for everyone
Server
- A player out of sight of another (half as far again as the low rate
starts, 255 m by default) is sent to them once a second instead of
five times. On a full server most players are out of each other's
sight, and at five a second each they were most of what was sent
- Rotations are rounded before a pose is passed on, more coarsely the
further away the recipient is: 0.04 degrees within the full rate's
reach, 0.16 within the half rate's, a third of a degree past that,
about 5 degrees out of sight. The pose is still an ordinary one. A
bone that turned by less than a step is the same bytes as before, so
the difference from the reference leaves it out, and the low bits of
the ones that did turn pack away. By distance only: a player the
crowd limit slowed keeps the fine rotations
- A recipient crossing from one precision to another is sent a whole
state of that player, since a difference from a reference of another
precision would carry every bone again
- "net" shows the size of the poses sent at each precision
Profiler
- A function in ReSkate.dll is reported by its address when the DLL has
no symbols. A release build named every one of ours as the nearest of
three exports, so a report could not say which was slow; the
release's symbols name the address afterwards
Server
- Dedicated servers run at 20 network updates a second, fixed for now:
whatever tps says in ReSkateServer.json is read as 20, and the tps
command no longer changes it. A busy server's traffic, in and out, is
its players' poses, and 20 a second is a third less than 30. Lobbies
keep their own choice
- A player who has not moved or turned for three seconds is sent on at
five poses a second; the full rate is back with their first movement
- "net" shows what a pose costs as sent, and what it would cost against
a reference renewed every second, every quarter second, and against
the pose before, measured on every fourth pose that arrives. It only
measures: a nearer reference packs smaller, and this says by how much
before the server is made to send them that way
Game
- The "/" menu on a dedicated server lists /w for everyone, and /msg,
/msg-party and /msg-admins for admins. The server already answered
them; the menu is the game's own list and never had them
No protocol change: a server built from this still takes 1.1.4 players.
Server: what each player is sent
- A crowd limit: each player is sent at most crowd_budget poses a second
(default 600, 0 for none; "crowd <n>|off"). Everyone at 5 a second at
least, the nearest at the full rate, the next nearest at 10. Before,
everyone within full-rate distance was sent at the full rate, which a
crowd of 40 turned into more than a connection carries
- A skater's sound goes only to players within the full-rate distance,
and in a crowd only from the nearest; it went to everyone
- A player who joins, or arrives after a map change, is shown the others
about seven a second, nearest first, and none while what they were
already sent is still on its way. Before, every outfit and every
stream went at once (and to everyone at once after a map change)
- Whole pose and sound states every 8 seconds instead of 2, on the
source's own clock, and slower pose rates sent on that clock too, so
recipients share one patch and compression (DeltaCache) instead of one
each. The settings survive a map change
- Object updates wait for a connection that is behind
Server: Steam connections
- send_rate (default 900 KB/s, "rate <KB/s>") is set as both Steam's
minimum and maximum, for open connections and each new one. With only
the maximum raised a connection stayed at Steam's 256 KB/s; set high,
what was lost was resent until the connection was full of resends
(about 1.1 MB/s reaches a player through the relays)
- A 4 MB send buffer, and a refused must-arrive message no longer ends
the player's session at once: 15 seconds of refusals do (30 for object
updates). A full queue used to drop everyone who was behind together
Server: seeing what is going on
- "net [player]": every connection's ping, delivery, queue and rate, the
traffic by kind (poses, sound, voice, outfits, objects), who uploads
most, and how busy the server's loop is
- A [network] line in the log every minute
- A leave or failed join says how it ended: closed by the player's game
with Steam's reason, connection lost, or closed by the server and why
- The queue time no longer prints Steam's "unknown" as a number
Server: other
- Reserved slots: reserved_slots and reserved in ReSkateServer.json, and
the "reserved" command; admins always have one
- The speed check flags a game at about 1.5x and over (was 1.06x), and
tells only that player; for the admins it is in the log
Game
- A remote skater with no pose for a second stays where it was for up to
eight seconds instead of being destroyed and rebuilt three seconds
later. On a busy server one slow frame did that to many players at
once, and the rebuilding made the next frames slower still
- Every waiting message is read each frame (at most 128 were)
- On an official server the role tags (Dev, Staff, Homie, Creator) show
for every player, not only the few the game is connected to directly;
community servers keep the old rule
- The server browser searches Steam at most every 15 seconds (45 after an
empty answer) and keeps the last list for 15 minutes when Steam returns
nothing, up from 2
- The game's own connections send at up to 900 KB/s
Cap outfit packets and stop dropping recipients when a relay cannot be
built. Add per-player relay limits for outfits, skater sound and voice,
and a back-off for Steam IDs that keep failing to join.
Throwdowns: only participants can write rows, turns and scores; a copy
that fails to spawn no longer blocks the others.
Throttle remote skater and skateboard re-creation, cap remote objects
per session, and show developer and friend marks only for identities
Steam vouches for. Route all connections through Steam's relays.
Dedicated server: validate map changes, clean player names, keep vote
cooldowns across reconnects, and cut ban labels on a character boundary.
AyeZeeBB