030 Dragon Fly [270] v1.0.8

[Masskid]

Yet in the test server we had 8 santa's flying around spamming the button and nothing...

IKR? it always is the new races fault poor poor new race, always gets blamed

[ZERO]

The weapon menu and flying effects are all that is left to complete the reprogram of dragon fly. Hope to release reprogrammed version this week. Then I will start with undead and I will reprogram them all in order.

[ZERO]

I just want to point out that the appearence of some effects for this race will change. Some may say they are more like santa which is true b/c both races acutally use basically the same effects with different colors. However, it is important to note that the effects I am "chaning" from what we currently have reflect the ORIGINAL race as was intended. Previously I did not have the technology to recreate all of the effects until I finally got around to making santa.

[ZERO]

I have finished the fly ability. All that is left is the weapons menu and tweaks. Also note that the "left hand glitch" appears to occur when you use fly. However this is not the normal left hand glitch. IT IS A GRAFIX GLITCH ON THE CLIENT SIDE CAUSED BY CLIENT PERDITION ISSUES. If you click fire you will see you actually have a knife. In the actual left hand glitch a crash can be caused and you can not get out of it.

I have spammed the hell out of it and have not found any problems with crashes or even lag. There is a large number of checks placed on the code to ensure that no bad data will be sent to clients or to the server which could cause a crash.

I recommend people to please test this race so you can see that it does in fact work fine and not crash b/c I know people are going to be freaking out.

[ZERO]

Dragon Fly from scratch recode is ready for final release test. Please post all issues you find. There are some changes from the current version for both effects and some game play.

This version is a massive optimization and represents the best use practice for all aspects of this race. The optimizations should dramatically improve performance.

I do not actually have the code for the current Dragon Fly as it was lost in a HDD crash a few months ago but here is the best comparison I can make.

Current compiled file size: 35,723 bytes
New compiled file size: 41,252 bytes

Normally you would see me promote a smaller file size and say how that in some way shows how the program has been optimized however the new version also contains over 200 lines of additional code for effects alone and most of those are references to very large blocks of code. In addition some new safeguards for dealing with timers also take up more code and require dramatically more complex methods and thus actually a bit more memory usage. However, these changes dramatically improve stability and ensure that timers are killed properly. In addition the new methods for creating wards dramatically reduces cpu usage when a ward is not in use by 100% by producing NO LOAD WHEN THERE IS NO WARD. Yes the timers for wards in this race and soon others will be created ON DEMAND and KILLED AS NEEDED. NO MORE GLOBAL TIMERS THAT RUN FOREVER! This offers a massive performance and stability improvement.

So please test and post comments below!

[CYBER]

Zero,
at about 1:15am today eastern central, the server crashed literally 14 times in a row.
first wcs mod crashed where we couldnt change race,
then the server crashed on dust2 about 13 times,
even when i changed the map to aztec, same shit...

were u doing some massing copying of files or smthn to update dragonfly at that time? or is it an unknown problem?
the 1 thing i noticed was that the stable, being unstable, almost always crashed when a santa went into flight. not that it matters, but just saying.

thanks.

[ZERO]

YEa I almost overwrote some race files around that time but stoped the transfer b/c I had selected the wrong server to move the files to. Perhaps that locked something up.

[Erdenay]

Will test dragonfly today and leave some input, although I'm sure it will be fine

[ZERO]

Just patched some final bugs and reprogrammed some methods. Also reprogrammed effected methods in santa.

Basically I was going out of control with the public declaration which was pointlessly being added to random methods. I even tossed in some Action: modifiers for no reason as well. This has been cleaned up in both and will be in all future programs. Not using the correct declarations waists system resources.

[ZERO]

1.0.5

• Reprogrammed from scratch
• New Effects (effects from original pre OB version added)
• Removed time limits on fly and weapon menu
• Dramatic performance improvements
• Death Sparks target zone is now spherical rather than cylindrical