Bug fix for Quake II
Although many right now feel that Quake II is a great game, id Software's John Carmack had an update in his plan file listing a big bug in the networking code for Quake II. Since Quake II lacks the modem support that Quake had, the only ways to play multiplayer games are via LAN or through a dedicated QuakeWorld server (we've got a machine running it already and if we want our butts kicked, we'll let you know where to go).
From Carmack's plan file:
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 bug fixes. I just went back to the release code base and recompiled with one function commented out so we wouldn't have to worry about introducing new bugs with our current untested code.
By the way, all bug reports should go to Christian, 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, so we can cut down on e-mail traffic.