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Social game but will end up anti-social

• chrisironsbones 3,524 Posts

  Tue, Jan 25 2011 5:04 AM

  Playing a Ready Go earlier i finished the round -2, but in that round i scored 5 bogeys, which occured due to the meter skipping, and ball then flying into deep rough. But each time i had a skip, i noticed friend activity each time.  This is a really bad problem and i end up playing rounds now either hidden so other friends don't know i'm online, and i've started to delete a lot of friends aswell to try and limit the problem.

  Seing as its ment to be also a social game, it will end up with people turning anti-social to combat the problem

• rowlandsfc 181 Posts

  Tue, Feb 1 2011 8:08 AM

  i was browsing the forums a whil eback and someone else psoted that friends status changing affects it, i ended up delete all the friends i never play and only keep the ones i play on a regualr basis now

• andyson 6,415 Posts

  Tue, Feb 1 2011 8:52 AM

  A player option to turn off or eliminate friend updates in the game client would be most welcome WGT!

  In the meantime, allow your CPU to complete whatever work it is doing because of the friends updates by holding your back swing at the top for a count of 4 or 5.

• CharlemagneRH 1,054 Posts

  Tue, Feb 1 2011 9:54 AM

  andyson:

  A player option to turn off or eliminate friend updates in the game client would be most welcome WGT!

  In the meantime, allow your CPU to complete whatever work it is doing because of the friends updates by holding your back swing at the top for a count of 4 or 5.

  All they'd have to do is make it only check for friend updates at the end of each hole, or if you were doing a multiplayer game, right after you take your shot.   Of course, you could make it do friend updates in real-time, with the exclusion of when you are dragging your mouse to select power or just about to do an aim click, but that would be too much to worry about... too much server/client traffic.  It's not important enough to justify limiting it only to real-time updates.

  Anyways, the point is... no need to shut off friend updates for the entire round.  Somewhere in between would be a good compromise.

• jbenny11 863 Posts

  Tue, Feb 1 2011 10:35 AM

  I might be mistaken here, but when you start any round does'nt your light turn red? In options you can also turn off friend noise. JB

• CharlemagneRH 1,054 Posts

  Tue, Feb 1 2011 9:41 PM

  jbenny11:

  I might be mistaken here, but when you start any round does'nt your light turn red? In options you can also turn off friend noise. JB

  Red only means that you can't be invited to a game.  It does not stop your friends list from being updated when a friend's status changes, friend invites, or cc invites, which are some of the possible suspects for meter glitch causes.

  There are multiple solutions to this problem... all that come to mind are rather basic programming techniques.

  Solution #1: Real-time updates, except when flag is set.  Similar to a "semaphore."

  1. When the client is loaded, a flag that we'll call "BUSYFLAG" is created and set to zero.
  2. On the active player's client, all non-critical functions (friend list updates, invites, etc.) that can occur during a swing will check the "BUSYFLAG" prior to running.  If "BUSYFLAG" is 0, they are free to continue on and do their job.  If "BUSYFLAG" is 1, they will put themselves in a queue to be executed later.
  3. Starting a backswing sets "BUSYFLAG" to 1.
  4. An aim click or completion of a practice swing will set the "BUSYFLAG" to 0 and ask the queue (from #2) to be executed.

  Solution #2: Server-side queue, client-initiated fetch

  After each hole (or stroke made by the player,) the client will ask the server if any friends changed their status, if the player got any invites, etc..  If so, the server will tell the client what friend changed their status, who sent an invite, etc.  If nothing happened, the server will tell the client that nothing happened.  After a response from the server has been received, the client will then move on to loading the next hole/stoke.

  (To avoid queues building up and wasting memory when players [x] out of their clients, never fetching their updates from the server, any server queue that is older than 3 mins will be deleted.  If the user then requests his/her queue, then it will start from scratch, checking every friend's status.)