Yeah. You'll note it has '/old/' in it.

That's how the site appeared from '99-'05 or so.

Ahhhhhh !!! Ok. Old. Some relict link. Mistery solved then.
Feel like Indiana Jones now, having dug up lost treasures *hihihihi*

Still the one open with the performance glitches. Hope that will solve with the new version.
It's really annoying when you're in the middle of something and the action freezes for some seconds just because the game is supposedly autosaving. *grrrr*
Does it autosave every minute or two? I thought it would save only when one exits?

Yeah, it autosaves.

So the performance glitch might be an autosave issue. Is this solvable besides the on/off feature in 0.2.0 by means of perfecting the code or something?
There are games out there, newer games, that autosave and aren't as aggressive on the hardrive till up to the point where your system is slowing down. Often these games autosave, when gameflow is interupted anyways, like at loading a new level or map or so.
Couldn't onlink just autosave when you get a e-mail reply on a done mission (whether positive or negative doesn't matter) since you have to wait a few miliseconds on receiving the reply anyway.
And else it only loads and saves your progress, when you enter or exit the session.
With having a feature to reload previous saves (in case you lost the game) as you guys already have plans on. Which would mean, that new saves don't override older ones or you have to choose a savename to save to and reload from when entering again...
We will see, what you guys build there I'm sure it will be great, an enrichment to gaming and a relief.

=============
My vision of gamesaves is, that there could be a button or option in the running game session to save to or load from during a running game to/from the name you choose. You could load a previous game within a running session or leave the session and load it at the login screen.
At the login screen there would appear another option besides "proceed" when entering a profile, like "load savegame". Through hitting "load savegame" you get to a screen where to choose one of the shown savegames and hit apply/proceed there.
Hitting "proceed" on the login screen with your entered profile will always continue the latest savegame as usual.
The game creates a savegame when leaving a seesion. The total number of savegames could be limited to 10 or so (if necessary) with autosaves going extra. With all slots full newer saves would push older out of the queue? Or having 3 autosaves always, 5 exitsaves that push older saves out the queue and 5 self-saves with names that stay and need to be erased or overwritten by players-choice.
Autosaves in the game could be temporary only and limited to three or so, beeing overwritten with newer autosaves after each turn: temp1, temp2, temp3, temp1 ...
They only serve the purpose to load the game at this point when it crashed without the opportunity of saving to a real save-game through option-saving or exit-saving; or the case of getting caught maybe.
Else autosaves are meaningless I guess and could be turned off if the player wishes to do so.
=============

How come, others seem to not have this issue of microfreezes with onlink?

Unfortunately I'm not a programmer, I'm just asking.

Oh yeah, I'm having the same issue as yours. Pretty irritating.
A little bits of my dxdiag:

I revamped the save functions yesterday. The time it takes to save has been hugely reduced.

A file that took 1.2 seconds to save now takes 0.17. I'll continue to tweak the performance after the primary 0.2.x release. This is a good start.

All hail to you, Miah! Praise to the lord of programming and hacker-dom *g*

May the well of innovative source code never run dry and your fingers never bleed ...

... I cant tell if he's being sarcastic or being serious, either way thats kinda creepy. anyway, Keep up the excellent work, I really am bouncing off the walls waiting for the next installment.

Neither. Miah is really doing an effort here and responded so quick. I wanted to give him honours in a funny way.
The lord and the well weren't meant to refer to Miah though. They were generally spoken.
It's hard to tell appart and could be misinterpreted, as I see now, because I can't use guestures here like speaking towards Miah in one and speaking to the sky in the other case.

So "All hail" and "fingerbleeding" was meant to go to Miah, "praise the lord of hacker-dom" and "well of innovative source code" was to some fictionous spiritual beeing.

Hope it's less creepy now.

---
Hey Miah, while you're tweaking, what's wrong with the map? Why is that reducing game speed so tremendously?

Easier to explain if you know a fair bit about programming.

Basically, there is a linked list showing your connection at any given time, and a function that needs to check if X value is in the list. In other words, if you had every link, it would iterate about 2000 times, going through an average of 1000 items before finding what it was looking for. That adds up pretty fast, I'd say.

There were a few things changed in the interface, and one of thing things is that issue. The first is that the time this function took to search has been changed from O(n) to O(log n).

The rest might take some getting used to, but you'll see when we get there.

I just know verry basic stuff about programming. Just had some q-basic, turbo pascal and assembler long time ago back in school. Never continued using it.
So let's say a know nothing about coding but can understand some of the principles.

Can't follow you what O(n) to O(log n) means. Something with a Landau notation and changing it from linear to logarithmic. Don't know what that exactly means, but i guess it's lightning fast with smaller numbers and slowing down with increasingly bigger numbers.
Linear doubles when the argument doubles, logarithmic increases konstantly when the argument doubles. So the logarithmic is generally faster with arguments smaller than 1.


Thanks for the insights. I'll brush up on my knowledge

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TYCHO !!!

I'll be happy to educate you.

Onlink uses a few data structs, and none of them are in the standard library. We made our own, and they are actually faster based on our latest data.

The first one I'll discuss is the linked list. Basically, this doesn't have a ton of applications, but it does have one for connections. The first item in the list is your first bounce point, the second item is the second bounce point, and so on. This means that in order to look for an item, it needs to go through each item one by one until it finds what it wants. LLists are slow.

Another structure used, this one extensively, is the red black tree. Basically, a balanced binary tree. When looking for a key, it starts at the root node and does a comparison. If the node equals the key, you have the value. If the value is less than the key, you check the left node and repeat; if greater than, check the right node and repeat.

There is only one root node. At the second level, there are 2 nodes. At the third, 4 and so on (4th: 8, 5th: 16, 6th: 32 etc).

That means that a RBTree with 2000 keys and values would only need to go through 11 keys before it found the one it wants as a worst case scenario. The worse case scenario with a LList is that it's the last item, meaning that it'll go through 1999 keys before it finds the one it was looking for.

That's only two of the structs we use. There are more, but that should help to explain what's going on with the speed.

Aha, verry nice.
Exponential to the power of two according to the binary system.

Don't understand how this exactly works with nodes and stuff, but no need to explain the details. Else I would have to pay you a teachers salary

But I have another question, if me asking doesn't keep you from programming too much:
Whats the difference between this CrissCross and LanLade?

CrissCross is your own library, data structure and routines added to the game to increase work efficiency? And LanLade is? Options added to the game like new Storylines and extended Systems?

The basis of LanLade is to allow non-coders to change Onlink drastically. This will work in four phases:

1) Languages will be able to be dynamically loaded. Right now, there is a German version of Uplink, which requires that a new build be compiled for each language. This also means that in order to test language patches, you need the source code. With LanLade, you will be able to load languages from a file. Slated for 0.2.x (not 0.2.0, possibly 0.2.1)

2) The main graphical object in Onlink, the "EclButton," will be able to be changed. You will not only be able to use custom theme as before, but also be able to resize the objects and move them around the screen. If one was to put their mind to it, one would be able to entirely redo the interface and make it look like a new game. Slated for development between 0.2.1 and 0.3.x.

3) Custom programs. People will be able to develop their own programs within Onlink to do specific tasks. This is slated for 0.3.x and might end up as the ultimate goal of the C++ client. This will probably be a custom scripting language that I will make. I'll explain this when I start actively developing it. It's really quite complicated.

4) This one's a surprise, so I won't be detailing it until the internal engine for this piece is done. Suffice is to say that it will make something customizable.

There will be more phases, but I'm trying not to get ahead of myself. Make it more the community game than the game that the community requests and I make.

Great. No I can't wait for 0.4 anymore.
Well done Miah *grrrr*

to 3.): I can imagine. It could knot your brain.
Develop programming for non-coders ... tssssss. Something like a LEGO-system of programming for dummies. Transfer it to the real world and it would be worth a nobelprize, if there would be one for infromatics

So from there the jump to a reall hacking tool running behind the game as a reall hacking interface for dummies is only just a small step further *g*

Nice, nice, nice. Nice in deed. Well done... or well doing, as I should say.