Network Play

You can play Armagetron over a LAN or the Internet. It uses the UDP connectionless communication mode of the IP protocol, so make sure you have TCP/IP installed.

The fastest computer in your network should act as the server. There, go to the network menu and hit the "LAN Game"- menu item. After a second, Armagetron should tell you that there are no servers currently available, but offer a "Host Game" item. Press Return on it. In the following menu, you can select a name for your server and the game options. The game options here are completely independent from those in single player mode. After everything is to your liking, you can hit the "Host Network Game" menu item and the game will start on the server and run just as in single player mode.

The other computers will be the clients. On them, you activate the "LAN Game" menu item, too. This time however, there should be the server you just started visible in the server browser. Just hit Return on it to connect.

An internet game works the same way; you just have to choose "Internet Game" instead of "LAN Game" in the menu. Note that the number of users currently online on each server is displayed by the server browser, too.

At the time of this writing, there are about ten dedicated servers available, so you should not need to start your own. Most of them will let you fight against a bunch of AIs while you wait for other players to join in.

Finding an opponent to play against should not be a problem these times; nevertheless, there still is the meeting page. Check it out, be online when the countdown reaches zero and you will certainly find another player online. I'm usually playing at these times and specially like to be on a server that allows cockpit view only.

If the server browser does not work for some reason (i.e. no master server available), you can still connect to a server if you know its network address or hostname and the port it runs on. The "Custom Connect" menu item in the network game menu serves that purpose.

Server and client do not need to be of the same version. If an older client connects to a server, the server will simply disable the features not supported by the client. This may be undesired, since users of newer versions will experience varying gameplay depending on other clients connected. Server admins can fine-tune the number of older client versions supported with the variable BACKWARD_COMPATIBILITY; setting it to zero will prevent all older clients from connecting. On the other hand, you can simply disable new features by setting NEW_FEATURE_DELAY to some positive value. If both configuration variables are set to the same value, no feature will be enabled or disabled just because an old client connects/disconnects.

The server browser will show you the compatibility status of the available servers; servers with a version similar to yours will be found higher in the list. For a list of the protocol versions supported by different Armagetron versions, see here.

You are not limited to one player per computer; on each of them you can play with up to four people. In the precompiled version, there is a limit of 16 clients. You can set the configuration variable MAX_CLIENTS to limit it further. If you compile your Armagetron server yourself, you can increase the limit in the file "network.h". Just change the line

#define MAXCLIENTS 16

If you are behind a masquerading firewall ( such as a DSL router or the Microsoft connection sharing ), you cannot act as a server; your computer is then unreachable from the outside unless you manage to forward port 4534 UDP connections from the firewall to your server. Most software solutions and some standalone DSL routers offer this option, so you may be lucky.

The client may be behind a firewall as long as it allows outgoing UDP connections on the Armagetron port.

Following the model of Quake 1-3, there is a special binary version of the game available for download (or compile it yourself giving the option --disable-glout to configure) that has all input/output features disabled. If you start it, it will read the normal configuration files and set up a network game according to the settings in the game menu (Number of AI players, game mode and finish mode). A dedicated server takes input from the keyboard and interprets it just the way it does with the configuration files. Additionally to the usual configuration files, the dedicated server will read the file everytime.cfg from the var directory before each round; it may be comfortable to place quickly changing settings there. You can join the game on the dedicated server just the way described above.

The advantages of this solution are:

• there is no longer a "privileged" player; all players are clients to the dedicated server.
• the dedicated server can use it's full computing power just to manage the game; it does not have to bother about input or 3d rendering. So, the game is a bit smoother for all players.
• the dedicated server should run on any 32 Bit Windows and about any UNIX; it does not need any special library installed (OpenGL, SDL, ...) , so it is easy to set up public internet servers.
• The dedicated server uses less CPU power than a client because it does not have to care about graphics and sound. It can be run on an older PC.

Ping charity can be configured along with your network bandwidth and other settings in the "Network Setup" submenu in the "Network Game" menu.

It is the configurable part of the "equal ping" technology. In short, if you have low ping and your opponent has high ping (ping: the time it takes a message to travel from your computer to the server and back, usually measured in milliseconds), you can take over some of his ping to make the situation more equal. So, if you have ping 60, your opponent has ping 160 and you set the ping charity to at least 50 (more does not change the situation), you will take over 50 ms of his ping, giving you both ping 110. If you set your ping charity to 20, you will end up with ping 80, your opponent with ping 140. Of course, you may be greedy and set ping charity to zero, but I suggest leaving it at the default value 100.

How does that "equal ping" thing work? It is not that complicated, but for now, I rather keep the secret buried in the source code (too lazy to explain it right now...).

In the player menu, there is the "Spectator mode" toggle; If you just want to watch an internet game, connect to the server with spectator mode enabled. Note that you will be almost completely ignored in spectator mode: the other players won't know you are there at all, you can't chat and the dedicated server will not bother to start a game if only spectators are online (all you are going to get is a black screen). Only the server administrator will get a message that a client connected.

In a multiplayer game, every crucial action makes you gain or lose points; after

• a fixed number of rounds has been played
• a fixed time elapsed or
• a fixed score is reached

If you are the only person on a dedicated server, a special single player game is started (its parameters are determined in the SP_* variables in settings.txt on the server) to keep you busy until someone else connects; the highscores in this mode may be published by the server administrator.
The highest scores collected in a single player game are collected in the file highscores.txt, the people with the most won multiplayer rounds/matches are stored in won_rounds.txt and won_matches.txt. A ladder is stored in ladder.txt.
Note: these statistics have all not been adapted to team play and most of them will store very odd results.

As in any software downloaded for free, you can't be completely sure whether Armagetron has secret functions that, for example, spy on your system internals, exploit known Windows bugs to get to your ISP's password, etc... and send this information to the author. Of course, Armagetron does not do such a thing, and you can check that in the source code.
But Armagetron DOES send some information out: If you connect to the master server for the first time, Armagetron will send

• Your Operating system and Armagetron/SDL version
• the information the OpenGL system offers, telling me which graphic card you use
• if you are running Armagetron fullscreen or windowed

If you are interested in network programming yourself, you may want to read the network subsystem documentation.

This document was created by Manuel Moos

Last modification: Tue Oct 14 09:46:43 CEST 2003