Off Topic Productions

Lend me your cycles: Testing the distributed animation program

Ok so this is the wonder-program but rearranged into a client-server architecture so you internet people can help with HDTP and DXR. The program is just too beastly for my lone laptop to handle in a reasonable amount of time, so I'm coming to ya'll for help. All you have to do is download and run the client. It's single threaded so, for you multi-core peeps, you can keep working away while it runs, although you may also want to lower it's CPU priority if ur playing supreme commander or something.

Simply close the program if it starts outputting any of these:

• WSAStartup failed
  socket failed
  gethostbyname failed
  Connect failed c
  queue empty

"Queue empty" means the server has no more models to work on so there's no point running the client anymore, until I rig up more models. The rest are network errors and there's no point in chaning your network or firewall settings just for this program.

This is the test run, just to see if its working. I'm going to be gone most of the weekend at an indie game jam so if something goes haywire just close the client and I'll see if I can fix it on monday

UPDATE: The experiment was a success and you don't need to run the client anymore!

I tried running it but I got an error - vertex2client.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

I can paste the error information if that's any help?

Damn, that usually means a segfault.

Well this is off to a horrible start lol

edit: found the problem, my structs had different alignments on the client and server lol. I might be able to fix this today, but we'll see.

edit: ok it might be fixed now. One more time phas

Oh and yes, if it crashes post the last few lines of output. That will tell me what frame and joint the program was working which will help me narrow down the bug,

A crash just after startup, note that I'm running vista though.

If you throw in the PDB with the zip, I think I could give you a line number. I could give you the assembler right now, but I doubt you can use it.

Let it be known that network code is a shitload of fuck. Anyway, we'll have to do this next week.

Better luck next week. I have a dual-core laptop that I rarely use, you can have top priority on BOTH my cores once you get it up and running.

That's a shame, hopefully you can get it sorted for next week!

Will there be a linux client? If so, I will have another box at home I can dedicate...

Right now it crashes on wine about the same as it does on windows, so I have good hopes that it might run on wine

I will try this out over the weekend (maybe tonight ) as I want to help out.

Also - when there is a stable version I will post a news post about it on the HDTP site - we get over 1000 visits a day so you know if everyone signed up that would be some awesome processing power


edit: will try this once you've fixed it up

Well aparently I don't have the keys to my car, so it looks like I'm here all day. Anyway, the client has been running stable on my comp for about 3 hours now so maybe someone else can give it a try.

Well, I gave it a shot and spewed out the same needing to close problem as Phas.

Still crashing here unfortunately

Wow, this is rediculous. Ok linux version lol http://www.geocities.com/therocknod97/vertex2client.tgz

I've tried ... but I think maybe your tgz may be corrupt. There is a 45 byte file in there, while the archive is 174 bytes, so unless tgz incurs a 129 byte overhead something is wrong

I have tried multiple machines to download it, and multiple tools to un-tar it, but it's all the same: