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Westlake Offers Help
For Online Play
by
Digger Dave..special to The PFL.com
I recently had the honor of speaking with Mark Adams, the
President of Westlake Interactive. I contacted Mark
regarding some of the ongoing problems we have been having
with Madden NFL 2000 for Macintosh. He graciously returned
my message with some very interesting details. Below is a
summary of our exchange.
Digger: First, I want to say thanks to
all the folks at Aspyr and Westlake for bringing Madden NFL
2000 to the Macintosh! We are thrilled to finally have this
title available. We are building an online community of
Macintosh gamers who are dedicated to the success of Madden
on the Macintosh as evidenced by the first online tournament
(which "Sweetness" and I hosted) and the ongoing interest in
new leagues that are forming.
Mark
Adams: Thank you.
We are excited to have this title on the Macintosh.
Digger:
You may be aware that many
of us in the online community are experiencing frequent
network freezes and disconnects. These occur in 2 ways: #1)
the familiar cable connectors turning red and #2)
spontaneous disconnects where the game just disconnects
without warning. Our community has played literally
thousands of online games and the consensus is that only
25-35% of them can be completed without some type of network
interruption. The speed of the connection does seem to have
some bearing on this matter but even those of us with high
speed connections (cable modem or DSL) still regularly
experience this problem. I realize the fragile nature of
dedicated connections over the internet but I think there is
something more going on here besides that.
Mark
Adams: Madden's
net code is inherently a bit unstable. The game works by
running the simulation on both machines at the same time,
assuming every event and random roll of the dice come out
exactly the same at the same time. Needless to say its
pretty easy for the game to get out of synch, if one machine
does slightly different calculations. This isn't a great
answer for you, but it does show a bit whats going on under
the hood. One thing we'd like to find out is how stable the
PC version is. Have you had any contact with PC leagues, to
see what kind of success rate they normally have with
internet games? We should be able to get the Mac stability
up to at least the PC rate, but I haven't played enough PC
net games to know how stable that is.
Digger:
Is there any game
settings or other things that we can do to minimize the
amount of disconnects that are occurring? Could GameRanger
be part of the problem? We have tried to minimize in game
chatting but that doesn't seem to help. Some of us have
turned off sound and commentary as suggestedin some of your
release notes but the problem continues to exist.
Mark
Adams: The best
thing I can think of is to make sure both games are tuned
for the highest performance- the faster the game responds
the less likely it'll lose packets and crater. GameRanger
shouldn't hurt it at all. Not pausing the game is probably a
good idea, otherwise the only other thing I could recommend
is to have the machine with a slower connection host. This
might keep the faster machine from flooding a slower
connection.
Digger:
What can we do to
help? Where can we send bug reports? We want to offer our
help in tracking down and fixing this issue.
Mark
Adams: If you can
find any pattern to the disconnects, that could be useful to
know.
Digger: Are there any patches/fixes on the
horizon for Madden 2000 for Macintosh? There are other minor
issues with playbooks, user profiles and certain stadiums
that have come up but they are only a minor inconvenience
when compared with our ability to play and complete games
online. This seems to be our largest problem.
Mark
Adams: We don't
have any patches in the works, but since we want to make
Madden a long time franchise for the Mac we definitely want
to try to clean up everything we can over time. Any bug
reports like that would be great to get to us, since we can
make sure and track them down when we are working on a new
revision. Especially things that are easily repeatable and
annoying, we want to fix those for sure.
Digger: In closing, let me say that...I
realize and appreciate the technical challenges presented by
such a large undertaking as this. I want to reiterate that
our community is dedicated to Madden NFL 2000 and wants to
assist you in making Macintosh the best platform for this
title.
So, there you have it
guys. An insider look at Madden 2000 from Westlake
Interactive president Mark Adams. I think the best thing we
can do at this point is to have a central point for passing
feedback to the engineering team at Westlake Interactive. I
will be that central point of contact.
Mark wants feedback on
three areas of the application:
Is the Mac version of Madden NFL 2000 more/less stable than
the PC version?
Can we determine any
pattern to the disconnects that we are experiencing?
What are the other bugs
that we are experiencing that are easily repeatable?
If you have any feedback
on these items, please email them to me and I will make sure
that we pass them along to Mark.
You can reach Digger Dave
at: digger_dave
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