[TECH] Announcement thread for Pitbosses/NatNeg Server hosted by Zulan/Ramk

[Krill]

Now, as the RB games apparent running stable, I want introduce our way to speed up the joining to a Pitboss game.

As PB player, you probably notice the annoying slow transfer of the save game (10kb/s). We developed a solution for this problem and bypasses the save game loading by an HTTP request. This leads to an almost instantly loading of the game. The PB games at Zulan's server already support the new save transfer variant.
The default save loading algorithm is still available and if you do not want install this tool 'from an unknown source', skip the rest of this post.


=== 1. How it works ===
I didn't changed the Civ4 executable directly, but wrote a wrapper application called 'BTS_Wrapper.exe'. This program starts Civ4:BTS and remap (hooking) the network related functions of Civ4 to a filter which detects the 'save loading commads'.
Due this approach…

• … the wrapper exe needs the same firewall settings as the Civ4:BTS executable. Windows treats them as different programs.
  
• … Some anti virus programs could warn because of the hooking. They can not distinct between this harmless tool and malware. I do not see a way how to solve this trust-problem, but published the code of the Wrapper here.
  

Sketch:

2. Installation instructions:

• Unzip the content of https://kirk.zulan.net/pb/BTS_Wrapper_v9...py_fix.zip
  into your Civ4:BTS-installation directory.
  
• Replace Civ4BeyondSword.exe by BTS_Wrapper.exe in your start link of the game, i.e
  ...\BTS_Wrapper.exe mod= RtR_4.0.0
  Example screenshot for an other mod
  
• Now, join a PB game. The loading bar should disappear within a second. If it does not work or an error occurs, please check for the log-file BTS_Wrapper.log in %TMP%. (%TMP% is a variable which refers to C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Temp or similar).
  

Regards

P.S. It could also be used in normal MP-games, but this feature is disabled as default. Take a look on the
Github page if you want enable it.

Question: How do I do this with a steam version of BtS? I followed instructions and it states that MSVCP100.dll is missing.