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

[Old Harry]

Pb45 seems to be down, to the point where I can't reload the game.

[Zulan]

Pb45 seems to be down, to the point where I can't reload the game.

I restarted the server on the console, and it seemed ok, but pbspy can't connect yet. Can you try to connect (I don't have a Civ4 to test at hand).

[Old Harry]

It doesn't seem to be working...

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Hello, the game should running again. The problem was that after the restart the previous(?) process still blockades the port used for the communication with PBSpy.
I shifted the port to another number to fix that (and now try to find the process which blockaded the old port… @Zulan )

[Rusten]

Still seems to be down. No confirmation from second party yet, but I can connect to PB46 without trouble so I wouldn't think it was on my end.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Ok, I tried an other, slightly older save of round 71. Does this help?

[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.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Go to properties, betas and switch to the original version of the game.

[Krill]

I've done that: I've played my PB46 turn, so I know that civ itself works, but I had to use the steam provided .exe. What I'm asking is how to use the HTML downloader .exe that solves the host file issue (and altogether provides a much more pleasant experience when logging in).

[Ramkhamhaeng]

I think your issue is not related to Steam/Non-Steam, but the lack of some older Visual Studio DLL files.

I would suggest you install the Visual Studio 2012 Redistributable Package
https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/download...px?id=5555

or you copy the DLL from an other system/ dll providing website.
Nowadays you probably need the 64 bit (x64) variant, not x86.