Categories
Uncategorized

Dealing with Defective hardware

A small percentage of my users, assuming what they are telling me is accurate, have defective modems or routers that shut themselves off when UDP data is sent too frequently. One possibility is they are defective by design, turning off to prevent bot controlled computers from doing port-scans or perhaps DOS attacks. Another possibility is […]

A small percentage of my users, assuming what they are telling me is accurate, have defective modems or routers that shut themselves off when UDP data is sent too frequently. One possibility is they are defective by design, turning off to prevent bot controlled computers from doing port-scans or perhaps DOS attacks. Another possibility is they just don’t know what they are doing. Probably both.

Another, larger, percentage of my users have defective keyboards, including myself. This happens to me on my Microsoft Digital Media Pro keyboard, where I cannot press up, left control, and left windows key at the same time. I’m tempted to find a partner (perhaps Logitech?) that makes keyboards that don’t suck, and to sell them through the website.

While not a defect, the largest percentage of hardware failures in my game are caused by video cards that don’t support Pixel Shader 2.0.

It would be satisfying to say “Your modem/keyboard/video card is defective/out of date. Go get a real one” Sadly, most people won’t, so I just have to implement crap work arounds.

Modem: Add a “My modem sucks” checkbox to the autopatcher that slows down the transfer rate.
Keyboard: Add gamepad support and keyremapping (Should do this anyway, so not a big deal).
Video card: Disable features, then re-add the most critical of them in crappier ways.

These problems are very annoying.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *