YANG (Yet Another Netplay Guider) - Frequently Asked Questions
- Running YANG, something in the menubar looks ugly to me!
A: It may happen when a customized Windows XP theme is used (even if you might not be aware of that).
One solution is to right-click on the desktop, select "Properties" (or any translation of that) and in there select another theme.
However, here's another workaround: (WARNING: If you try the workaround which deals with the registry, be careful!)
Fix the ugly menu bar after applying a custom theme
- Where are the YANG-related settings saved?
A: On ENGLISH VERSIONS of Windows, or at least Windows 2000 and XP, they should be saved into a place like:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\yang
On Windows Vista and 7, the location is of the following form:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\yang
The drive letter may change, and on Non-English versions of Windows, "Application Data" may be named differently!
The following method may work in certain cases (although it may also not work): %APPDATA%\yang
On Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/yang
On Linux, FreeBSD and possibly other Unix variants (excluding Mac OS X): ~/.yang
- I'm using Hamachi with a few friends, and things don't work as expected.
A: There's a number one rule when you use something like Hamachi: Never advertise the room.
Reason is, that if you do advertise, the master server would detect your external IP (which is non-Hamachi) and that'd be used in the room.
So in case you've just advertised a room, don't just unadvertise it. Close the room and restart it.
If you want to make sure it's not advertised on startup, check the room settings and look for the room advertising checkbox.
Regarding your buddies, they should go to the Action menu, choose to join a room manually,
and then join you by your *Hamachi* IP address. Not a non-Hamachi IP.
In general, mixing Hamachi IPs with non-Hamachi IPs is a way to fail here.
- Setting up a DOS game, it doesn't seem to run as expected (e.g. a window appears and disappears immediately).
A: It's possible you don't have a CFG file like DUKE3D.CFG ready for the game. Even if one exists, it may not have all settings the game expects.
They should be set up before. For instance, for Duke, you can drag-and-drop the SETUP.EXE file coming with DOS Duke into the DOSBox.exe file coming with the DOSBox emulator.
You can check that it has been set up properly by trying to launch a single player game, from the "Action" menu in YANG.
- Setting up a DOS game, I get a message like "Unknown/unsupported executable".
A: Turrican has supplied lists of executables which can be recognized. You should always use the latest version available. There's an exception for Duke Nukem 3D, where there are two releases of v1.5: Original and GOG.com. Both are supported.
Now, you can see here lists of executables for Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior.
- I'm trying to set the amount of RAM used for DOSBox games, and it doesn't seem to work!
A: Right now, to avoid issues caused by the usage of a too low amount of RAM, it's set by YANG to 32MB.
- How can I play mixed Internet/Local games of Descent and Descent 2, using the DXX-Rebirth source port?
A: Each client on the local network should edit the d1x.ini or d2x.ini file in the source port folder, and set an offset for a UDP port by uncommeting the line starting with ";-ip_baseport <n>" and set some unique value. Clients on the local network should use DIFFERENT baseport values.
- I can't select MOD files for Blood.
A: For other games, you'd just select a bunch of MOD files and they'd be used.
Their types would be recognized by file extension (like CON or GRP).
With Blood, however, a file ending with .RFF can have two purposes: A Blood game resources file, and a Blood Sound file.
Due to this issue of file recognization, the usual way of handling MOD files is currently disabled for Blood.
As a workaround, you should have the MOD files ready in the Blood directory, and use the room to enter extra arguments:
-art for art, -snd for an RFF sound file, -RFF for an RFF file for Blood resources, and -ini for an INI file name.
- It looks like I can see the country flag of someone, but not the country name. How can I tell the name?
A: On Windows, you should be able to see it by just leaving the mouse cursor on the flag icon (then a tooltip will appear with the name).
Alternatively, you can enlarge the column, like on the other platforms where there's no tooltip,
and then the country name will always be displayed at the right of the flag icon.
- Why can't I see the pings of all clients, and only that of the host?
A: It is not supported as of today. If you've heard of firewall and/or "port forwarding" issues,
more of them may occur if I try supporting direct pings between clients.
So for simplicity it isn't supported at the moment.
- Sometimes, the ping raises. It appears to occur while chatting and joining.
A: It is known to occur with the current implementation.
The case of "chatting" has actually been figured out just a few days before the release of YANG v0.53.
Fixing it requires not-so-tiny changes to the implementation, which are not so trivial and require some thought.
I'd prefer to add things which don't require so much thought and/or planning, most of the time.
- Why have you removed support for Duke3d_w32 (Rancidmeat's port, not xDuke)?
A: Because it hasn't been updated for a long time, and I've heard that Dave has said he won't continue with working on it.
On the other hand, there's xDuke which is based on it, has a few added features, and isn't yet considered to be abandoned.
- Why have you removed support for JFDuke3D?
A: Because there hasn't yet been an official new release since the end of 2005. Right, there may still be development on it.
But for now, you can use EDuke32 and/or Duke3dw. Both are based on JFDuke3D.
- Isn't the icculus.org/duke3d port outdated? What about removing it?
A: It may be the only source port working on PowerPC Macs. Yes there's EDuke32 but I'm not so sure regarding its Mac support.
- Is it just me, or there's no way in YANG to validate checksums of the game?
A: That's right. It isn't really useful when Windows eduke32.exe is not the same as Linux eduke32.
In fact, even two Linux machines may have a bit different eduke32 executable, although they're of the same version.
Regarding the GRP data file, it may be stored in different places like /usr/share/games/eduke32 on Linux, so it isn't checked either.
- What does Flux mean?
A: It's a way of measuring the ping stability. After all, you may know that the lower the ping, the better.
But it may also be good to see how much does the ping change over time.
If the flux is high, it means the ping is unstable, which is less desired.