network issues and root cause analysis

[deadc0de6]

First off I wanted to thank you for working on this project, I love the game and would be thrilled to be able to have a more stable (and balanced) version of it!

I'm writing since my friends and I are sometimes playing generals zero hour (bought on ea games) in lan and are experiencing some issues with the network (lags, out-of-sync issue while in game, specific user cannot join the game, etc). I'm thus here to get some help on identifying the issues and see if it's patchable. I have skills in reverse engineering and programming (go, python, C, asm, ...) and would like to do a root cause analysis on the issues related to the network part of generals zh. Especially the fact that sometimes, when playing a local game, some player (usually one, this is reproductible) is able to join the lobby but once the game launches (with the different progress bars) the player doesn't go through and will not be able to start.

With the vanilla game we sometimes get out-of-sync issue and with the gentools patch applied we do experience reproductible issues with one player being unable to pass the loading page after starting a local network game.

I have thus following questions:

• how far are you from reversing / rewriting the network part of this game
• how close your implementation is (on the network level) from the original game
• can you point me to the different parts handling the loading of the game and the network communications during a lan game
• could you provide me with a few pointers / explanation on the network part so that I can start doing some research on the potential issues
• how stable / playable is the game as of your current status

I'll be honest, I haven't looked at your code or started to reverse the game but I came across your project and thought it'd be easier to start with a few pointers before digging blindly into this.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks again for this project!