Please do not move to the MP forum. This is a bug report that I hope Johan will see, rather than a request for information from the MP community. Thanks. 
On hosting up games of EU2 and pressing <start>, all players see a screen that lists all player names and countries and either says "Connecting" or "In", though I may be wrong on the exact words used. When someone crashes while hosting up, the other players are left in limbo and still appear to be in the process of connecting to the crashed player. This continues until they kill EU2 and rehost.
What is happening here? In most games you would expect to host up OK, but find the crashed player absent when you are ready to start. However, Johan has said that in EU2, and as I understand it all Paradox games, as part of the hosting process all players must act as hosts simultaneously while the game is being hosted up. I believe this is due to needing to ensure chat works properly, but I'm not sure. Thus, when any player crashes while hosting up, the whole process is knackered, leaving the other players trying to connect to his hosting.
How could this be solved? Well, either the initial hosting process needs to be changed, or a connection timeout needs to be introduced. I would expect the latter to be easier to implement. This timeout would either be 1 minute or 2 minutes waiting for any connection at all from the crashed player, or 5 minutes for the total hosting. With my experience of hosting and GMing a player who used to run EU2 on an extremely slow computer, I believe 5 minutes is the lowest you could comfortably take such a limit without causing serious problems.
Of course, the EU2 MP community have become used to the hosting process, and the hosts generally know how long to continue before someone has clearly crashed, while the other players know a rehost is happening if the host's info goes back to "connecting" again. While a change to the code wouldn't affect EU2 that much, such a change could easily be ported into all of Paradox's products, benefitting many more people including all those HoI2 players who are new to Paradox games.
On hosting up games of EU2 and pressing <start>, all players see a screen that lists all player names and countries and either says "Connecting" or "In", though I may be wrong on the exact words used. When someone crashes while hosting up, the other players are left in limbo and still appear to be in the process of connecting to the crashed player. This continues until they kill EU2 and rehost.
What is happening here? In most games you would expect to host up OK, but find the crashed player absent when you are ready to start. However, Johan has said that in EU2, and as I understand it all Paradox games, as part of the hosting process all players must act as hosts simultaneously while the game is being hosted up. I believe this is due to needing to ensure chat works properly, but I'm not sure. Thus, when any player crashes while hosting up, the whole process is knackered, leaving the other players trying to connect to his hosting.
How could this be solved? Well, either the initial hosting process needs to be changed, or a connection timeout needs to be introduced. I would expect the latter to be easier to implement. This timeout would either be 1 minute or 2 minutes waiting for any connection at all from the crashed player, or 5 minutes for the total hosting. With my experience of hosting and GMing a player who used to run EU2 on an extremely slow computer, I believe 5 minutes is the lowest you could comfortably take such a limit without causing serious problems.
Of course, the EU2 MP community have become used to the hosting process, and the hosts generally know how long to continue before someone has clearly crashed, while the other players know a rehost is happening if the host's info goes back to "connecting" again. While a change to the code wouldn't affect EU2 that much, such a change could easily be ported into all of Paradox's products, benefitting many more people including all those HoI2 players who are new to Paradox games.
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