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MP - Some problems

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unmerged(32250)

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Jul 21, 2004
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We have been running a four player LAN recently and have been encountering a whole host of problems with MP. Can anybody help us solve to make the game more stable?

1) Host freezes. No CTD, just full freeze. Clients get Network Latency error and must exit. This has happened on all the PCs, both old and new.

2) Clients CTD. All the clients do this at the same time and leave only the host playing the game,

3) One client drops out, but game has to be saved, eveyone surrender, and then restart the scenario when dropped client loads up again. (Client cannot enter a game once it's running, basically.)

4) One PC in particular can host a 2 player MP fine, but is very tricky to get all 4 on one game. (Firewall turned off). Same PC sometimes has problems connecting to a hosted game. I press Join and it hangs for a bit, then returns cusor control, but doesn't enter scenario. Game needs to be restarted to fix this.

5) Some saved MP games seem corrupted and a CTD is imminent within 15 mins.

6) Mods (such as SECK) *highly* decrease game stability.

7) Over time, as we get stronger and bigger, the game bugs out more frequently.

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All PCs run fine normally and have 1.03b patch, Windows XP SP1, latest drivers, and all that jazz.

Is there anything that we can do to increase stability? On average we get about 40 mins before a reload. We all love this game and MP is just far too cool to give up on. But you can all imagine how disheartening is it to play for 12 hours, with intermittent crashing, then find the game is no longer playable!
 
At what speed are you running the game? Sounds like you have it on rather high speed, and as CK eats up a lot of resources (1000 provinces and thousands characters, all checked for hundreds of events all the time, and the poor host has to handle it all). Try starting the game on Very Slow, then pause after one day. Then everybody get their courts together etc. Then start the game on Very Slow, after a few days increase to Slow, then to Below Normal. Below Normal is a good speed for a no-pause game. You could try going on Normal in a LAN game, though you'll most certainly end up pausing a lot (which effectively makes the game progress slower). Don't go faster than Normal, unless the Host is a super-computer of the "Deep Blue" class :p

As of your point 3), that is how these sort of games work, no matter what game. At least I know no strategygame where a client can join a game in the middle of the session...
 
We've been running the game in Normal mode and even tried dropping it down to Below Normal as you suggested, but nothing. The game still bugs out, albeit we get slightly more playing time.

Such a shame. This is a really great game, but totally unplayable in Multiplayer (at least for any length of time).

:-(
 
Durzagott said:
Such a shame. This is a really great game, but totally unplayable in Multiplayer (at least for any length of time).
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Well, the Sunday Morning game with 6-7 people from America and Europe have been running for a hundred years. Some of the players have computers that are close to the minimun requirements, and none of us (AFAIK) have a "top-notch" computer.

I have played with my son CK MP over LAN. We've now played for almost 300 without any problems.

Others have examples too, I am sure :)

So Durzagott, I don't think the problem is in the game, but in the fact that you are trying to run the game too fast :) Shut down all unnecessary processes running in the background (messenger programs, anti-virus, Windows-auto-update etc), rename AVI folder to AVI-back, rename music folder to musi-BACK and sfx folder to sfx_BACK (you'll lose all sounds though, but game stability increases massively, at least it did on my 800 MHz computer) AND THEN run the game on max Below Normal. Even then you should expect to get one or two crashes in a five hour session, but IMO that isn't too bad :)
 
check hosts cpu temp. too.

freeze's like that can easily be heat related
 
Jarkko Suvinen said:
So Durzagott, I don't think the problem is in the game, but in the fact that you are trying to run the game too fast :) Shut down all unnecessary processes running in the background (messenger programs, anti-virus, Windows-auto-update etc), rename AVI folder to AVI-back, rename music folder to musi-BACK and sfx folder to sfx_BACK (you'll lose all sounds though, but game stability increases massively, at least it did on my 800 MHz computer) AND THEN run the game on max Below Normal. Even then you should expect to get one or two crashes in a five hour session, but IMO that isn't too bad :)
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I've done this over and over again. All computers have been optimised to the eyeballs. No bg processes, game running at below normal speed, extra fans blowing inside the cases.....everything (and hey, I'm an IT technician, I know how to optimise a computer). Nothing seems to work. The game is highly unstable at best. Two hours of gaming time is all we get before a crash. Three if we're lucky. This is unacceptable for any commercial game, in my view. Not that that'll stop me playing it in Single player mode of course. It rocks too much. Just a shame that the MP is so messed up. It's a hell of a lot more fun when your friends are in the game with you.

PS: Plz, no more suggestions that I lower the game speed. I'm doing that already!!!
 
Sorry for asking the stupid obvous question: You did defrag hard-disks already?

For some reason in the last three MP games (in on eof the one of the players using coal-burning computer) I've not suffered from a single CTD. Before that it was about one or two CTD's in a 4-5 hour session.
 
Two hours of gaming time is all we get before a crash. Three if we're lucky.
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Is that really so bad? you have autosave on dont you.. I play Eu MP a lot over internet and we usually have to rehost every 2-3 hours.
 
2-3 hours CTD interval is fully playable interval from my pov. With yearly autosaves, the most you have to replay is one year. At least I would not be frusturated by a one rehost between 2-3 hours.
 
Actually, I think 2-3 hours before a CTD is perfectly acceptable. The problem is that once the crash happens the spell is broken. I play with a group of four or five people, and by the time the second crash comes along, one of them invariably says "Hey, let's play something different now". Being a CK junkie it makes me want to cry when I hear those dreaded words :(
 
Durzagott said:
Actually, I think 2-3 hours before a CTD is perfectly acceptable. The problem is that once the crash happens the spell is broken. I play with a group of four or five people, and by the time the second crash comes along, one of them invariably says "Hey, let's play something different now". Being a CK junkie it makes me want to cry when I hear those dreaded words :(
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Well, you should join one of the ongoing Internet games then :)
 
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