Network game stability

[Yarrick]

Hello there! ehh here's a little plea for improved network stability:
I have started many games with 4 and 5 other human players on the local network, and it usually works real nice for the first 30-40 years or so.. but sooner or later one of us always crashes to windows.. the player serving saves the game.. we load the game up again and play for a few more years, then another crash and so on in a neverending cycle and the crashes only seem to come more and more frequent!
It's quite unbearable having to reload all the time and we usually end up starting a new game after xx number of crashes.

I suspect that this is not a multiplayer specific crashbug but is instead the same bug(s?) that are causing the single player crashes people have experienced (I'm one of them) but we have also experienced massive lag on some of the clients (such as ordering a troop to move and it won't start moving until after a month or so! - and we are all on a 10mbit LAN).

We can't really pinpoint these crashes either, sometimes it happens when someone presses the Siege button and other times it comes out of thin air! It does seem completely random to me at least.

This is with 1.05b installed on all computers. Hopefully it will work a lot better with 1.06 when we get our hands on it.. I will post our observations with the new patch later.

BTW, we all love this game! Best thing since sliced bread I would say.

 

[Yarrick]

Ok, just wanted to let you know that the crashes are still there with 1.07b installed. We have started a couple of 5 player games and sooner or later someone always gets dropped to desktop. Very annoying.

We have also experienced massive lag on some clients. When the date is for example May 15th on the host machine, there is sometimes one or two of us who have our date lagging by 1-2+ months!!

For the record, all of us are on a 10mbit LAN. We shut down most TSR's and turn off ICQ before starting up EU.

One more thing.. when one client is lagging, the host gets a 'connection problem' window thrown in his face in-game. It says 'Nätverksproblem' or something similar along with the problematic client's nickname. Now in this window the host can press either 'Avsluta' (I think) which drops that player from the game or you can press 'Fortsätt' which continues the game just fine.
Th problem however is that when this screen pops up the first time it disappears soon after and it sort of 'oscillates' in and out from the game screen. This is VERY annoying! The host has to quickly press 'Fortsätt' or the window will disappear and come back on the screen about one second later at a different spot on the screen! When the host eventually manages to hit the 'Fortsätt' button the window stays gone for maybe a month or two months and then it reappears again!!!
IF this connection problem window shows up at one time in the game you might as well save and load it up again because this 'window-popping-up-in-the-face-of-host' thing will go on forever, and it's very annoying for the host to constantly have to chase the 'Fortsätt' button whenever it pops up every time.
This window bug/feature(?) only affects the host, not the clients.

Hope you understood that, let me know and I'll try to give a better explanation and maybe some screenshot too.

Cheers

 

[Rio]

Er,
EGAD!!

With only 421 more hours to go, I hope THIS proves to be fixable or a non general phenomenon! I am (probably WE all are) certainly pulling for ya!

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Rio ~/|~

 

[unmerged(564)]

I had similar problems with MPs. The problem went away when we switched to TCP/IP instead of IPX though. (which the game calls 'Internet' and 'LAN-game', I think?)

 

[Yarrick]

Ahhh thanks for the tip Bane, we will try it later this evening!

 

[Rio]

<crossing fingers!>

------------------
Rio ~/|~

 

[Yarrick]

Same thing when choosing 'Internet' instead of LAN. In fact, it almost seemed to be more unstable when choosing the Internet option. Probably just my imagination though, but sometimes it would just start lagging down to a complete slideshow.. so we switched back to LAN.. played a couple of hours, worked fine, then someone crashed again

Well, guess we'll keep loading that save game.. annoying the hell out of us, but at the same time we are having a blast with EU in multi.. frustrating

BTW, I don't think the game uses IPX even though you choose 'LAN', because none of us even have the IPX protocol installed in Windows. My qualified guess is that the game uses TCP/IP regardless of the type of multiplayer chosen.

 

[Johan]

There is no difference between LAN and internet..

the first just checks for games on the local network...

/Johan

 

[unmerged(620)]

we experience the same problem with 4 players on a 100mbit switched LAN. CPUs used: 2*Athlon 1.1 Ghz, 1*P3-800 and 1*P3-500. all w/128 MB and geforce cards. some improvements with DirectX8.0 (we think, at least some of the crash-reasons seem to have vanished, e g clicking the 'storma'-button in siegemode)

 

[unmerged(477)]

Well, in the game Bane and I played the 'client'-players (me) time was lagging. And not so little. Id say about half speed. And if the game was paused, my date raced through to get syncronized with the servers. Led to some interesting results where I could (by looking at Banes screen) fortell the future After several LAN tries we switched to Internet and it went soooo smooth. Didnt even have one crash during our 8 hours of gaming. Of course, this was before the 1.07b patch which works fine for him but abends my EU at startup.

I dont think that different patch-versions will work in MP, eh?

Mormegill

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As a general rule, I try not to let fear of hypocrisy get in the way of my whining.
-Brian Lindenlaub, WFRP Mailing List

 

[unmerged(628)]

Great work Yarrick! This gets us on our way! Nice details. What OS's are you using?

Sounds like the out of synch problem can be treated with an occasional pause. How quickly does the problem return?

Is there anything that first happens 30-40 years into the game? The first seige? The first colony established? It could just be the game gets too big (whatever that means) and it starts loosing it's mind or it may be it doesn't handle specific things (like seige). It sounds like once you get to this level no amount of restarting eliminates the problem so it is something systematic that is recreated each time. (duh!)

We need to help Paradox fix this.

 

[Yarrick]

Ok, back from another session. This time I told everyone to try to remember what they did at the time of crashing.

I have a little list here with a few bugs and some general weird stuff.. prepare yourselves:

Ok, first crash of the night after about 1h: France (human) starts a war against a big alliance including Spain, Lothringen + a few others and conquers all of Lothringen. He presses the 'Annektera' button in the peace negotiation screen. BOOM! and he crashes to desktop

Next crash sometime later in another game: Ottoman Empire (human) is besieging a city in the far east (no info on country) but decides to divert some of his troops elsewhere. He splits the siege force in half and marches off to an adjacent territory with one of the halves. BOOM! crash to desktop

After those two we had Poland (human) crash to desktop a number of times while he was simply ordering troops around on the map.

Poland's crashes were almost always preceded by the country lagging behind in the current game-date. Sometimes as much as 12+ months! When this 'Polish' lagging started, the host also got the 'Nätverksförbindelse' screen popping up on his screen every month or so in a neverending cycle (see one of my above posts in this thread describing this problem).
Here is a screen shot of this window:


Another multiplayer oddity are random events that come in packs of 2, 3, 4 and 5 event popup windows, all of the same type and at the same time! I can hear my pals cry out in anger in my headset as they get for example 3*(Political Crisis event) which effectively runs their stability into the ground to a -3 despite their country having a solid '3' in stability before this pack of events.
You can also get positive events in this way, for example I once got 5*(Fortress Upgrade) and my 'Polish' friend once got 3*(New Manufactory) which actually gave him 3 new manufactories all for free!

This event behaviour must be a bug right? I can't recall these things ever happening in any of my singleplayer games while it's very frequent in multiplayer.

I suggest some kind of check is inserted into the event generatiion code which makes sure that no more than 1 event of the same type will spawn at the same time.

Ok, next a bug: colonizers currently enroute to their destination province are lost if the multiplayergame is saved and later reloaded. This happened to the Portugese player three times in our game tonight
Maybe this bug can also be found in singleplayer? Haven't checked it myself yet.

One more bug/typo(?): If you hold the mouse pointer over the little ship icon next to the number displaying the current number of settlers, a popup window will be displayed reading something like 'Du har 2st bosättare, du erhåller 1 per år'. Ok, all well, but at the bottom of the popup window there is a line that reads 'Du kan maximalt spara upp till sex köpmän'). Maybe mixed up with the Merchants popup-window?


Last thing I have on my mind right now is a rather strange oddity concerning a pair of technological boosts that occured about halfway into our game.
First the Ottomans (human) and then the Russians (computer) got some pretty big boosts in all the four tech fields. We have no explanation whatsoever for them, and right now in 1560-something the Russians are practically in cyberspace and are all wearing the 18th-century outfits. Take a look at these screenshots of the tech developments:

Infrastructure

Trade tech

Land tech

Infrastructure

And for the record.. we are all using Windows 98 (some are using Win98SE) with DirectX7 and BattleCom for voice communication. EU version is 1.07b

Enjoy all this for now and I'll be back later!


[This message has been edited by Yarrick (edited 07-02-2001).]

 

[Rio]

Although it sounds more and more sinkingly like a problem inherent with the basic MP design for EU (could be not minimizing info packets to client servers or memory admin problems as the 'game gets too big' as mentioned above {which can have to do with not purging histories older than 'x'}), players that typically are being lagged should compare hardware and connection type (for non LAN games) against those not lagged if it can be shown that player 'A' is always one of the players lagging behind. If it is only larger country players being lagged behind, this probably points to a design problem as the predominant issue. Related to this is the interesting remark about Direct-x 8.0. It might be interesting to see if differing Direct-x versions amongst the same group has any effect.

Great work and perseverance guys! I wish I could be of more help before the second half of February! Uh... 334.5 hours from now!

------------------
Rio ~/|~

 

[unmerged(358)]

The strange technolical boost might have something to do with the severel events at the same time error, if you get like 4 Inflation events at the same time you essentially get a new tech upgrade every month, until the end of the year. This might possibly explain it ? Try a single player game and use the cheat codes to give you 5 inflation events at once and see the improvements, that might match the case you had ?

Cobos

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If you are not part of the solution you are part of the precipitate.

 

[unmerged(628)]

Wow, Awesome report Yarrick, you are the MAN (I assume, I don't know your gender). Anyway, excellent work!

 

[Traveler]

I hope, and pray Paradox is working to fix the multi-player aspect of the game. I know I'm going to buy this game without a doubt. But, I won't be able to get my friends to play unless it's multi-player, they're kinda weird that way.

Yarrick,

Keep up the good work... and the rest of you struggling with the multi-player. There are a lot of us pulling for you and hoping the gurus at Paradox are watching.

Traveler

 

[unmerged(896)]

Sigh, I have never seen a MP gamer post that they have managed a MP game of over 50 years without problems... My question is.. has anybody ever successfully played a full campaign in MP EVER without problems? If not, then this shouldn't be avertised as a MP game

 

[unmerged(628)]

I second that ewoku. It needs to be addressed soon!

 

[unmerged(767)]

I can confirm some of the bugs mentioned, like:

-crash when aborting siege
-crash when annexing a country

The random events occuring 3-5 times in a row, never had that in my games...(1.07b/c, LAN, win 98, 2 human players).

Once more -and i hope Paradox can give a short reply whether of not they are planning anything like that- an improvement in the next patch for:

!! saving games on both host and joining players computers in multiplayer mode !!

I have given up on internet multiplay for the moment, the fact that it crashes too often and you have to load 2 MB again all the time makes it a waste of energy. But the LAN option is great )

Cheers,
MMAI

 

[Paradox Interactive]

We are working on the multiplayer code right now. We will keep you updated on progress.


Patric