v1.09 multiplayer

[Daztek]

some friends and i played v1.09 multiplayer over the internet for the first time on the weekend and there were a few problems. we had 4 players all dial-up, 3 in one city and one interstate, and of an evening so probably not the quietest time to be on the net

firstly, the first two loads were unstable and crashed within a few minutes

when we got going on the third attempt lasting for several hours (2.5 i think) the host's machine was chugging badly. he said it was like playing in treacle, that he only saw one day a week as his interfaced only refreshed that often. his screen was frozen for a fair percentage of the time. it was much slower than the set speed, for all the players.

then the speed would vary as well, to much faster than the speed setting.

we have been playing using 1.08, and although more unstable the more players you have, at least when it was stable it was smooth and predictable to play. we had optimised our PCs and network connections for EU so we don't think thats the major problem. net traffic at the time could have been a factor. we will change our host to the best PC, which didn't seem necessary before

in summary v1.09 MP overall seems much slower/demand much more processing power from the host PC, only marginally more stable, and vulnerable to erratic changes of speed

what have other people found??

cheers

 

[Rio]

Daztek,

There are a number of reports including 17 hours of work our player-group reported on under the thread called "1.09 Warning" in this same forum. Not to put too fine a point on it, we removed 1.09 with radical surgery and exterminated any vestige of the patch on any of the PCs we have players using. You will find we had about a dozen players find it useless for any more than two-ways for any length of time. I also found it occasionally prone to solo crashes on a state-of-the-art-machine which had never suffered any trouble with any of the previous versions or add-ons.

In short, while there are some limited successes out there, they appear not to be the North American version or any of those which had the safedisc write protection program on the patch UNLESS people were using a LAN. Unless you have one of the non safedisc versions, it is probably best to uninstall all EU, reinstall a virgin copy and add the 1.08 patch. Then if you wish you can use other scenarios (IGC etc.).

Good luck!