dg551

Join Date 01/2014

Multiplayer Disconnects & Crashes

MP Game Freezes

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A friend and I played a Sandbox MP game of GC4 over the Internet tonight, using latest V 0.9.

This was a game with 2 humans and 6 AI players.

For the first 1.5 hours we had no game problems. Then the game started to freeze, with no error message, when the game showed Starting New Turn. I had to exit the game, then load the last auto-save. We would be able to continue the game for several turns OK.

Finally, after about 2.5 hours, the game would freeze during an AI execution phase: Arcean Turn. When I exited the game, then reloaded the last auto-save, then we played our turns, then game would freeze at the same AI turn execution phase. We tried this several times. We even loaded the previous auto-save turn, and a manual save.

I have copied the err log file and my last manual MP save to one of Dropbox folders. I have supplied the link above.

We both played the same version for several hours today, as solo games, with no freezes at all.

Have other players had similar game freezes during AI player executions?

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting ,

quoting post

A friend and I played a Sandbox MP game of GC4 over the Internet tonight, using latest V 0.9.

This was a game with 2 humans and 6 AI players.

For the first 1.5 hours we had no game problems. Then the game started to freeze, with no error message, when the game showed Starting New Turn. I had to exit the game, then load the last auto-save. We would be able to continue the game for several turns OK.

Finally, after about 2.5 hours, the game would freeze during an AI execution phase: Arcean Turn. When I exited the game, then reloaded the last auto-save, then we played our turns, then game would freeze at the same AI turn execution phase. We tried this several times. We even loaded the previous auto-save turn, and a manual save.

I have copied the err log file and my last manual MP save to one of Dropbox folders. I have supplied the link above.

We both played the same version for several hours today, as solo games, with no freezes at all.

Have other players had similar game freezes during AI player executions?

Hey there,

Glad to see that someone else is playing/testing MP. I have some good news and bad news for you.

The bad news for you is that what you're experiencing in MP is similar to what myself and others have reported experiencing as well, so it's a universal problem.
The good news is that this is sounds MUCH more stable than my MP experience with 0.81 where we had (2 human ~ ?8 AI) it unstable enough that it would crash every couple of turns by early-mid game. So 0.90 sounds like it's a big improvement and that stability is getting better.

Hang in there, hopefully we get a rock-solid MP experience by full release!

Hope this helps,

-tid242

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SchismNavigator

Join Date 06/2012

+165

Still working on it, thanks for giving us a fresh snapshot of how it's running.

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Thanks for the prompt reply, tid242 and SchismNavigator.

I did continue the last saved MP game, as a solo game for some more turns, but had no more freezes during AI turns.

Good to know that this issue is being worked on.

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My friend and I continued our last saved MP game, using V 0.9, for about 3 hours today. We played over my LAN at my house.

After the first hour, we started having crashes to the desktop for only one of us - Peer Disconnected - when the other human player was using the Diplomacy screen to trade with AI players. This crash happened 5 or 6 times in our session. Sometimes we could hit Done when the AI suggested a trade, and the game did continue OK. The crashes happened everytime a trade, by the AI player, was accepted or rejected. Us two humans did successfully trade with no issues.

After the first hour or so, we started having the game stuck on Starting New Turn, after the game had cycled through the AI player turns. Loading the last saved game did not help - the game still stuck on the same place. We did load a previous saved game, successfully ran one turn, but the game still stuck on the same place. We had to give up playing this game entirely and start again.

Both of us successfully continued to play the MP game as a solo game, with the AI taking over the other human's place. Neither one of us had any crashes or freezes, as we played on several turns from the last saved MP game.

Here is a link to the last saved MP game and the error log file if this helps.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ewnmp9stjhsi47f/AAD4b90S6RK7yTA-cjhQoUOpa?dl=0

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

As another datapoint. My MP has been a lot less stable than others have been describing. The above commenter mentioned 5-6 crashes per 3 hours. I experienced 5-6 crashes in an hour or so last night (2 human players). But did not encounter any reproducible hard-stops, restarting always cleared whatever the specific roadblock was. I put up quite a few debugs in the discord sitrep-90 channel.

I was contemplating what may be contributing to this and flat-out whitelisted GC with my AV. When we try again (perhaps tonight) we'll see if this improves performance at all..

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A friend and I have played a two-player, two AI, 1-sector MP game for a few days and what we've seen is the following:

1) Frequent "hangs" where the UI is waiting on one or the other player but there are no pending actions. Only recourse is to have the player who didn't host quit, the host saves, and then exits and restarts the MP game, reloading from that save. We could end up hanging multiple times in a row trying to finish the same turn. Very frustrating!

2) Infrequent crashes to Desktop. These should be getting reported. Also frustrating but far less common.

HOWEVER there is good news!

For the first situation, it appears to be correlated with one or the other player alt-tabbing from the game. Perhaps a sync issue between the clients when the game isn't front and center?

For the second situation, it appeared to be correlated with rejecting trade offers from the Terran AI player. If we rejected the offer, the OTHER player's client crashed. So we just stopped rejecting trade offers and no more crashes. Very effective extortion tactic by the AI if you ask me.

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My friend and I started a new MP game, using V 0.92. We played 42 turns, or about 3.5 hours today. We played over my LAN at my house.

As there were no AI opponents in this version, we played the default Arena game.

I started the new MP game, but then my friend could not see my new MP game on my LAN. There was a Queries Lobby Failure message. This happened several times. I started a new MP game and he eventually he managed to see my game in lobby and join it.

In the course of the first hour of play, we had no issues, then the game started to freeze at the end of my - the Terran Alliance - turn. The turn arrow was shown at the bottom right, but the game was frozen. I had to use Ctl-Alt-Del to exit the game. This happened about 6 turns in a row - always at the end of my turn. I would then re-load the auto-save, get in maybe one more turn, then the same freeze would happen.

In one case, where I had reloaded the saved autosave game, my friend got the Queries Lobby Failure error, when he attempted to join my saved MP game. After several re-loads and attempts to join, he finally managed to see my game in the lobby and join it.

Eventually this behaviour stopped and we were able to play the last 1.5 hours of our session with no freezes. We did no diplomacy as we were at war, due to the Arena game rules.

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My friend and I continued our saved MP game, using V 0.92. We played another 40 turns, or about 4 hours today. We played over my LAN at my house. We did not have any Queries Lobby Failure messages this session.

We had a total of 7 crashes/freezes in this gaming session:

One case where the game froze and I had to use Ctl_Alt_Del to exit to the desktop
One case where the game froze, but I was able to access the Menu and immediately load the last saved game
Five cases where the game froze, I could then access the Menu to exit the game, then load the last saved game

There was no diplomacy used as we were playing Arena, so were at war already.

The freezes happened close to, or at the end of each of our turn's movements. Usually we did not hit the arrow to advance the turn, as the game attempted to auto-end the turn, but froze.

Can this be fixed soon, as I can't see how the game, in its current state, can be sold with advertised MP capability?

Once the human to human MP capability is working, then we need to have the human vs AI capability re-enabled.

Thanks

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I am surprised that there are only 3 persons playing MP games, who have bothered to post any issues.

Let's have some more MP feedback from players, please.

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting dg551,

reply 9

I am surprised that there are only 3 persons playing MP games, who have bothered to post any issues.

Let's have some more MP feedback from players, please.

Personally speaking, my interest in MP declined by about 99% with the removal of the AI's. We mostly want to play and beat up on the AI's, so our desire to playtest MP is just pretty low at the moment.

Hopefully they will clean up MP some, and roll out AI's in the GC4 test branch, and we'll be happy to playtest it then.

I'm guessing that I'm not the only person in this camp... But I /am/ definitely looking forward to the MP game mode!

-tid242

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tid242

Join Date 04/2008

+63

Quoting dg551,

reply 9

I am surprised that there are only 3 persons playing MP games, who have bothered to post any issues.

As an aside, I posted a lot of issues on the Discord channel for MP... Most of the action taking places these days seems to be happening there vs on the forums..

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My friend and I continued our saved MP game, using V 1.01. We played another 40 turns, or about 3.5 hours today. We played over my LAN at my house. We did not have any Queries Lobby Failure messages this session.

We had a total of 4 crashes/freezes in this gaming session, after about an hour of play.

Two cases where the game froze, I could then access the Menu to exit the game, then load the last saved game.

Two cases where one of us got the Expected Message Count Mismatch error message. We had to re-load the auto-save.

We then both re-booted our computers, and I rebooted my cable router. For the last 2.5 hours of our session, we had no issues.

There was no diplomacy used as we were playing Arena, so were at war already.

The freezes happened close to, or at the end of each of our turn's movements. Usually we did not hit the arrow to advance the turn, as the game attempted to auto-end the turn, but froze.

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My friend and I stared a new Agenda MP game, using V 1.03. We played about 45 turns, or about 3.5 hours today. We played over my LAN at my house. We did not have any Queries Lobby Failure messages this session.

We had a total of five crashes/freezes in this gaming session, after about the first 1.5 hours of play.

Three cases where the game froze. I could then access the Menu to exit the game, then load the last saved or auto-saved game.

Two cases where one of us got the 'Expected Message Count Mismatch' error message. We had to re-load the auto-save.

We are looking forward to Sandbox mode being re-enable soon.

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