HELP! Critical Bug?!Some Problems in Multiplayer game

[MIG29]

I have been playing multiplayer game these days. But with more games played, I found a problem. That is, in many Battle (official or custom) there would be significant data desyncs. The host would suffer serious lag, units can hardly move. And the opponents screen displays total different content. This is serious desyncs!!!

Sometimes, when I click begin, some already deployed units may disappear or turn out to be at the edge of the map. And in the Quick Battle Mode, the two opponents often have the same deploy area.

I have made many tests with different people, but the problem remains. The internet connection was good, we were using REAL TIME Mode.

Hope for your help. May the force be with CMSF!THX!

[Schrullenhaft]

This problem crops up often with multiplayer. The problem is possibly many-fold. A faster Host may help and less network lag would be the other. CMSF transfers A LOT of data and I believe that the Host is responsible for generating it (i.e. - it is NOT a shared labor between the two computers). Network lag compounds this problem, often due to a lot of "hops" between opponent computers.

I believe that CMSF is pretty much compressing the data for transmission as much as possible already, but even then there's still a large amount of data to transfer. This problem can even occur on LANs where there are few or no 'hops' between computers, but it does seem to happen much less frequently in those setups.

This problem has been reported before and the developer is aware of it, but there doesn't seem to be a consistent way of duplicating the problem to isolate it in the code (at least that is the impression that I'm getting).

[ May 07, 2008, 01:31 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Fat Dave]

Unfortunately, these types of multi-player anomalies seem to be seriously limiting the amount of real time human vs human match-ups. The engine itself is a work of true coding genius, but the networked play, either accros a LAN or via the internet, obviously needs more attention.

Having predomiminately been a TCP/IP quick battle WEGO player of CM's 3 earlier masterpieces, there was initial dissapointment upon learning of its non-inclusion for Shock Force, but the real-time live play option did provide for a 'beer and chips in front of the PC facing a human opponent' type of game.

To learn that this is not yet working optimally means a longer wait while it is improved, but I do have faith that it will eventually perform as it was envisaged.

Playing against another human across the internet is what made CM so addictive for me, I just hope this will also be possible with the same level of satisfaction with this amazing new engine.

Looking forward to playing more of this superbly detailed and beautiful looking game.

Cheers

David

[Spooner]

This seems to happen with me all the time (both players with 1.07 or 1.08 Paradox directly over the Internet or via Hamachi LAN. Tried on combinations of 4 different machines, each with decent broadband connections. Both battles and QBs). If it just happened occasionally, it wouldn't be so bad, but it seems to happen so much that I've pretty much given up on MP games. In fact, the only map I've ever been able to finish successfully was Al Huqf Engagement (worked perfectly the 3 times I've played it in MP), which, since it is so tiny, supports the idea that larger, more data-intensive maps are the problem. If anyone can suggest other maps that have worked successfully in Internet games, I'll try those out...

I'd even be happy if the game paused while it resynced, rather than the game just collapsing in a heap as it does now. Even just telling me that the other player had desynced would be an improvement, since right now, we tend to play on for a while before we realise that the game has gone FUBAR and waste even more time.

Although I prefer real-time, I'd be quite happy with MP being only playable in WEGO mode if real-time is just untenable. I'm guessing there are other technical issues with WEGO which are preventing its release, but I am more hopeful that WEGO will be completed rather than real-time be fixed (de-syncing shouldn't really be an issue with a turn-based mode).

And no, PBEM is just too disjointed for me to enjoy, so it isn't a real alternative for me or anyone I play with.

[Spooner]

[sorry, double post]

[Lurker765]

I think the developers are happy with the multiplayer situation. I posted quite a while ago that MP did not seem to work very well and got the response:

"me:I want to play this game head to head against a human opponent and can't. WEGO TCP/IP doesn't exist. RT TCP/IP exists, but seems unstable for medium sized battles.

Steve: Not aware of it being unstable. Do tell.

me: Well...since you don't believe me about the TCP/IP still having some problems maybe you can check the links: (listed several links in tech support forum)

Steve: I did and saw nothing about stability problems like you claimed. In fact, I saw the opposite. Pleased with performance, pleased with the overall experience (though there are some issues we're looking into).

me:This last link you replied to claiming that since it works for the majority of people it isn't the CMSF code. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. Who knows?

Steve: Well, there is ONE PERSON saying he is having some problems. So yeah, who knows? Maybe all the other people that are saying it's working great are really the minority? BTW, check out Half Life or any other tech support Forum for online games and you'll see more than one post about networking problems."

From this thread:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=003883;p=2

So it appears that the developers lay the blame on user setup/connections for this problem.

[Spooner]

Well, as I said, I've tried it with two of my PCs (different locations with completely different hardware, operating systems and broadband connections). I've played against two different opponents from both of my machines. Tiny battles work (specifically Al Huqf Engagement), but small-medium battles don't (large battles aren't really appropriate for real-time, so that matters less). I haven't tested with a large number of missions though, since it is hard to convince people to waste their time when it is obvious that something is very wrong.

It could be that the larger battles have a greater data transfer which is causing the problem or it could be that the problem happens after a period of time (so that very small, short scenarios don't have time to fail). Hard to tell exactly how long it takes to fail, since, as I said, you can keep playing for a while before you realise that the game has de-synced. The fact that some scenarios work fine and others fail implies that it isn't so obviously an issue with how we have installed the game or configured our machines though. Maybe that is a naive conclusion, in which case I apologise for making such assumptions.

If BattleFront want more specific information, then I'm happy to provide it. If anyone else who has no problems with Internet would be willing to run a test-game against me, I'd be quite interested to see what would happen.

I like the game, but would love it if I could consistently play MP battles. It would be great if there were a simple solution to this problem (that is, that those of us having failures were being complete noobs in some way ;P).

[Lurker765]

One of the links that I gave in that thread included the final statement by Steve saying:

"It would appear to be not related to CM's code. Plenty of people are having no problems, which means the choke point is probably not the code itself. It is possible that there is something in the code that is more/less friendly to some configurations than others, but on the whole it appears to work fine. But yes, it is pushing a lot of data so the tolerance for problematic connections may be lower than for some other applications.

Steve"

[panzermartin]

That's why I still consider CMSF an inferior game to CMx1. Not properly working multiplayer in this massive online gaming era is a huge minus. RT addition was a great step but I was really expecting it to shine in head to head. Maybe till the ww2 release things will get better.

[Fat Dave]

I have to agree with Ali-Baba on this one.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, the beauty and absolute addictive quality of CM1 multi-player match-ups is what made this game so exciting for me. I never played against the AI much (except to try out different offensive tactics) and it was versus another human where the game really stood head and shoulders above anything else. It consumed 5 years of my life

Once CM2 is able to play out reliably against another human opponent (there are still some minor irritations in PBEM) I am sure it can be as popular as CM1 multi-player once was

Until then, I hope Battlefront et al will keep up the good work and not lose sight of this crucial part of this game.

[DzrtFox]

I've had similar issues (out-of sync games, strange issues on the client side) and posted about it only to have to post completely ignored by BFC. So apparently they are in no rush to either admit there is a problem or to fix it.

[panzermartin]

DzrtFox is correct. It is a problem ignored by BFC and even beta testers. I haven't seen anyone posting about playing online smoothly either. Well, apart from that tiny scenario. The funny thing is that they are future plans about cooperative online play with up to 8 players iirc. Riiight...