Strange situation

[Le Tondu]

My buddy who is stationed in Mannheim, Germany is having some problems when we try to game via a TCP/IP connection. He keeps losing his internet connection when we play CMBO -and not when he just surfs the net. The disconect happens even after we've both hit the GO! button and the red status bar starts going across that little window.

This is very perplexing.

He has one of those VERY new alienware $y$tems running XP Home Edition. I have XP Home Edition too.

We made sure that he doesn't have the firewall working and restarted the system. All of his Norton stuff had been disabled and he has made sure that his ISDN internet connection will not ever disconnect if it is idle.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

[Schrullenhaft]

Are you aware of the TCP/IP bug that will end a TCP/IP session when a crew is captured ? The disconnect will typically happen to the player that isn't performing the turn calculation. The 'calculating' computer will play back the turn normally and then eventually be notified that the other player has disconnected.

The workaround for this is to email the autosave turn that the 'non-calculating/disconnected' player has (this will result in the last set of orders/turn being lost). A few turns of this should get you past the captured crew and then you can restart your TCP/IP game with one of the PBEMs. The next time a crew is captured (the most common reason for the bug) this problem will reoccur. You may want to do a search for TCP/IP bugs or 'captured crew bugs', etc. for more details and other suggestions (among which are some for saving every turn, etc.).

This isn't a problem with CMBB since the TCP/IP code has been completely changed. There's no absolute word as to whether BTS will make a TCP/IP (and other minor fixes) patch for CMBO. It is considered a 'finished' product and it isn't officially slated for any further updates, but there is a slight possibility (and absolutely no promises) that a patch may be made after CMBB has been released and patched to satisfaction.

[ May 29, 2002, 03:31 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Le Tondu]

Thanks Schrullenhaft,

This is happening in the first couple turns, so crews hadn't been captured yet. We're gonna give it another go this sunday and see what happens.

Is the captured crew bug XP specific or does happen with other OSs as well?

I'll keep your work-around in mind if I should happen to experience it.

Making CMBO XP compatible would be great, IMHO, but then again, who is gonna have time for CMBO when they have CMBB installed??

[Schrullenhaft]

The crew capture bug is independent of OS and platform.

CMBO is Windows XP compatible. There have only been two problems people have had - one was with the NVidia cards having problems with transparent/flickering white text/elements (present in Win2K also) and NVidia has this fixed now with the 28.32 and later drivers. The other problem seems to be a bit hardware specific. Some people can't see the CDROM when they launch CMBO in XP and thus can't play, however I've been unable to duplicate this problem myself and it seems to be tied to the motherboard and CDROM that's installed (my guess). Some workarounds involve setting the program's 'compatibility' setting for Win2K, but this doesn't always work (and other settings can actually generate this problem when it wasn't one before).

If the dropped game happens within a few turns and you're sure it isn't a captured crew, then I'm not sure what to recommend. I wouldn't assume that CMBO is that susceptible to delayed/dropped packets, but a number of other people have had similar problems while others don't experience any. I'm not aware of any patches to XP that would improve this situation either. However I wouldn't assume that this is a problem specific to XP (especially since it has an improved TCP/IP implemantation compared to Win9x/ME) since it wasn't out when others have had this problem. The only thing I could suggest is to turn off MSN and any other instant messaging clients and possibly anything else that may be constantly attempting to access the Internet while you're connected.