Birth of the Federation

Well, Gentle and I had another epic udm dd game. Colony update worked out fabulously, and the battles were fun and epic. Destroyers rocked and overall this is the best mod version thus far. We did have a host - capital H - of crashes, particularly after turn 100. Sometimes every other turn crash, sometimes every 3rd turn. About 2/3 of crashes were midturn, just one party gets unresponsive trek.exe. Most are ntdl errors in the Event Viewer. The other third sync error... Desyncs are very very frequent. we played non-mpr version, i had buy button reversed, i don't think gentle did.

we can't do much about ntdl i was told. same for desyncs... The only thing that kept us going is the sheer beauty and complexity of the plans we've started and the empires we've built...

is there anybody interested in getting a new network engine built for this game? I know Flocke was thinking about this in the past but he is super busy and has too much on his plate.

I am willing to start a kickstarter compaign or an equivalent here to make it worthwhile for the creators. I get the usual talk about copyright issues etc. however i suspect it is time and money that it comes down to and I this is the only thing that keeps this game from being more mp friendly, this issue can be circumvented.

ruthlessferengi wrote:i had buy button reversed, i don't think gentle did.

I have stated many times if a change is made both players should have same change. It is very important for players to talk about any changes before starting any game in MP.

Not sure if this was game ranger or warzone, has the sync error problem with game ranger been solved? If so the buy button fix could be cause of sync errors? you are only member testing this.

ruthlessferengi wrote:is there anybody interested in getting a new network engine built for this game?

All of the errors/crashes you listed in your post is game/trek.exe related and a network engine would not prevent them.

thunderchero

thunderchero wrote:a network engine would not prevent them.

it would allow to compute and compare hash codes for trek. exe and stbof.res and put a warning if not equal
in fact a new network engine is a key aspect for many possible changes and improvements also on sync errors, but not the solution itself
it will be implemented sooner or later, I'm sure about
if someone wants to pick up on it, great

I also had buy button disable. I think we had the same version and all the crashes was due to the large amount of ships/colonies present in the game, maybe the fact that we both had cloak races(and we played a lot with cloak skill during battles) could had an effect on battle crashes. For the random mid turn crashes i don't have any idea. But is frustrating like hell not being able to play 2 turns without loading autosave . I notice also in SP that, after turn 100, the amount of time take for processing turns is increasing graduate(just like in old time vanilla) I try to use all romanian bad words i know but seams that the game is not scared by that. So..
Cover me Porkins!

gentle wrote:I also had buy button disable.

so you see buy dialog? or buy dialog is skipped?

But any way as I have said before communication is key.

example;

if player A finishes his turn and clicks the turn button, he is bored waiting on player B. if player A even clicks on a system, goes to research screen, intel screen ect. this can cause a sync error or a mid turn crash.

this is just as important in combat also.

it is very important that the first player to complete turn to do nothing until both players have pressed turn. or both players press turn button at the same time.

but also in-game chat we know is bugged, so this communication needs to be done out of game in lobby chat or team speak.

thunderchero

..buy dialog was skipped. You may be right with "nothing" to do after pressing turn; i usually went and check the systems or whatever.. after pres turn. Good to know for future, thanks.

gentle wrote:..buy dialog was skipped.

so you did have changes between versions, RF saw buy dialog each time buy was clicked.

I told RF I did not expect any problem with this but I could have been wrong.

thunderchero

I enabled buy button and that allowed me to get in more cash and more/better ships. I will see if gentle can enable it as well for our next game. I enabled it at turn 150 or so and we did have a lot of desynx and ransom crashes before this anyway. I thought etc told me that buy button reanablement can be done unilaterally in mp. I prob misunderstood him. We used wZ.

thunderchero wrote: it is very important that the first player to complete turn to do nothing until both players have pressed turn. or both players press turn button at the same time.

actually I never played this way but how about enabling turn timer to avoid this problem a bit? Sure, later on, on epic games you may need 10 minutes longer than in the beginning. But ending turns in the first period of the game shouldn't be a problem anyway. The problem is, when it is getting big. The AI with their stupid course settings for any single ship and shit like this is really breaking the game. We know how easily stuff can go wrong when regrouping ships. There is some error somewhere where the ships aren't stored correctly in the memory. I always thought of this as an array/pointer bug.

But that's just one major thing of many. The major thing which is even worse, is the fragile UI. left click, right click when turn is ended somewhere in a field and boom shit hits the fan. Or do it in F4 menu. Just left click, right click on some of the locks and boom. Might have to do with the direct ip connection. I think it should be smoothened out. Actions should be limited, to prevent things like that. But this has to start in the game, not the part which is the network engine. The UI is very direct and here I'd start.

There are so many construction sites in this game...

anyway, some hash-verify would really be cool. It's a pita when people modded something and forgot about it and shit gets de-synced all the time. Happened to me to btw

other than that. as this game establishes a direct ip connection, I found it useful to not have running any downloads/uploads in the background. It needs a steady and fine flow of packets. So better don't use icq, skype and stuff like this while playing.

true.. now I have an old lynsys router 54 mb etc that I've had for close to 12 years now... works just fine... would switching to mega monster router help? I do have a bunch of Netflix, Pandora, etc going as it is a busy house!

I can tell you, even with all these crashes, gentle and I still intend to beat each other silly anyway, game is so good!