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I maybe wrong here, but someone from Norbsoft will not be able to do anymore for you than the people you have already been getting help from.
Thats is the craziest thing ive ever heard. The developers will not be able to help me more than players I talked to in the lobby?
The reason why I asked them to meet me, is that Norb has asked me a few times what error message the person I was trying to connect with was getting. If they know that, then may be able to talk me through fixing the problem.
Thanks for the guide though NY Cavalry, I think it is abit over my head. I think Ill just avoid hosting!
Last edited by con20or on Thu Jun 17, 2010 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
When you connect to an MP game, there is text written to the screen and into the log file. I am pretty familiar with the messages and I do not think that any read:
No
When debugging issues, it is very important to be exact. We do have 3 sources of information for mp games that we can look at if the problem is in game. We have yet to find an issue with the game itself, it always ends up being a setting on the users computer. The reason is that we do not do anything fancy. We just create a listen socket on the server machine and then the players connect. It's all very standard. We use RakNet for our networking software. Again, pretty standard stuff. The mapport command is supposed to create the mapped port for you on your router, if your router supports it. It does work on mine and I know of a few others. I do not have any idea how it could cause issues, because this is all pretty standard code. If the router supported it, the mapport command was supposed to allow anyone to host without any router knowledge, but not all routers support it.
In one of the recent patches, we upgraded the version of RakNet that we were using. That is the only change that we have made to the networking code. So if some people were able to host before and cannot now, that is what it must be. I would be interested in knowing how many people can host/connect with the unpatched game, but can no longer. It would be also good to know if there are any that can now host that could not before.
Our team has played MP a ton and we have not had any unsolvable issues. Some of us have had to disable the firewall while playing. I always have mine disabled when I'm using my computer at home because my router is the firewall and I consider it redundant to also have it running on my computer when it's behind my router.
If enough people feel that MP has gotten worse since the patches, I can revert back to the old version of RakNet. It has made no difference for us. We noticed a slight increase in performance, but that's about it.
It is a good thing to test unpatched vs. patched, as that would help us solve any issues. There are also two commands that be put in the ini file that will print out packets and more mp debug information. But as no connection can be made, they won't help a lot. All that can be done with bad connections is write the exact text on the screen that you see and also any entries in the log file. It is important to be exact and it is important to get both sides, client and server.
'Computer syas no' is a line from a long running comedy show over here, I thought you might have heard it before.
As for what the error message was that the person trying to connect to me actually was, I dont know. The lobby isnt the best place to carry out testing, especially when busy. I was very lucky to have found someone like talon who would take an hour+ out to help me.
If enough people feel that MP has gotten worse since the patches, I can revert back to the old version of RakNet. It has made no difference for us. We noticed a slight increase in performance, but that's about it.
I'm not sure which changes caused this, but from my experience the problems with players not seeing the OOB in a sandbox setup have disappeared since the last patch. This is a HUGE benefit to MP -- it's been much, much easier to get games to actually start.
I saw that there is a newer release and I'm going to download it for the next patch. I think that there were a few issues with the release of raknet that I put in the build. So hopefully (fingers crossed) this newer build will fix any of the new bugs.
I've obviously upset you and I apologise, I do appreciate your help.
I stick by my opinion however, hovering around the lobby trying to persuade people to join your game, and help you test it for an hour plus is a non runner. Talon was one in a million.
It is also difficult to document the error messages that the person trying to join you is getting. The lobby text feature isnt great, you cant even type full sentences without having to hit carriage return. I hoped to avoid this by getting one of the developers to try and connect with me.
I will look through the guide you linked me too, but having gone through two 'guides' that were linked on portforward in the 'how to play multiplayer' section, im not overly hopeful.
But like i said previously, i think ill just give up for the time being on hosting.
you can test the game yourself at home. Just run two windowed instances on your computer. It may run slow, but it might show you what's going on. Make sure to connect to the internet IP though, don't run it as a lan game.
You have to get the logs of the client trying to connect, that's the one that might give a clue as to why you are having these issues. I see that a handful of people have the same issues. Most have no problems. But we'll upgrade the network code, if you can get logs or error messages we'll look through them. We'll also take a look and see if everyone on the team can host. And if they can't we'll try to figure out why.
I'm also going to change the mapport option to a button rather than the automatic way it is now. So that you can hit the button and try to map your port.
