We released the first game with 3.705, this was the last version before RakNet drastically changed the internals of the library. There have been a lot of releases since then and we've tested them all. We now can get 9 people in the game during our testing, as we've gotten some new testers and they've been doing what's expected (showing up for the mp tests
.Our results are in, with the newer versions the connections work great. This was a problem with the older versions. With the newer version when we start a server from the lobby, everyone gets in every time. With the old version that was a problem. Also with the old version, some people would not get the scenario or the officer list. They would be looking at a blank screen many times. But the old version was solid once the game launched. It was just getting the game started that was the issue.
With the new version it's the opposite. The connection works great, the scenario comes across and everyone gets in with the proper information, but they drop, randomly from the game. There is no reason for this and it's nothing that we can find in the logs.
For this reason, we are going back to the older version. We can work on and try to fix the connection issues. That can be done in the code with a little redundancy, the same that we do in the game and the same reason the game runs well. We cannot fix the issues with the new version and people dropping, we have no control over that. That's deep in raknet.
We've really done our research, running different versions the same night with the same parameters and scenarios. We're pretty confident of our results. So now we just have to test and fix the connection issues and we'll be good to go. Sounds easy, but it's still a lot we have to do.