Multiplayer games stopping/pausing

[Garnier]

This has been going on for as long as I've been back.

Frequently, in multiplayer games, the game clock will stop. Sometimes this happens and it starts again after any length of time, up to maybe 5 minutes, because we generally quit after waiting 5 minutes.

But maybe once every three games we have one of these were it just never starts again and we end up quitting it. It can happen at any point during the game, we've had it happen after a few minutes, and a few times after 45 minutes.

In case you want a save, here is one from today. Of course if I load this savegame it will run fine. I took this save during one of the pauses where we ended up quitting a few minutes later.

When it pauses we all type a message in chat to be sure no one is alt-tabbed from fullscreen mode. I'm not aware of any other known reason for the game to pause in multiplayer.

[norb]

So you can chat, that's interesting. But the clock is stopped. Might be time for some mp logs.

[Garnier]

Yes we can chat, move the camera around, click on things, give orders (though you don't see any effect from your orders). It behaves the same as when a player in fullscreen mode alt-tabs.

Another symptom is that the host is unable to end battle, when he clicks to end battle and it says "are you sure?" clicking on the yes button does nothing, but then after a while the host's game crashes. I believe other players are able to click end battle as normal.

This has happened with various hosts, not always the same one.

[KG_Soldier]

We had a good run the last few weeks. Most games finished fine. But this weekend, the "freeze" set in on about half the games we played.

[norb]

Just off the top of my head, the only thing that could cause this is if someone was not responding. One of the machines didn't give it's updates. The MP logs from all the machines would show exactly what is happening.

[Garnier]

Despite that all players are able to type messages.

The MP logs are disabled by default as I recall, how do you enable them? Will be difficult to get everyone to enable them and send them in, but we can try.

[Little Powell]

Despite that all players are able to type messages.

The MP logs are disabled by default as I recall, how do you enable them? Will be difficult to get everyone to enable them and send them in, but we can try.

[Debug]
MPLog=1

Look for the MP log file in the Work folder after a game. They can get huge especially after a long game, so zipping them/emailing them may be an issue. Hopefully you guys can catch the bug at the beginning of a game.

[Jim]

Typically, how many people do you have involved in the battles that freeze up?

-Jim

[Garnier]

It's happened with 6, and anything up to 13 which is the max we've had in the past few weeks. I don't recall it happening with less than 6.

And yes those log files are huge, after 15 minutes, just hosting a game with myself, mine grew to 500MB.

[McHugh]

As I am thinking of purchasing the full version after playing the demo, I assume that the mp files refer to multiplayer files. You mention 500 MB. Do these files only appear on the host player's pc? Sounds like the host player better have a large hard drive. Does the host player have to manually delete these files after each game? Multiplayer is a big issue for me, in fact, I wish SOW could be played PBEM. Thanks.