MP Game Stability

[Olszowy]

This has been going on now since Pipe Creek maps came out. Having a great deal of difficulty getting custom scenario MP games to run using Pipe Creek maps. One of two things will happen. Game will start normally and freeze at 10 seconds in OR game will start and play normally then freeze an hour later. Does not matter which Pipe Creek map, does not matter the OOB, does not matter how many players, does not matter who hosts. We have it happen with two players or five, with large OOBs and small. It seems that the larger the scenario the more common the problem. We cut back artillery batteries within the CSA and reduced game detail quality and that seemed to help sometimes and other times not.
We tried with the new patch last night and had the game freeze about an hour and a half into it. The 10 sec freeze always reads the same draw error(usually one to dozens of the same error in the log file) and the freeze at hour and half had nothing in the log noticable. I know the draw error has been reported previously but cannot recall off the top of my head. We've been spending as much as an hour launching, re-launching scenarios to find one that will work and it is getting very tiresome. We are not using any bizzare mods and had the game crash using stock OOBs. Any suggestions? I will find the draw error as I know it was posted on the forums somewhere before.
We have successfully played Pipe Creek 2 with 4 Union corps players versus the entire ANV minus Cav and minus about half the CSA artillery. That game and similiar versions on Pipe Creek 2 always seem to go fine. Pipe Creek 1 maybe 50% freeze up either at start or an hour or so into the game. Pipe Creek 3 95% fail. We have only fought one fight to the finish and that was 4 Union corps versus the ANV minus cav and some artillery.

[RebBugler]

Try having the host set the new sprite ratio option to 10, see if that helps. All the Pipe Creek MP OOBs use a "whole heck of a lot of troops"...as us Rebs would put it

[norb]

Since the games are so long and there are so many troops, MP performance is based on bandwidth and the speed of the computers running the game. I do not know why there would be a draw error that happens 1.5 hours into the game. Is it on every computer? Posting the log may help, as the draw errors are always caused by something else, that's just where it finally dies.

[Olszowy]

Let me clarify, the draw errors only occur at the 10-12 second mark. The freezes at an hour or so usually have no error. At least not on my machine. We play only every Thursday so I will make a point tonight of capturing any errors.

[Olszowy]

okay, more MP game crashes. We played Antietam successfully with a combined OOB of about 80,000 last week and Gburg the week before, no issues. Last night was horrible. We had five players, same people who played previously. Crampton's Gap map crashed at 6 seconds and one player got a flashing rand synch error on his screen. Started again on Antietam, game froze at 12 seconds, started again, game went about 24 minutes and froze, no noticable errors. Started again, same player got rand synch error message. Tried again after lower settings, game froze at 17 seconds. Had everyone reboot, player that was getting rand synch errors also rebooted his DSL box and never came back due to issues. So we thought woohoo, found the problem. Started new game with just four of us on Antietam, game ran 28 minutes and froze. We went to a stock MP game from Gburg and it froze about 30 minutes in as well. It appeared from log files on everyones computer that the host got disconnected. The only oddball thing I saw in log file was DDS mismatch listed once at the start of the loading process. No errors listed at time of each crash. I think next time we are going to swap out the hosting machine as I have suspicions it is something there.

[Blaugrana]

This is interesting.

Four of us tried to play last night. 3 of us got going on a 3-player divisional game on the East Cavalry Field. It seemed to be running very smoothly on the host's 10 meg connection for 10 or 15 minutes, when it froze. We were then unable to get another game to run all night.

We tried every combination of players we could think of, and 3 of us took turns to host, but without success. The games loaded, but then either immediately froze, or did so after a few seconds. We eventually gave up after about 3 hours.

We tried using Hamachi and without Hamachi.

2 of the players have succesfully played in the past but couldn't last night. The other two players were new to hosting / MP.

Any ideas??

Should we have saved logs? Can you remind me how to do this?

[Blaugrana]

As I have so far been unable to host an MP battle, am wondering if my game is in some way corrupted.

I have 1.4 plus Antietam.

I know detailed advice about reinstalling has been given previously but my searches are not finding it. Could someone point me at any 101 guides to re-installing the game, so I can consider that route?

MTIA,

[NY Cavalry]

Blaugrana,

Look for me on Ts and I can try to help you further. I will not be on until maybe Sat night or Sunday, if this helps. If you have done all the proper port forwarding work and your port is open maybe we can narrow it down. I am no expert but we can see. When I did mine(I am not expert) it took me a few days of trial and error to get it right. You have to be sure to get into your router and properly set up to know what to do with the open port.

[Blaugrana]

Hi NY Cav,

Thanks very much for the offer - I'll drop by later today or tomorrow and see if you're there. That would be very kind.

[norb]

We have had a few very odd reports of a corrupted patch. So we reuploaded the patch. You could try downloading and just install right over your current game if you feel that something is acting odd.