MP Courier Crashing

[Marching Thru Georgia]

I have been playing a bit with the Brits, and can confirm that freezes do occur, especially when both sides are handled by humans. Co-op play against the AI is nearly freeze-free. That in itself is an interesting distinction. However, Norb may have hit on the problem. The NSD team uses Skype and everyone else uses Teamspeak. Different internet resources are undoubtedly being used. This may be a line of inquiry worth pursuing.

[Saddletank]

I apologise for my outburst. It is... just very frustrating.

How about this? We have found player vs AI with HITS & couriers to be pretty stable. These games hardly ever crash. Remember this still involves players sending couriers to each other.

But make it player vs player and the crashing starts, P v P courier game crashing is at endemic levels recently but P vs AI is not, despite them both using HITS & couriers.

So what might be an explanation of that?

EDIT: Hm, same time MTG! But good point about Skype, our group should explore that.

[NY Cavalry]

Digby (Saddletank),

I am not a representative of the company and have absolutely no official standing with them. I have though played MP almost as long as this game has been out. There were some quirks in the beginning, but the team did keep at it and have greatly stabilized MP play. It did take a little time though. I never have crashes anymore except very rarely. More crashes are prone with the Antietam map for which I assume it is something with its size and detail, but even that map has a high rate of game completion. The only scenario for Antietam that can be played on MP doesn't work (I think because of its size), but I hope soon they will release some more Antietam scenarios for MP play. Those are my only complaints and they really are not complaints at all, I am satisfied. It is a good simulation and good support.

I don't know of any other company out there giving the support that they do for a civil war market. I do know how frustrating MP failures can be, but I am sure they will get it sorted out.

If I ever have time again I'd like to play some HITS games with you guys and I know I am a stable host and maybe we could get some trouble shooting in.

[Little Powell]

Digby (Saddletank) but I hope soon they will release some more Antietam scenarios for MP play.

You know us; if you ask, there's a good chance you shall receive.

We are going to release an Antietam patch at some point (just need to figure out the best way to roll it out) and I'll make sure we include a few smaller MP scenarios for it.

Saddletank - Let me know the time and place and I'll join a game with you guys.

P.S. - I think Chamberlain's suggestion a few posts above is a great one and you guys should definitely try it out.

[KG_Soldier]

Well. . . our GCM games have been pretty much crash free for some time now. Sometimes individual players drop from games, but rarely do said drops crash the game (someone takes army command every game and we just play on when someone drops.)

(A little off-topic, but I'd like to thank NSD for getting rid of the opponent's info in the stars screen, much better game-play without all the excess intelligence).

We use Teamspeak all the time, so I find it pretty hard to believe the courier game crashes/freezes are caused by Teamspeak.

Some players can't use the GCM terrain mod or the GCM toolbar mod for some reason or another, but they caused these players to crash before they we able to join the game, so they were easily identified.

We've had perhaps 2 game freezes in the last couple of months. If you compare this to a year ago when 75% of the games we played ended in freezes, NSD's efforts to solve the MP problems are impressive and much appreciated.

@ the hits and couriers players, we struggled for a very long time before the problems were found and fixed by Norb and the NSD team, literally thousands of game freezes. But we persevered and tried to stay as patient as possible. Have faith, Norb and the NSD team will eventually work it out.

[Blaugrana]

Try 1 player vs. 1 player for an evening and see how it goes and see if anyone is having a problem. Chamberlain

Thanks, Chamberlain, and all, for your positive suggestions.

I agree with the idea of testing in steps, Chamberlain, and we are trying to identify what causes problems and what doesn't. On the specific point of starting with 1 vs 1 games, however, I'm not so sure. I'm fairly certain, from the games I've played in and heard about, that it is the courier message window that is the trigger for freezes, rather than the couriers sent by the game when set at 'Brigade and above' and a player uses point and click.

I think (in my experience when playing MP HITS & Couriers) players use point and click to order regiments around, and use the 'Send courier message' mainly to send messages to other players. Therefore, 1 vs 1 games would not use many 'Send courier message' couriers at all.

We will keep testing, and we will try and get you ALL the MP logs for at least one frozen game. One of us will normally ask everyone to do so, but ...

[Blaugrana]

Well. . . our GCM games have been pretty much crash free for some time now.
We use Teamspeak all the time, so I find it pretty hard to believe the courier game crashes/freezes are caused by Teamspeak.
We've had perhaps 2 game freezes in the last couple of months.
@ the hits and couriers players, we struggled for a very long time before the problems were found and fixed by Norb and the NSD team, literally thousands of game freezes. But we persevered and tried to stay as patient as possible. Have faith, Norb and the NSD team will eventually work it out.

Thanks for this, KG_Soldier. It's this stability of GCM that I have always thought suggested there's something different about how we're playing and the only thing we can identify is the use of couriers.

I wasn't aware of the problems in the past with GCM stability - again, very good to know. I hope we'll keep playing HITS & Couriers games and reporting problems to the team as they arise. It is frustrating when games freeze but it is fun while it lasts.

[NY Cavalry]

Well, Soldier said it much better than I did.

[Saddletank]

Once again I do apologise for my lack of patience and my frustration.

Good points about the GCM group - games of 14/16/18/20 players regularly and Teamspeak in use - few crashes.
All 3 of the courier groups - games of 4/5/6 players and Teamspeak in use - endless crashes.
I don't know if members of the other courier groups have played GCM but most of the people in ours have - again with few crashes.

The 1 on 1 test possibly won't throw up the players with the... uh... 'variable quality connections' because a 1 v 1 game isn't putting as much load on an internet connection as a 3 v 3 game, I wouldn't have thought.

One interesting thing I saw last night while using the 'N' key to bring up the Command Map. I double clicked on it to send a brigade somewhere and got a momentary pause of about a second. And of course TWO couriers galloped off. I double clicked because the double click command is used to send units everywhere in th ebattlespace. However on th eminimaps its a single click. I was wondering, just so it could be consistent, how about making all 'go here' commands a double click, no matter which interface you're using. I guess the game was momentarily strugling to fire off both those identical couriers within about 1/50th of a second, so altering that process could help, at least a little.

Norb - asking a lot I know, but when our group sends in the logs and you see player X had a lost packet and the game ended, could you please feed back to us which player that was? If we can do anything to help that person's game run better its good to know he needs the assistance. ISPs can be contacted and lines checked, RAM is cheap, we can look at that players AV and other settings, etc, etc, etc. Anything to help those with the lost connections.

Just saying "We got your logs and the crash is down to a player connection" isn't helping us very much. If you can say who it is we'd be grateful.

Is there any more debug code we can put in the ini files to help US see who is crashing?

Thanks.

[Martin James]

[quote]Norb - asking a lot I know, but when our group sends in the logs and you see player X had a lost packet and the game ended, could you please feed back to us which player that was? If we can do anything to help that person's game run better its good to know he needs the assistance. ISPs can be contacted and lines checked, RAM is cheap, we can look at that players AV and other settings, etc, etc, etc. Anything to help those with the lost connections.[quote]

Just to confirm that Norb has done this for Tuesday's game, and I have just circulated that to our MP group.

Martin