Scourge of War Boards

Ah ok, thanks Monty. It'll be fixed as soon as possible.

Yes, we've got them and Dave is going to try and recreate the issues during the MP tests. Thanks Monty, your help is always appreciated.

Guys,

We tested this extensively last night, and Norb is still looking into possible causes. Unfortunately we were unable to re-create the issue. We played an MP game on historical difficulty, which uses couriers for orders division and above. We were sending couriers all over the place, several at a time, manual orders, free text, etc... Not a single crash.

I'm just trying to narrow it down here. What is the exact setup you guys have used when it crashes? Difficulty level? Type of battle? OOB? Number of players? As many details as you can provide.

We use a custom difficulty with distance from general set to something like 50 units (correct me if I'm wrong Gobbler), courier use set to "side". We tend to use a vanilla OoB with each of us commanding a division (a typical game is 4-5 players).

I think the following may increase the chances of the bug occurring:

*4 or more players
*The number of units in the battle
*More than an hour into the game/ shortly after first contact with the enemy
*Sending a courier to someone at the same time as he has just sent you one (highly speculative, I think this has only definitely happened once)

A typical game would be a hunt them down with us all playing on the same side. After about an hour of marching we would encounter the enemy sparking off a flurry of couriers between us, at which point the bug could occur. If not, the battle could last for another hour before the bug occurs, if at all.

^^ Why hello there Monty

Mods we ran for Antietam are the two map/flags mods that come with Antietam.

Difficulty settings are custom with the following:

Bare Map
100 max camera distance
Side level for courier orders (although I think Monty orders his AI brigades via courier, the rest of us usually won't)
Medium uniform quality
Sprite ratio varies, usually 0.
Best quality map objects
Realism off

Type of battles are 99% hunt 'em down or line of sight. We use the vanilla OOBs, primarily Antietam (happens with and without DRF) but often the GBurg Brig OOBs as well. Doesn't seem to change the frequency of crashing.

Typically we'll be playing with a minimum of 3-7 players, usually Corps sized with a division per player. On hunt 'em down it usually seems to crash after an hour of marching just when we've seen or engaged the enemy. I'm not sure if this is related to enemy contact or to the flurry of courier messages/orders sent as a result. We have had corps sized games that've lasted 1-2 hours into contact with heavy fighting before crashing after someone sent a courier. It does seem that battles will last longer with 3 players (but they'll still tend to crash), even at corps level, but I'm not sure if this is load or just infrequency of couriers. Our couriers are always free text between players and it seems those are the ones that set the crashes off, we'll ask after a crash if anyone just sent a courier and someone will always pipe up with 'ye I sent one to X'.

We'll also do divisional level line of sight battles which tend to last alot longer than the corps level (to the point of finishing them after an hour or two) but we've still had crashes in them, I think there's a divisional level log in there somewhere and I think it was a hunt 'em down.

The only other constant is that I tend to host but if I remember right, the one time Leffe hosted that crashed as well. And I've been hosting without us using couriers and it's been rock solid.

If you need anything else just yell.

In addition to monty and gobbler:
We often play with uniform settings on highest.
I hosted several more games than one and they pretty always crashed when using couriers. Just hosted a 4h game with 4 players without any problem when not using couriers.

Some more ideas what might increase chance of crashing:
Composing a courier message when a courier message arrives.
Reading a message when a courier arrives.
Looking at the OOB when a courier arrives.
Many players compose a message at the same time (As said, it seems only to happen when the fighting begins).

Thanks for the info guys. We basically did everything you guys listed above last night, played for over an hour, 7 players, couriers being written, sent, received like crazy..

Like I said, Norb is still studying the logs so hopefully he can find something.

I can always examine more logs. I've looked at the ones sent and for example in one, no one gets BeefStu packets after a while. He still runs fine and gets other packets (though they might be older ones), but no one gets his and he sends them multiple times. So it seems that his internet connection got messed up somewhere during gameplay. Everyone else just sits and waits for him. I can see nothing in there about the couriers affecting this. It appears to be just a lost connection.

It would be good to get a set with a crash. The ones I have are older.

Thanks.

Our kriegsspiel group hasa been experiencing frequent game freezes in MP HITS courier games since 1.4, so Gobbler & Co are not alone.

We were intially not sure whether it might be due to connection problems, but over the last few days we think we have ruled that out as a cause.

At them moment we have scaled back our planned MP activity, and all we are doing is occasional tests.

We have been using custom difficulty on advice from con20or.

Appreciate you need more stuff to work on to identify the problem. Happy to send you a log file next time it happens, but not sure how to produce one. Is this just a save game file?

Martin

Did you ever try the reinstall Martin?