A Petition from the MP Community

[norb]

MP will be made moddable to some degree in the feature patch. We discussed a lot of ideas tonight and we're sure that we can get some in. My goal is for the server to "serv" gameplay affecting files, while allowing the players to use custom sounds/toolbars without affecting nor requiring the other players. I believe that we can get this done with a little work. So we've heard you and will make it happen.

[General P R Cleburne]

3 Cheers for the cause!
Communication of this kind is invaluable to the community as a whole.the fighting men salute you sirs!
YOS
Cleburne

[General P R Cleburne]

Honorable Members of the NSD team and support network.
First i salute you for your effort and work in creating the multiplayer aspect of this fine battlefiled simulator.It is by far, way ahead of other simulators in many ways already....but may i suggest a simple step you could take to push this software further?
I understand that bringing multiplayer to this software was the major change in this title in the series.To me that is the main change.We already have a rather small but very active community that partake in multiplayer battles on a daily basis.The potential for growth at the moment is huge.What Garnier has done for multiplayer here is akin to what many of the community have been looking for in this particular kind of simulation for a long time....In fact the majority of multiplayer battles(possibly 90-95%+) take place using Garniers ideas for a balanced and moderated progressive campaign system.Without a doubt sirs right now your community is growing very fast due to this work,and alot of new players return to multiplayer now after having left before(due to inactive lobby and no communication with other players/times/availablity)simply because now they have found the part of the multiplayer community that works and is fun.IF we do not latch onto this now and absorb all these players into the community we might lose them for good.Time is very important to us and the lack thereof when it comes to multiplayer communities.Right now i think it is a good time for this community and some great changes are taking place.
Perhaps gentlemen if i may point out to you this is after all, a community that you enabled us to create with your excellent piece of software and great support network around it.In pointing this out maybe i am not too forward in asking you if it might be possible that from time to time members of the team could actually come in to the multiplayer community and join us and see exactly for themselves the things of which we often try to come here to speak of.
Gentlemen i thank you for your time and hope that your excellent work continues.
YOS
Cleburne

[Little Powell]

General P R Cleburne - I'll be happy to join in for a Q&A session. I'm not sure how helpful I'll be, but I'll do my best.

The best night for me would be this Saturday night. I can join in on teamspeak. Just name your time, as long as it's after 7:30 ET.

[KG_Soldier]

I'm more interested in having you ask a question: "How did I lose so many men?"

[General P R Cleburne]

Thanks for your response Little Powell sir.We will look forward to meeting you on saturday.I would suggest anytime after 7.30pm on saturday there will be quite a few Generals in the teamspeak server meeting to fight battles and chat, so this time frame looks good.Thanks again for your interest in this matter.
YOS
Cleburne

And of course it would be great if you brought some fighting troops along with you and maybe helped us hold the line once or twice!.

[SouthernSteel]

The thing that was actually requested is to have one/some of the development team actually come in and play a game with us, if you would be willing to spare a bit of time. We have, as of late, not successfully run one of our usual 90-minute games through to its conclusion. I believe that one or two of our group may have sent in save game files from one of last night's games.

When playing with 12+ players, at least as far as I have observed, we have only made it 15-20 minutes into the game, and then it freezes and that's all she wrote. This has gone on for at least 3-4 days now (I don't recall over the weekend). What usually seems to bring on the freeze is the first real spike in infantry exchanging volleys (or what equates to that). Once, say, two brigades on either side get into a firefight, we get the big freeze and eventually all have to leave, and this has pretty well shut down some big games we would otherwise play in the evenings.

Still, aside from being able to have a look at technical problems we experience from time to time, we'd be glad to have any of you stop by to at least observe and see how great the game can be in large MP games.

[norb]

What has changed? Your comment reads like this is something that worked recently and our last patch is old at this point. So something else must have changed, since the released game has not.

[Garnier]

The problems being reported lately don't appear any different than what we've been having all along (as in, before and since the last patch). The patches have fixed a lot of the problems. This freeze and some of the inconsistencies we get in the multiplayer setup page are the only stability issues we've had in a long time.

Perhaps we should observe and document the problems we have in the multiplayer setup page better.

There has been a lot of activity in the last few days and it could just be coincidence that there were more large (12-14 player) games in the past few days, and that all of these froze. It's not an actual freeze of the computers of course, everyone is still there and able to move around the camera in game. This is one of them that froze, the scenario and gamedb are there if they're of any interest.

It sounds like the freezing has in some occasions occured shortly after the shooting started in battle, but not exactly when the first shooting occured. This could easily be coincidence I think, because we've also had the freeze with the same symptoms late in a battle, even an hour or more into it. It could also be some people's slow computers doing something weird that triggers a pause of some kind.

I'm going to try to get everyone to disable fullscreen, since having fullscreen on is normally the only way a player can cause a multiplayer game to pause, and being alt tabbed from fullscreen mode does pause it with the exact same symptoms as this freeze. If we all had fullscreen mode off, we'd know it wasn't this effect being triggered by something thinking the game was alt tabbed.