Multiplayer not working..

[Hullu Hevonen]

We where playing a big game of 7 players, Gameranger did not work, since players kept crashing and having other problems with the gameranger. 1-2 people got bluescreens with Tunngle, Hamachi works though. This took 1-2h getting everything to work, as always, some programs work for some some some not. This causes alot of unnecessary frustration and kills the game experience for all. More players = more lag as well, even though the game doesn't utilize much processing power or internet speeds. Maybe the engine has some loop issue or other since it can't handle many players.

There is also problems when playing with people from say North America and europe play with each other. This is basically the last option for me to play this game, since the AI is not a challenge and now Multiplayer games are as always full of frustration, I don't know if this is suppose to be like this by design or not. I really hope you improve the multiplayer experience since it's not simply workable. I'm sorry for taking up issues that has be discussed earlier, but this time we actually on a larger scale tested all the different options, like Hamachi or Tunngle.

This is such an great game with so much potential, but there are key critical features that don't work, if MP works and your customers can play against humans instead of AI because it's insufficient, thus by fixing much MP, you would lessen the importance of the AI issue for example because the AI would not mather as much since players stear carriers etc.

Hope you can take this critizism with an grain of salt and take the importance out of it

EDIT:
My specs
I7-930 oc to 3,4ghz
AMD HD 5850 graphics
my network speed

[ZEvans96]

+1 VERY laggy when trying to play multiplayer.

[GreenGoblin]

I can confirm that we put about 8.5 hours into testing this multiplayer and the best that could be achieved was one day taking 2 minutes. Needless to say, this was unplayable. I have fibre-optic internet and my latency is <100 ms to games in North America and Russia. We noticed that during the game the amount of upload/download traffic was very low and no-one's processor was running at more than about 30-40% usage.

Considering that multiplayer support for up to 16 players is advertised, this is unacceptable. One-one games between players are almost always fine, so this leads me to believe that the game at present is unable to support games between multiple players over the internet.

EDIT: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3507247460

[kettu]

We did a lot of testing, without weather system and merchant marine it works somewhat faster between 3 persons. Ping between 3 of us was under 40.
I have an AMD quad core, 8 GB Ram memory, radeon hd 6770
my internet speed



we also tested old game supreme ruler 2020 gold multiplayer. two of us it worked very good, with one more person it lags.
two persons in sr 1936 multiplayer works like 3 in 2020 multiplayer.

I got two friends to buy this game and there is no multiplayer except lan multiplayer.
and game is 27 € / 36,99€

I hope you will bring some improvements with speed, let game use more cpu power and our network.
and yep we all hope for that steam integration.

[zero007]

Yeah its pretty annoying to play this game online because time is advancing so slowly. Not to mention all the crashes experienced when we were playing. At the current state this game is totally unplayable online with more than 2 players.
Edit. CPU 4770, 16 gb ram, 770 gtx, 100 / 10 MB connection.

[Balthagor]

You folks have certainly done more testing than we've been able to do so far, however we did test it working both LAN and over Gameranger without the problems described above. We will look into it.
19795

[Hullu Hevonen]

The problem with gameranger is that bigger games where it has problems connecting everybody to everybody. When we where 3-4 players in gameranger it worked, but when we became 7 it started hoving problems with different players crashing when launching the game and we had to rehost. We also tried switching host so that all players tried to host with the same problems.

[mikeownage]

Have you tried just directly connecting to the hosts public IP, if they forward there ports correctly this would be the best way to try to play as it will have less overhead compared to hamachi and gameranger. I know hamachi does encryption which adds packet overhead and I assume game ranger does as well never used it or looked into it. Not to mention you have to go to their servers then to each other add additional overhead it's also important to consider that you aren't the only ones going through their network which could be under heavy load and if they have QoS running ping may not be a valid measurement of performance capability. Especially considering the default ping command only uses 32 bytes on windows and I forgot the default ping size in bytes on Linux.

[Hullu Hevonen]

Yes (in other words, it didn't work), the problem is that not all cheap routers don't always have good port forward support. You also have to keep in mind the fact that different people connect via different connection setups. In addition to that you have to take into consideration each players personal skills to do this and the other players amount of skills & patience in helping him overcome port-forward issues. Add to that you have to take into consideration different security setting and software that could hamper this that are installed on each players pc. This is only the things that I can come up of the top of my head when considering port forwarding. So this means that the more players you get the more possibility there is for something to not work and essentially F**k up the game for all the players involved. So getting the games to maybe connect requires a 3rd party software.

To illustrate this with an example, if I remember correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), Goblin had a VPN that he used to get past his schools campus firewalls, port blocking etc. I have an cheap EURODOCSIS 3.0 (a new one that would allow me to properly port forward would cost me atleast 1-1.5 months worth of food budget) router that is partly controlled by my ISP provider. So my question is, should students be discarded from playing a software product they bought? I have other mp games that I played in where players have had other problems as well. Both Goblin and I have very fast internet speeds as you can se above.

Shall we go into different factors affecting the game speed or problems each 3rd party software (hamachi, gr, tunngle etc) has?

In short, there are a thousand factors that can screw up a game with this Multiplayer settup that BG has implemented. We the customers and fans shouldn't be the ones telling BG in this detail how one part of their game does not work as designed (or was it designed not to work beyond LAN?)

[GreenGoblin]

An interesting thing to note is a lot of games seem to run properly with poor internet connections (which I don't have). For example the Paradox games (the old ones anyway) run at the same speed as single-player if the host has a good machine and the game simply pauses every time it becomes too desynchronized and waits for the other machines to catch up.

It seems to me that in SR it runs at the fastest speed at which everyone's machine can do the same calculations in parallel; and if for some reason someone does desynchronise then it crashes without warning after a couple of minutes.

I'm pretty sure that with the early Paradox games, only the host's machine would be doing the processing and the others would act simply as clients, whereas it seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that with SR everyone is connected to everyone and the whole thing bogs down as you add more players.

Don't get me wrong here, this is one of my favourite game franchises, but I think getting the multiplayer more competitive (competitive with rival games) would be really good from a marketing point of view. Actually, SR is much better suited to real time multiplayer that HOI for instance, because it plays so much more like a classic RTS game, rather than a real time computer-wargame. Obviously, Supreme Ruler is somewhat more complicated than Age of Empires or Command and Conquer, but back in the day people were playing these over dial-up connections at playable speeds with up to 16 players.

[mikeownage]

Yes (in other words, it didn't work), the problem is that not all cheap routers don't always have good port forward support. You also have to keep in mind the fact that different people connect via different connection setups. In addition to that you have to take into consideration each players personal skills to do this and the other players amount of skills & patience in helping him overcome port-forward issues. Add to that you have to take into consideration different security setting and software that could hamper this that are installed on each players pc. This is only the things that I can come up of the top of my head when considering port forwarding. So this means that the more players you get the more possibility there is for something to not work and essentially F**k up the game for all the players involved. So getting the games to maybe connect requires a 3rd party software.

To illustrate this with an example, if I remember correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), Goblin had a VPN that he used to get past his schools campus firewalls, port blocking etc. I have an cheap EURODOCSIS 3.0 (a new one that would allow me to properly port forward would cost me atleast 1-1.5 months worth of food budget) router that is partly controlled by my ISP provider. So my question is, should students be discarded from playing a software product they bought? I have other mp games that I played in where players have had other problems as well. Both Goblin and I have very fast internet speeds as you can se above.

Shall we go into different factors affecting the game speed or problems each 3rd party software (hamachi, gr, tunngle etc) has?

In short, there are a thousand factors that can screw up a game with this Multiplayer settup that BG has implemented. We the customers and fans shouldn't be the ones telling BG in this detail how one part of their game does not work as designed (or was it designed not to work beyond LAN?)

a few references
TCP = Transmission Control Protocol - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissi ... l_Protocol
UDP = User Datagram Protocol - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol
DirectPlay8 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectPlay

I am not saying don't report it or saying it does or doesn't work. I was just pointing out that using a third party service of which the game wasn't designed to be used with but instead the service either directly or indirectly supports the game doesn't mean the game will or should work perfectly in that scenario. The real potential issue is the game uses Microsoft DirectPlay8 which uses UDP for transport of data. Unless DirectPlay8 has some method of error detection and correction along with a way to re-transmit lost data of which I assume it doesn't due to the sync issues and crashing. UDP itself doesn't have the transmission assurance that TCP provides. If a packet is lost or corrupt TCP will detect this automatically and notify the sender that it needs to resend the packet however, UDP will not unless it is implemented at the application level. In case you are wondering why Microsoft would use UDP to transport the data in DirectPlay8 the game can be considered "Real Time" of which UDP is the networking standard for Real Time Communication as it has less overhead in both packet size and duration of processing on network equipment of which explains why DirectPlay8 uses it. I don't know if DirectPlay8 has this built in or of they expect the game developer to do it. In the case they expect the game developer to do it the developer must include in their application a method of detecting missing packets that have never arrived, packet that have arrived corrupted and a way to ensure they have arrived in order if that is important. If the application detects any of those issues it needs a method to correct this on the clients.

Update: Upon reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectPlay it seems DirectPlay8 can do the things required if requested

on a side note if you can't afford a new router with port forwarding but have an old PC laying around with atleast two NIC cards look into http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/fr ... ition.aspx

If you only have one you can pick up a second one on amazon for cheap Ethernet cards are extremely cheap these days then again so are routers . A NIC card will run about $12 and a cheap router around $20 + shipping not sure about European prices.

[Hullu Hevonen]

I never accused you of not allowing me to report any problems . I am aware of what TCP/UDP and other protocols are, my point is that they are not enough and are not the direct problem. You would still need some sort of third party software like steam (ideally) for example, since completely redeveloping the multiplayer is not reasonable, especially now when the series is coming to an end. The game cannot handle big games at playable framerates, which is where TCP etc comes in, I don't know if it is because of too much game checksum that causes the massive lagging (and thus strain on bandwidth) or too little checksum. When using 3rd party software there is different results in this aspect, GameRanger is generally faster, but crashes more easily than Tunngle or Hamachi, suggesting GameRanger does not have any data checksum or similar.

I do not know how the code looks in this regard and I don't pretend to either, but BattleGoat should make sure that they can deliver on their promises, that is 16 players MP games. This actually worked better in SR2020 if I don't remember wrong where we had a big game called something like the Great Powers MP or something. Although that wasn't painless either.

No extra pcs lying around, been considering getting my hands on an old PC, but my small apartment is already crowded enough. Plus you don't actually need to ethernet ports/networkcards to do that, you could just VLAN it via one port if you wanted to.

[Hullu Hevonen]

Ok, now I am depressed, trying to get this to work again and this is killing my spirit with this game. The game runs slow, requires 3rd party software, like hamachi. GameRanger runs the game outside of steam so, we get no game cards, no perks. The unit animations are slow, running the global crisis scenario is slow compared to running the same scenario in SR2020 engine (clockwise). The network issues are still the same, but the game runs slower. We tried direct IP with nogo and Hamachi with slow game speeds. It's unplayable. BG should change the definition of SRU being able to do Multiplayer to LAN or VLAN. Considering quitting this game :(.

[zero007]

MP gameplay it totally unplayable due to extreme bad game performance during mp game. Random crashes. Need to use 3 party softwares to connect and play mp. Direct ip only works if everyone has the possibility to access their routers and configure it correctly. This brings memories from 1990 and age of empires....

[GreenGoblin]

We need Steam support!