MP Courier Crashing

[Martin James]

Right. I'll do that too. We are planning another HITS game early next week so let's see what happens.

Martin

[Olszowy]

Hmmm, afte seeing the behavior last night during our three hour quest to figure out why we were freezing and CTD during MP courier games I now wonder if it is not the same thing you are suspecting with couriers. i have not seen a courier error though in a log file. We cleared out a bunch of errors with a 1.4 patch reninstall but after removing all mods and playing a stock version on Gburg we froze 7 of 10 times at 17 seconds. The logs files were all the same but no mention of any courier issues. I have been hesitant to install the beta patch until I was certain it was not a mod or file problem on a specific computer. Tonight is our MP night with 4-6 people so I should have some new results. I am very interested to see what effect of one reinstall in particular is going to have on stability. The whole log is posted in a thread in MP, but below is the only error I see in the log file, and we have not loaded the beta patch.

<SYSTEM> ODugan map loaded.
15:00:00 DDS mismatch with Lucius.
15:00:00 DDS mismatch, user dropped
15:00:00 Waiting for all soldiers to arrive on the battlefield...

[Jim]

We think that this has been fixed. Please get the latest beta patch and let us know how it works or not.

-Jim

[Martin James]

6 of us tried some MP games with courier yesterday. Most of these froze (4 out of 5). The longest went for about 80 minutes. It was our impression that on each occasion the freeze occurred just after someone had sent a courier to a human player. That could be coincidence of course, because lots of other stuff was going on, and in each game several couriers had tpically been sent before the freeze occurred.

We are all using patch 1.405, couriers at brigade-level, and custom difficulty.

We all have log files and will send them in. They are all very large - over 19 meg. Is that what you would expect? Will need to zip them I think. Who should we send them to please?

Martin

[A.S. Johnston]

I was with Martin and four other folks in that game yesterday and sent the file in, also. Hope it helps.

Where is the patch to be found please?

[edit: Never mind, think I found it in the thread about the patch. ]

[A.S. Johnston]

Well, another crash, the host this time, CoB4thTEXAS, but there was no apparent cause .. that is, we'd been using couriers like they were going out of style without issues, but it was about 50 minutes into the game. I'll send the log file and the others will I'm sure.

[CoB4thTEXAS]

Not sure what this means, just though i'd post it. i've seen this after almost every game freeze, not always the same player though.

[Leffe7]

I saw the same error once in a game back in january, here's the link.
We were still in-game and could look around, but the game was frozen. The error messages "waiting for courier message..." were appearing extremely fast, like 20 per second and between those was the one error line "waiting for gobbler". I have never seen this error message again, though.

[Saddletank]

Our groups experience is that couriers do seem pretty stable with the vanilla game, but using them with mods - we have tried the GCM mod specificlally - crashes the game almost with 100% certainty.

Now if Garnier could get together with Norbsoft and those two parties could discuss what the problem might be and fix it, that would be fantastic, but for now our group is continuing to use couriers without any mods enabled.

We played 4 games tonight, 2 were player teams vs the AI in the vanilla game and they ran fine; one was the same player team vs the AI using GCM, which crashed and the last was player vs player using vanilla, which ran fine.

We've had similar patterns the last few sessions, so its looking like we can see what the problem is...

[norb]

Yeah, I was worried that it might be mods and the fact is that we just cannot debug mods. We have too much on our plate already. The mod authors are going to have to figure out which part of their mods are causing the issues, by simple trial and removal. If the theory is correct, I would go with that assumption and start adding back 1 mod at a time to find out which is causing the issue.

The problem people are seeing is that the courier message is never arriving. No one gets it, though it has been sent, just like they are sent during the first hour of the gameplay. But at some time, they get lost.