MP Courier Crashing

[Blaugrana]

I've just, with Saddletank's help, counted up recent games played by Kriegsspiel group people.

Of 8 recent Players vs Players vanilla MP games, 3 have been played to completion, 5 have frozen.

I have not counted:
a few games that came to a natural conclusion before the hour mark
several games in which mods have been used - these are even more likely to freeze
players vs AI games - these are much less likely to freeze

We will continue to gather data on this and pass it on to the team.

[Monty]

I'll point out that our group (which includes Leffe and Gobbler) only play with a mod that introduces a textured minimap and (rarely) a few custom OoBs. Since Antietam came out we've been using the DRF mod that came with it.

[Little Powell]

Just a little update, we will be doing some more testing on this tomorrow evening. If the problem is indeed with couriers, Norb has put in code to request the courier again if it gets hung-up.

[norb]

Also keep a look out for other factors such as memory. If it keeps dying around the same time, it could be just running out of resources on one of the boxes. Mods may be just an additional resource issue that make them end sooner.

[Blaugrana]

Also keep a look out for other factors such as memory. If it keeps dying around the same time, it could be just running out of resources on one of the boxes. Mods may be just an additional resource issue that make them end sooner.

Thanks Norb. Freezes do seem to happen as things start hotting up. How would players be able to see if lack of memory is a problem on our PCs?

[norb]

Not sure of the absolute best way, but you could right click on the taskbar and go into task manager. There's a processes tab in there and you can see how much memory each process is using. SOWGB is going to max out at 1.7-1.9 Gbs and that is VERY high. But with adding lots of mods, etc. it increases the memory image. We make sure all of our stuff runs, but when you add mods on top of it, there are probably some situations that could cause issues. I'm not saying this is the problem, it's just one more thing to check.

We are working hard here also and since there is no smoking gun, we are just trying to add some redundancy and not muck anything up.

[Blaugrana]

Thanks again, Norb.

Thinking more about this, I have seen complete freezes, where a game sucks up all a machine's memory - in the Star Wars game we bought for my son this Xmas. This freezes all the time and you have to go into Task Manager and try and get back out.

Our MP freezes are nothing like this. On my machine, and (I'm 99.9% certain) on everyone else's,the freezes we suffer mean no units move, no commands can be given, but we can still use our PCs, TS is still working and the battle sounds continue. It's a game freeze, not a PC freeze.

So, if the possible memory problems you were referring to were like those on SWBFII, no we're not getting these on SoW.

HTH

[Martin James]

Our MP freezes are nothing like this. On my machine, and (I'm 99.9% certain) on everyone else's,the freezes we suffer mean no units move, no commands can be given, but we can still use our PCs, TS is still working and the battle sounds continue. It's a game freeze, not a PC freeze.

I play with Blaugrana and can confirm this is the same for me and (I think) everyone else in our group. We also find that all of the red & blue stars remain on screen. In my case at least, I can still swivel the camera too.

We occasionally find that a game will temporarily stop for an instant, and then resume. When a game freezes, it is just the same effect, only permanent.

Hope that helps.

Martin

[norb]

Thanks, all the logs I've seen lately are packets that just are not arriving for what ever reason. The low level network code I use should not allow this, but it's happening somehow. We just played over an hour, 6 of us, using brig couriers and it ran great. We did what ever we could to mess it up, but it ran solid. Maybe we just didn't play long enough or maybe some redundancy that I've recently put in is working. Look for another beta patch this week. We'll keep trying until we figure it out.

[Saddletank]

Thanks, all the logs I've seen lately are packets that just are not arriving for what ever reason.

I'm not following you I don't think. Are you saying these are packets from one or more players that halt the game? That is, it's a simple internet connection fault?

If so, why do I see so many more of these freezes when couriers and HITS are the settings than when they are not?

When you guys test, is it over a LAN or the internet? Would one or more of you be willing to join our games to hopefully see what we are seeing?

There was an incident last night of a 2 vs 2 HITS & Couriers game where, quite early on, BOTH sides could see, in the 'dispatches sent' folder, the messages of the other team. The game ran over an hour and was concluded without a freeze or crash but seeing the other sides messages (they were not flagged as intercepted) is surely not intentional or desirable?