Game freezing shortly after it starts.

[Garnier]

We've been trying to get a roughly 10-8 player game going for the last hour. We had some issues in the game room with people not seeing the oob and such and then crashing. We eventually figured that out (or rather had some players not join and it worked). However once we got in game, at about 25 seconds, the game stopped, as if it was paused. All players were in game, we all could chat with the X key and everyone could see the chat. So no one had crashed, we were all connected. No idea why it froze.

We had players leave one by one, and it never unfroze.

Edit:
Have tried again, it froze, then after a while a certain player left and it unfroze. So perhaps there's something going on with him that caused it, don't know yet.

[Criztian]

I think that it was me that froze that second time.

I ordered a regiment to move to the right side of my line, and pressed the "Take Command" button so they doesn't stop if they got fired on. And right there, boom, freeze.

The freeze up at the start of the game, was definitely not me though.

[Garnier]

Criztian the freeze we experienced was not the one I am referring to in this post. That was a different issue. Unfortunately we don't have a save.

[norb]

This is one of the major areas that I still must work on before the official patch release. The problem is that there is nothing consistent in the bugs. There is no 100% set of rules that will cause problems all the time. So it's just got to be more error handling, grasping at straws, hoping that I can recover from a bad situation.

[Garnier]

The good thing is we are eventually getting those big 8-12 player games going and when they work, they work well. Most of the problems are in getting them started. Keep it up.

[norb]

I really should have put the raknet logging in as an option for this release! I didn't think of it because I knew that I would not get to MP for the beta. It's next. Yes, it does seem that once it's on, then it's fine. We didn't have many connection problems during testing, so this is a new area for us. We even made it simpler, as the who ever runs the server is a proxy. So it's just the server connecting to everyone else. I had NAT in there at first, but it wasn't stable enough. The connection process is very simple as far as the calls to raknet that I make. So there isn't a lot for me to debug, but it's got to be something that I can do to handle the errors better. I probably should put in a couple of checks from the server to make sure everyone is there and handle it if they aren't. Rather than depending on raknet to tell me.

There is some MP logging that can be enabled, but it's really for out of syncs and gameplay and that part seems to be working well.

[Garnier]

We have been trying for the last 2 hours to get a game going. Most of the issues were people not seeing OOB and dropping from the room. Twice we got into game with about 8 players, then after 10-15 minutes the game paused and stayed paused for about 5 minutes, before we gave up and exited.

[norb]

I am adding the raknet logging to the next exe. If you want, you could enable the mplogging and I could take a look at it. I need to have the logs from as many players as possible though.

[Debug]
MPLog=1

This will create a sowgbran.log in your work folder. This is to check out of syncs. I don't think that's what this is because usually you would see an error message about that. But maybe there are other clues. Does this seem to be a patch issue? Have you gotten any good games going since the patch?

Thanks!

[RebBugler]

The crashes today were associated with folks messing with files...see Mantis. I've been keeping up with the games going on today, and once those folks were uninvited, no crashes have happened in MP since, that I've heard of.

[norb]

Thank you Reb. I thought that I handled that adequately in the code, guess not.