Frustrating Multiplayer Problems

[Cannash]

I've been trying to play a multiplayer game with some friends in another state, but we've been having some pretty frustrating issues. They include:
- Whenever two people try to change their settings (Empire Name, Color, or Species) at the same time, their client crashes (stops responding and goes white).
- People randomly disconnect from the game, causing the server to shutdown. (Our skype call remains intact, so our internet connections are fine).
- When we happen to actually get a game to work, it takes forever for the next turn to download on all the clients. (The person hosting the server is instant).

I haven't had these problems when playing with someone on the same LAN, but I would really like to play with my distant friends. Any solutions? I can try to get bug reports or crash reports from everyone if they are necessary.

We are playing with v0.4.3 (6281). Should we try to use the latest Test Build, instead?

Our OS's:
- Win7 32-bit
- Win7 32-bit
- WinVista 32-bit
- Win8 32-bit
- Win7 32-bit

Thanks!

[Geoff the Medio]

Unfortunately, there hasn't been a lot of testing of multiplayer games, particularly with more than two players, or work done to make it a stable and good experience. This is probably the first report I've seen of attempts to play a game of that size. I'm not surprised there are serious issues between remote systems using

There are some plans to change how updates are sent between the server and players that would hopefully speed the download of turn updates, but that likely won't help much with random disconnects. There could probably be a lot done to make things more fault-tolerant and to support dis- and re-connection of players to game, but it hasn't really been a development priority, in part due to the general lack of interest in such games.

Comparisons with the stability of Skype are a bit like comparing a pogo stick to a modern jetliner as means of air transportation... The development time, support architecture, and results are drastically different in scope.

[Cannash]

Okay, should I try to get crash reports from everyone? Also, I want to thank you for this awesome game. My friends and I really enjoy playing, even though we are limited to singleplayer and LAN.

[Dilvish]

I agree with Geoff that the tentatively-planned shift to 'diff' updates should significantly speed up the turn update process at in advanced games.

As for disconnections, let's go ahead and have a little discussion on how we might improve the situation, even if we don't have anyone ready to take it on as a coding project just yet. Right now it seems the server simply shuts down the current game immediately upon detecting any client disconnect (though I haven't yet looked into what it does to track that). I've just taken a quick look through the server networking code & don't really have a full picture of it, but here's a rough sketch of what I'd propose:

a) the server networking info keep track of ip addresses for established players
b) upon detecting a disconnect, rather than immediately shut down the game the server would
(i) begin checking for a reconnection from the dropped player
(ii) automatically and immediately save the current status of the in-progress game without waiting for any new info from clients
(iii) send out a message to all clients informing them of the disconnect so that the respective UIs could inform players of the snag/delay
(iv) accepting a replacement connection for the dropped player could be based entirely on IP addr match, or possibly also or instead players local
option info could include a password (which the server would have recorded for established players) that must be matched for a reconnect
(v) while waiting for reconnection, rather than timing out after a fixed period of time the host client could have a dialog that gives the
host the ability to end the game or cause an AI client to be launched as a replacement for the dropped player

[Geoff the Medio]

Okay, should I try to get crash reports from everyone?

If you can identify a reproducible crash, such as with the game setup UI, and can give specific steps to cause it, do please describe it. Reports with little more detail than that a game crashed when trying to play multiplayer over the internet probably won't help.

[Cannash]

Well, we've been able to eliminate most of the problems by using LogMeIn Hamachi to set up a virtual network and hosting the server over it. There hasn't been any random disconnects or long waits between turns.

If you can identify a reproducible crash, such as with the game setup UI, and can give specific steps to cause it, do please describe it. Reports with little more detail than that a game crashed when trying to play multiplayer over the internet probably won't help.

Here is a bug that we can reproduce most of the time:
On the game setup UI, if two people attempt to change their species or color at the same time, one or the other's game goes white and a window pops up saying that FreeOrion has stopped responding. They then disconnect from the host.
We've been able to get around this bug by just having the person hosting the game change everyone's settings for them.

[Geoff the Medio]

On the game setup UI, if two people attempt to change their species or color at the same time, one or the other's game goes white and a window pops up saying that FreeOrion has stopped responding. They then disconnect from the host.
We've been able to get around this bug by just having the person hosting the game change everyone's settings for them.

Sounds very similar to this (later-reported) issue: viewtopic.php?p=66360#p66360