Hello,




As promised, here is a heads up on our recent MP improvements.



Latency [WorkinProgress]


In many cases, the GUI elements and the AI couldn’t deal with big latency. Latency means the action you are asking for can take some time to be validated and performed. During this time, by spamming a button in the GUI, a player could easily ask the same action to be executed many times. It didn’t necessarily generate desynchronisation but stability issues or game irregularities. For example, by spamming the button “Create fleet” in the star system view, a player could ask many fleets to be created using the same ships. As far as the AI is concerned, it could ask for a buy out of the same improvement many times… One the one hand, we are currently working on improving the reliability of our system to deal with latency, and on the other hand we are adding more feedback to inform the players when their actions are pending.




GUI that temporary duplicates/instantiates objects [Fixed]


In some cases, the GUI elements create fake objects or clone existing ones to allow the user to make temporary modifications on them. For example, in the ship design creation screen, we create a fake ship locally during the modification process and we send the result to remote players only when the player validates his ship design. A desync could appear when a player had this kind of screen opened during the end of turn, because his local objects were included in the simulation calculation only on his computer and not on others’.




Game speed management with game events [Fixed]


At the creation of a MP game, the host generates the random events and the exploration rewards that will appear during the game. He updates their duration according to the game speed and include them in the save file he sends to the remote players. We spotted an issue when playing in fast (or slow) speed, where the duration modification wasn’t properly managed by the clients. So, for some players, the events could finish earlier (or later) than they should have. This was another source of desync.




Desync detection tool [WorkinProgress]


We have already used a tool to detect desync between players. We improved it during our latest tests and as many of you suggested, we are thinking now of a way to release it in the future. There is still some work to achieve, to integrate this tool in the game, but we are on it.




For your information, we will start some tests later today and this weekend, with our VIP members in the first place. We are hoping to release the MP improvements in a beta available on Steam in the upcoming week (if you opt in for it), if of course everything works according to plan.



Thank you.