MP is completely unstable and thus unplayable. Unless you can finish the game in under 25 turns.

please fix multiplayer sync issues ASAP, devs need to know that there are unexpected bugs atm!

hey manage to play several games without game stucked ,



i think it s besause Manual battle are disabled and pirates too



EDIT : Nope was just luck , an other game with same setting was just all about Desync.....

A bunch of friends and I have played a game every night this week. The desynchs were really bad. The first night we hosted back up and 3 players were missing 3-7 systems.



We've started saving at regular 5 turn intervals and doing 'Score Checks' to make sure everyone at least sees the same point values for players. If theres any hint of a desynch we rehost the last auto save or interval save. Makes it rather annoying to get through a match that way and if these problems could be resolved multiplayer activity would skyrocket.

For the love of god, what will it take to make the development team add a simple desynchronization watchdog to the game? I am well aware that doing so won't catch all desynchronization issues and that it doesn't actually solve the underlying problems, but notifying people with an "OUT OF SYNC ERROR!" the moment the watchdog is triggered allows them to reload from the latest autosave BEFORE that point resulting in minimizing the wasted time and maximizing players' enjoyment of play. It also helps significantly with bug reports as you can get saves close around problem areas where people still have some idea of what they just did.



For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about something that is remarkably simple in principle and only somewhat trickier in practice: You select a number of important values in the game that are broadly representative of the game's state, and every client constructs a checksum over them at the start of every turn and submit it to the server.



The server then compares checksums - if any differ, you'd got a synchronization problem. You can then tell players and allow them to rehost at an earlier save or, if you are willing to invest more work in it, you'll check to see if most players' checksum agrees and, if they do, allow the possibility of dumping/reloading into the ongoing game for the few players that don't match up.



Even the simplest version that merely notifies players that one or more players are out of sync would seriously cut down on the mess that is the current state of Endless Space MP, while work progresses on finding and solving the causes of desynchronization.





A SIMPLE example checksum would be "the number/string that is equal to writing the total FIDS of all players in sequence". That extremely simple checksum, by itself, would catch practically any and all "system not colonised", "growth rates differs", "buildings affecting FIDS not constructed" issues. (Yes, it won't catch those rare cases where one value went up just the same amount as another went down such as to result in identical checksums for two different situations, but those are a minority - and the accumulating effect of this type of discrepancies typically seldom result in several consecutive checks that are all false-negatives).



A better checksum covering more areas of the game and incorporating control digits isn't hard to write and, for the truly ambitious, you can do stuff like calculating a SHA2 checksum over the entire data structure, though that is probably overkill and, depending on implementation, may take too much time. But for the love of god, add a watchdog even if only a simple one.





This post brought on behalf of a frustrated player who just played in a four player game that rehosted at turn 36 with the host not having saved since 16 (oops!), only to discover that fully half of my systems, fleets, heroes etc. etc. etc. never really existed for the server. Which given how my colonisation pattern was in practice means that the server stopped receiving (or stopped believing) reports from my client sometime during turns 16-18, at which point a watchdog SHOULD have triggered. Sure, it would have been annoying to rehost again, but nothing like the annoyance of everybody abandoning the game at turn 36 because nobody's position was what they thought it was (except for the host). In the current state, even if the host had saved the game every single turn, we'd still have had to either abandon game or revert the last 18-20 turns of playing.

Have played about 8 games now with some friends and it has gone out of sync everytime. Nobody wants to play a broken game.

maladictor wrote:
Have played about 8 games now with some friends and it has gone out of sync everytime. Nobody wants to play a broken game.

This sums up my play experience.

Took a break from this game for a couple weeks and will continue to do so. I will not play or look at the game very much until sync issues are resolved. No XPAC buying either until solved as I only play for MP.

Hey guys, I saw this thread and decided to make an account. The syncing issues are ridiculous right now and need to be fixed ASAP. Until then I believe I may have a temporary fix but I haven't had time to test it enough to be 100% sure. You can hover over the circle at the top left of the screen during a game to see everyone's overall score. My friends and I would confirm that everyone's score read the exact same at the beginning of each turn before any action has been taken. If it was off by even 1 or 2 points, we loaded the game. We had to load it one time very early on when the scores were different. After that the scores were never different again. We had a crash at the very end of the game and it loaded the end game back up correctly with 3 players.



Notes:



1. You don't really have to verify that everyone is synced up after EVERY single turn. We usually checked about every 3 turns. Just make sure you can load the auto save from a few turns back if it is desynced.



2. After we loaded it back up at the end the scores were all wrong, but after that turn was played again they normalized. Everything on everyone's empire was right, just the scores were wacky for the first turn.



3. The scores must be EXACTLY the same. If there is a 1 point deviation from even 1 person. Reload.



These are just some ideas that I had last night to put a temporary fix on the issue and maybe someone here can confirm whether it works or not. It did last night but it might have been a coincidence. This issue needs a hotfix ASAP though. It's ruined a lot of my games.

DMT wrote:
Took a break from this game for a couple weeks and will continue to do so. I will not play or look at the game very much until sync issues are resolved. No XPAC buying either until solved as I only play for MP.

Haven't touched it in weeks. Won't touch it either for the same reason. Won't buy any add ons either, same reason. I am also strongly urging others to do the same. I hope they resolve issues soon. If they don't, I hope the game dies completely and the studio fails along with the fluff that is g2g votes. WHERE IS THE VOTE TO RESOLVE MP ISSUES???



Nope. More achievements are what we need right? I propose am achievement:



Better Late Than Never --this is earned when the studio resolves gamebreaking mp issues, thus creating a finished product. If the studio release anything asking for money before this is earned, then the studio dies.

Better Late Than Never

cute

How about..

Eternal Patience Achievement - Win or get to the end of 10 multiplayer games that last 100 turns or more.

Another game that failed. I am absolutely not recommending this game to any of my old civilization buddies until it gets fixed. It's just frustrating now. (and I'm a fairly new player)

KnightHawk wrote:
How about..

Eternal Patience Achievement - Win or get to the end of 10 multiplayer games that last 100 turns or more.

Better not make it impossible. I'd suggest..

Stroke of Luck - Play an MP game longer than 50 turns without a desync.

From the Tech Support forums: Steam Voice Chat interfere with Multiplayer. Maybe you guys can check this out.

Hi Guys, my first post ^^



My observation is. That it goes pretty fast out of Sync when big parts of the map are still unseen (especially if the host don't see the map).

After I Played Amoeba, and my friend(host) and I goes into an alliance we hadn't any Sync problems. Before that we needed to reload the Game a few Times.



sincerely

Wasi

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/content.php?235-Multiplayer-status-Where-we-stand



http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/content.php?233-Multiplayer-status-January-2013