Hi folks,
As you may know, we are currently working on some improvements regarding the multiplayer mode, and especially synchronization-related issues. As it is a major inconvenience right now, I’m keeping you posted on the progress of this task.
Orders were locally processed, sent to the server, and then forwarded to other clients, which possibly caused desynch between players. Now orders are directly sent to the server and locally processed when received back. This ensures a correct sequence of orders, but brings a whole bunch of new issues and regressions.
So to make it work, we had to modify the way various things are handled:
- Make sure all orders have been received, before we can switch to another game state.
- Changed the way constructions are queued, cancelled or bought out.
- Re-work the way AIs handle these actions (using unique IDs and a lock mechanism).
- Modify the system managing fleets’ movements to match the way orders are now managed.
On the bright side, this allowed us to find and fix some non-desync-related bugs such as:
- The AI is trying to buy infinite improvements
- Loading a MP saved-game multiple time lead to an error and disconnection
All these changes are currently tested by our QA team and will be released very soon.
In the upcoming weeks, I’ll keep focusing on the multiplayer mode. Indeed there are a few remaining bugs that need to be fixed, including connectivity issues (e.g. 0x04 error message, ‘%updating’ bug), and probably other sources of desynchronization. We will keep you up to date on this matter.
