sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but i'm just wondering... why is it that one player can't be the "host" for these multiplayer games? to avoid all this sync error business? Isn't that how most games do it? Sure this means that if the host drops, usually the game is hosed (except for a few games, like Age of Empires which could dynamically switch hosts) but I imagine it would save a lot of dev time trying to hunt down these sync bugs.
Do we really have that many more units, more things to keep track of in Sins than in other rts games?
Or maybe they could release a dedicated server client, like with CS and all the other HL mods. Though that would perhpas require a lot of retooling of the game engine itself, making it a not worthwhile undertaking..
I mean, when entrenchment comes out, won't that mean potential for more sync bugs? each time they add content to the game, there more potential for future sync bugs?
It's not so much that Sins has a "central server" to "host" the game. The idea is that:
1. Everyone has exactly the same starting point, data and variables
2. Everyone's "simulated" actions/instructions follow an exactly identical algorithm and steps
This mean that as long as each client executes the same "instructions", the simulation will be identical on each client. So no "central server"/"host" is required as long as all the instructions are shared between all clients in a timely manner. This strategy is in fact more scalable since it avoids problems where if the "central server/host" is too busy (too many MP) or too slow (poor network).
In the case of the current desync problem, the devs are looking at item 1 - some data is not quite right at initialization.
