Beta 2 - Sync Problems

Yup, This is a very sad problem, I love the expansion, I dont even wanna play it without the starbases and landmines now, but mulit-player is impossible.

Experienced the exact same thing! Some of the game was the same for everyone, but most of it was desynched beyond recognition.

Two of three players crashed during the game, and we had a routine of sending our save game to the crashed player and continuing where we left off.

We also managed to start the game where one of the players had an 1 hour older save file than the two others. When I hosted the save game, and we were ingame he was basically playing the old version of the game, and we the new version. How about doing a md5 checksum on those save files and assuring that everyone has the same one eh?

Same. Happened in a lan game. was very sad...spent an hour just building up...

Been there done that.  prolly 8 out of 10 games desync for us...forces us to play small maps with fewo pponents  1 unfair or 2 hard...Our problem is that the data is the same for both of us and that dont help the devs much.  Restart from save and the desynch happens same time no matter what.  Worse still we move together to a star we had not moved to before and the enemy ships were WAY WAY(i mean glitchy shouldnt happen distance) far outside the grav well....AND our ships went out there to getem.....Weird.  Electricity/Internet has been down here(ice storm) for over 7 days now..so we are just geting back to testing.

We ran into this last night playing the Gateway map with 2 human and the rest AI - We tried backing up a few auto-saves and everything was still out of synch anyway and we gave up.  Glad to see we aren't the only ones seeing it.

Any idea when this will be fixed or what's causing it?

If you can sync out regularly you are very valuable to me and I need your help.

Here is a plan of action:

1. Update to beta 2.5.

2. Change the following fields to the new values listed below in your user.setting file (located somewhere like the following C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting)

CalculateCheckSumDetail 3
SaveCheckSumSnapShotsOnSave TRUE

3. Exit Sins completely (everyone must do this) and play a FRESH game of Sins (no save games).

4. When you sync out (you will see some red text) have every player send the snapshot and/or sync files from the CheckSum folder where your Sins settings are stored  to [email protected]. Make sure you let us know who else was in the game so we can pair up the sync files if they come from seperate email addresses (alternatively just put them all in one zip/rar file and have one person send the information).

The CheckSum folder is likely something like: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Checksum.

Thanks,
Blair

Hey guys, Blair means it about you being valuable -- it's very difficult for them to reproduce these bugs 'in house', and -- speaking as a programmer myself (if a novice one) -- unless you can reproduce a problem, your odds of being able to figure out what is causing it, much less fixing it, are slim.

I and a buddy of mine first saw this happen a couple of days ago on 2.0.  He claimed there was a huge fleet attacking one of my planets and I made a joke questioning his sobriety.  We updated to 2.5 tonight and got the error again but this time with the syncherror file and a screenshot as requested.  Hooah.

I was perfectly sober, you dolt!!

Seriously, we did see this in 2.0 and experienced it in 2.5 tonight playing the Gateway map with two Human (well, if Bfiguero is actually human, that remains to be seen) and 4 AIs.  The game desynched within 10 minutes.  He sent me his log files and I forwarded them on along with my own to the Support e-mail address and was floored when the Support person WROTE BACK (no, not just the autoresponder, a real reply) at 8:33PM PST. - Very Impressed...

On a whim, I had saved the game immediately on start, and we tried to reload that save and it appears to have desynched at about the same tickpoint, but I didn't really look.  I assume this isn't a latency thing (we're both on Comcast's backbone albeit on opposite ends of the Western US) so it's not a bandwidth issue. 

Josie/Blair - if you need more logs, let me know (you have my e-mail address).  I can always sucker him in for more punishment...

Will the red text stay up on the screen or will the checksum file be called anything special to signify that it is a desync?

The group I'm playing beta 2.5 with is also getting this problem. Four to five us play against the AI and always go out of sync and have since the beginning of the beta. We just sent in our checksum files (per Blair's instructions), so hopefully that will help track down the problem. We're also available for more punishment should the need arise for more logs or files.

I quit relatively soon after experiencing the first synch error but the file that was created with the checksum reporting active was named SyncError-Tick73033-Player1.txt if that clears it up.  You'll also get a message stating that the file was created and give you the full path and file name so it will be very apparent if and when it happens.

Ah, okay. Thank you. I was just wondering if I could leave the game running in the background with mostly AI playing and still get the checksum dumps.