Out of Sync Error - Beta 3

from Sins Forums

Guys, I'm sorry to report, but the sync error is still not fixed.  Last night I was playing multiplayer with my friends and about 5 hours into a game (shortly after we loaded the saved game) we noticed it was out of sync.

The strange thing is that my computer was the only comp out of the three of us who was different.  I think it is a processing issue because I was the only one out of those three which has a quad-core AMD cpu.  I was running the game in windows xp and on 4 gb of ram.  I can get the different save game files from my friends' computers and their autosaves if that would help.

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Ok, so I was talking to my friends and have been running through the situation in my head several times.

Here's what i think happened...

Game was going great and we in sync UNTIL one of us had a blue screen of death...

So I saved the game and sent the file to both of my friends and had the other one restart the game so that it could wouldn't screw up for some reason.

BUT I left the game open and hosted the save file with the game open.  This means that the state of my game was not fresh like theirs was.

So after we loaded, the game diverged and ended up very different and we were sad...

So I think that when they reloaded the game, it gave them a brand new state with properly initialized variables for the save game.  The state of my game was from when I quit after saving our progress.  Like the developers blogged about determinism, everything was fine until the state of our machines were different.  And fortunately, I think this bug may be easier to figure out because it deals with variable that hang around after a game is exited and reloaded...

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

i'm not quite sure about that. You see, sins unloads its in-game info when you exit. which is why 5+ hour games can take 10-15 seconds to exit. It then completely reloads the state when you load. It is possible that they forget to set a variable to clear though.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

If you blued screened out, who knows what the state is. But just to be sure:

Turn on sync checking in C:\Documents and Settings\fyst\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting\user.setting.

CalculateCheckSumTickFrequency 50
CalculateCheckSumDetail 3
SaveCheckSumSnapShotsInGameTickFrequency 0
SaveCheckSumSnapShotsOnSave TRUE
IsCheckSumLoggingOn FALSE

Everyone send their syncerror and/or snapshot files (in the CheckSum folder) to [email protected]. Make sure we know who was involved in the game if you don't all send together.

Thanks,

Blair

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Yeah, Like I stated above, I made sure that we all had the same save file.  It's just that I didn't close out and the other two did.  So there is some mistery variable lurking around that had to have altered things on my end and not on theirs.  Anyway, I'll be testing this later this week when we all have time to do this again.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Is that code all we need, or do we need a different executable?

(I edited the code and it didn't notify me of sync problems, just froze up the game with a "SaveDump" error. )

Will try playing again now and give you the update..

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

It won't solve the dump problem, just identify if you go out of sync. We received hundreds of dump files in the past few days and I'm now happy to say everyone of them is fixed. Ofcourse, there maybe new ones that come up between now and Wednesday so keep sending :)