BtS OOS (Out of Sync Error)

[rah]

how does the k-mod multiplayer play with those not using it?
I've just started visiting here more frequently and have liked a lot of things that you've claimed you mod handles.

[karadoc]

Originally Posted by rah

how does the k-mod multiplayer play with those not using it?
I've just started visiting here more frequently and have liked a lot of things that you've claimed you mod handles.

K-Mod multiplayer requires that all players be using K-Mod.

[Frisbie]

I recently called Firaxis. They claimed we need to adjust the windows firewall and add single port forwarding ports 2033 & 2056. We did so, and I'm not convinced it worked. Do u guys think if we played directly into the modem, it would help? That would negate the fact that we need to do port forwarding, right? Any response would be great. Thanks,

Brad Frisbie
mtbikepatrol@comcast.net

[lvdz]

Originally Posted by Frisbie

They claimed we need to adjust the windows firewall and add single port forwarding ports 2033 & 2056. [/email]

Has anyone else also tested this?

[karadoc]

Originally Posted by Frisbie

I recently called Firaxis. They claimed we need to adjust the windows firewall and add single port forwarding ports 2033 & 2056. We did so, and I'm not convinced it worked. Do u guys think if we played directly into the modem, it would help? That would negate the fact that we need to do port forwarding, right? Any response would be great. Thanks,

Brad Frisbie
mtbikepatrol@comcast.net

Were they talking about OOS errors? One might think that Firaxis would know a thing or two about their game, but I'm pretty damn sure that opening ports on the firewall has nothing to do with OOS. If there are firewall problems, you simply won't be able to play; OOS is a completely separate issue. OSS is caused by mistakes in the Civ4 programming. (Which is why K-Mod is able to fix it.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "playing directly into the modem"; but I would expect that anyone playing from behind a NAT will need to have UDP port 2056 forwarded to their computer (or whatever port is specified in the civ4 ini file). UDP traffic is not very good at getting past a NAT.

To check of you are behind a NAT:

Spoiler:

Open a command prompt and type 'ipconfig'. Note that line that says "IPv4 Address". Then go to [http://www.whatismyip.com/]. If the address listed at that site is not the same as the one listed by ipconfig, then your router is using Network Address Translation.

I'm not sure if port 2033 is actually required, or what it might be required for. When I start a multiplayer Civ4 game and then use a command prompt to run "netstat -a -b", it doesn't not say that civ4 is listening on port 2033...

[lvdz]

Originally Posted by karadoc

Were they talking about OOS errors? One might think that Firaxis would know a thing or two about their game, but I'm pretty damn sure that opening ports on the firewall has nothing to do with OOS. If there are firewall problems, you simply won't be able to play; OOS is a completely separate issue. OSS is caused by mistakes in the Civ4 programming. (Which is why K-Mod is able to fix it.)

I think you're right. The 2056 port issue is discussed in the Gamespy thread, therefore for Internet Games and not Direct ip games.

So, karadoc, is there any limit (such as civ numbers or map size) for the K-Mod to prevent OOS, or it just anihilates the error completely?

[karadoc]

There are no size limits. OOS should be (almost) completely eliminated in K-Mod for any number of players.

There are actually lots of unrelated bugs which can cause OOS; and it's usually extremely difficult to actually work out what it causing the OOS, even after the bug has been found. But anyway, I've spent considerable effort tracking them down and fixing them. The result is that almost every game is completely free of any OOS.

It isn't totally fixed though. I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 10 full games would get a single OOS in the current version of K-Mod. I've recently found a bug which I think might be causing the remaining problems; and so hopefully the next version of K-Mod will be 100% OOS free.

[lvdz]

Thanks for the feedback karadoc. I actually don't mind an OOS from time to time, as long as it does not prevent players to finish a game. It's ok to save and quickly reload when it occurs imho.

Sounds good!

[rah]

Originally Posted by karadoc

There are no size limits. OOS should be (almost) completely eliminated in K-Mod for any number of players.

There are actually lots of unrelated bugs which can cause OOS; and it's usually extremely difficult to actually work out what it causing the OOS, even after the bug has been found. But anyway, I've spent considerable effort tracking them down and fixing them. The result is that almost every game is completely free of any OOS.

It isn't totally fixed though. I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 10 full games would get a single OOS in the current version of K-Mod. I've recently found a bug which I think might be causing the remaining problems; and so hopefully the next version of K-Mod will be 100% OOS free.

And the next version will be out when?

And does K-mod resolve the Global unit upgrade OOS problem?

[karadoc]

Originally Posted by rah

And the next version will be out when?

And does K-mod resolve the Global unit upgrade OOS problem?

Well, I don't really have any kind of schedule for uploading new versions... It's really just a when it's done / when I feel like it kind of thing; but I'd predict that I'll upload a new version within the next week or two.

I don't know what the upgrade OOS problem you're referring to is. A couple of minutes ago I glanced at the code for the upgrade-all command, and I didn't spot any obvious problems. Maybe whatever the problem was was already fixed by one of the previous changes, or maybe it's something more subtle and harder to spot... Perhaps you can test it to see if there is a problem or not!

But really, I don't recommend waiting for the next version. The current version works very well, and the save games from the current version will still be compatible with the next version when it is updated, and so on. ;; and besides, when the next version is released, then there will be the possibility of the next-next version coming out a couple of weeks after that...

[lvdz]

Originally Posted by karadoc

But really, I don't recommend waiting for the next version. The current version works very well...

Indeed, this is now the mod I use when playing Direct IP games. Last one was on a huge map with 14 civs total, 3 human players, and no OOS happened! Gj karadoc.

[lvdz]

Addendum: We're currently playing a direct-ip game and many OOS errors occured - random event are on. Everyone had to restart the game while pressing the (right) SHIFT key down and everything went back to normal, no more OOS.

If I'm not mistaken, holding the SHIFT key while starting the game clears the cache.

[karadoc]

That's interesting to hear about the many OOSs. Was that on the most recent version of K-Mod (ie. v1.32, released a couple of days ago) or one of the older versions?

Generally, in my experience, when there is one OOS error, it's best if all players quit and then rejoin from a save game rather than trying to rejoin while the game is still running. I think shift, or something like that, does clear the cache, but I would only expect that to help if there was some kind of weird bug in civ4 which caused the game to still be loading stale cache for some players but not for others.

[lvdz]

Originally Posted by karadoc

That's interesting to hear about the many OOSs. Was that on the most recent version of K-Mod (ie. v1.32, released a couple of days ago) or one of the older versions?

Generally, in my experience, when there is one OOS error, it's best if all players quit and then rejoin from a save game rather than trying to rejoin while the game is still running. I think shift, or something like that, does clear the cache, but I would only expect that to help if there was some kind of weird bug in civ4 which caused the game to still be loading stale cache for some players but not for others.

I'll have to double-check, but from what you say I think this is the previous version, as it was downloaded before or on June 27 (so before a couple of days ago).

Indeed, we have relaunched the game from a savegame. Then I don't know if holding SHIFT down really helped, but it became our standard operationnal procedure as the problem disappeared. If it happens again, we'll try to simply restart the game and see what the output is - hopefully we won't have to.

This said, K-Mod allows us to enjoy multiplayer without having to abandon a game due to the OOS - and we can even play with random events. Restarting from a savegame once in a while is perfectly ok for me as I already mentioned. We might try the newer version once we finish this game.

[karadoc]

Alright. Thanks for the feedback.

As I mentioned earlier, the most recent version did fix a couple of potential OOS problems that I was aware of; but the problems were very rare, and it's essentially impossible to know what problem caused any specific OOS to happen. In any case, I guess we'll all just hope that the OSS you saw was caused by a problem which is now fixed!

By the way, when playing direct IP games, you should keep in mind that the game doesn't check that all players are using the same version of the mod. eg. A player using v1.30 could join a v1.32 game, and no one would be warned about it; and it would almost certainly cause some OOS problems.

This is specifically a problem for direct IP games, because in LAN games and "Internet" games, the game you are trying to join simply will not appear on the games list if you have different versions - but with direct IP, there is no games list, and there is nothing to block you from joining games with the wrong version.

So just make sure that all players upgrade at the same time.

[lvdz]

That is probably a stupid question: where can i find which version of k-mod I use? I've checked in-game and in the folders but haven't found the information.

Oh, another one: do we just need to download the new version and replace the folder in order to upgrade? And are the savegames compatible with the newest version? Edit: Oops, the answer is right there.

[karadoc]

The only place the version number is listed in K-Mod is in changelog.txt.

(I realise it would probably be convenient to have it somewhere else as well, but I don't trust myself to remember to update it every time...)

[lvdz]

Thanks. As expected we currently use version 1.31. We'll probably upgrade to version 1.32 once this game is over.

[lvdz]

Well, here is what happened this week-end:

We finished a game played with v1.31, with casual OOS with random events. Everything went globally fine.

Then we decided to update to v1.32. First by just extracting the folder over the existing one, then by deleting everything and then unzipping.

We could not play on v1.32 without OOS happening all the time, even with random events off. We reinstalled v1.31 as it worked fine, but then OOS were persistent, it wasn't possible to play a single game. We decided to upgrade again to v1.32 and found out that it was impossible to start a new game without an OOS: it occured directly, the very first second the game began. The only possibility is now to launch a savegame, otherwise it is just not playable, even tho we made sure we used the exact same version.

[karadoc]

Well that's strange... (and somewhat disheartening).

I've played multiplayer v1.32 a few times myself without any problems whatsoever; so it's hard for me to guess what might be causing the problems.

You've already said you've deleted the K-Mod folder and reunzipped; and I mentioned in my previous post that you have to be extra careful with Direct IP games to make sure all players are using the same version - because there will be no in-game warning signals. -- So, based on what you said and what I said, I suppose we can be pretty sure that you're using the right version on all computers -- But never the less, that would still be my best guess for why it's going out of sync. It's really vital that everyone has exactly the same K-mod assets. Let me reiterate that I haven't seen any OOS at all with this version, and no one else has reported problems either.

Failing that though, assuming that these large amounts of OOS errors are due to some bug in K-Mod, then I'd like to know the following details:

• Is "simultaneous turns" enabled?
• Is this a pitboss game?
• Is there a turn timer?
• Are you using a special map script?

(I don't think random events have anything to do with it.)

If the OOS really does happen the instant you join the game, then there must be some reason why you are seeing it and I'm not seeing it. I want to know what I need to do to reproduce this problem, so that I can find its cause.