Hello all,
This is my first post here. My wife introduced me to the forums after she had been here awhile. She is Lionese and can often be found helping people get the right avatar for their forum login.
On to the subject at hand: We have had multiple issues witch civ4 on our network here at our house. I'm not a newb, and am in fact, both Cisco and MS certified in networking and computers. Here's what we have discovered:
We completed our first LAN game out of about 10 attempts tonight. We did it on a slightly smaller world than normal, and with far fewer civilizations. We have tried multiple times to play a 3 player and once a 4 player LAN game with the same results each time. Over time, the connections to each other fade away and die and we end up rebooting, reloading the saved game and trying again, over and over again. Let's back up and start at the beginning.
Okay, the first thing noticed was absolutely attrocious performance issues with my wife's computer. She's was on an AMD XP 2500 with 512Mb of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4400 Video card. Yeah, the card is older, but it is still an awesome video card. She could not play at all. First thing I thought about was virtual memory and paging. I dug a gig of RAM out of one of my other computers and upgraded her RAM. Still bogged. She was, in the mean time, reading the issues that others were having and suggested that it may, in fact, be the video card that was having issues. So I bit the bullet and put my ATI X800 in her machine in place of the Geforce 4 ti 4400. Okay, her machine seemed to be liking things better.
My son was on his machine, which is an AMD XP 2600 again with 512Mb of RAM and a Geforce FX 5200. Again, not the absolute best but not a bad machine for the task. As we started playing network games, we kept loosing connection to him. I could sit and watch my network traces and my pings flying through, indicating a really solid connection over the network from me to him, but still, at the same time, having connection issues in game. Okay, perhaps it is virtual memory and paging and it's not responding fast enough because of it. So, I upped his machine to 1Gb of RAM from my second game box. We also took advantage of the opportunity and dumped a RAID 0 stripped array into his box to help with some of the disk I/O. The machine will pay the game fine now, on it's own, but a LAN Game?
Here is our typical attempt at a LAN game. It does not matter which one of us "hosts" the game, it always goes the same way. We start and everything is good; although we always seem to be waiting on eachother to finish our turns. This lasts for up to an hour into the game, when things are just starting to get interesting. Then someone's connection drops out and we spend the next 10 to 15 minutes waiting for them to reload into the game. We get going again, and we just start having repeated connection issues, sometimes it is the same machine over and over and sometimes it is different machines each time. Sometimes it is my box that can not see either of theirs, sometimes it is one of their boxes. It is never the same box all the time. After fighting it and reloading over and over for an hour or two, we always give up and go on to other things.
Now my wife is on the wireless part of our network, and if I expected to have issues network wise on any of it, it would be on that, but that does not seem to effect anything either. I have noticed that when you log back into a network game or restart a network game on the lan with everyone, the system seems to hang like mad waiting on the last screen before the game is loaded and you are ready to play. This can be further damaging if, by a twist of fait, you have an AI leader trying to bargain with you as you come in the door. I don't know why this is, I just know that it is.
I have read though a lot of these posts, and I would have to say that this, as a "finished product" was a little green around the edges to be released. This is; however, status quo for much of the PC game industry these days. The pressure to get the product to market forces it out the door when another 3 months of detailed beta testing on multiple configuration computers seems to be in order.
Oh, for the record: We all downloaded the patch on the same day, and were all updated with the latest patched version of the game, with the same results.
And in response to some of the suggestions about limiting the size of the world and the number of AI nationalities; the point behind the game is that it should be playable in all variations accross a lan, especially my lan. It's 100% linksys or Cisco and 100BaseT Switched. There are no hubs for collisions to happen and every other thing we have done on the network runs like a charm.
Now that we have finished our first game by limiting the size of the world and the number of AI nationalities, with only two of us playing, we will start to increase these settings and see how far we can get, both with two players and with three (and eventually 4, as one of my other son's would like to play with us as well).
Now, as to if this is a "memory leak" or a "virtual memory" problem is immaterial. It's a problem, that at the user level, we should not see, especially when we far exceed the recommended listed hardware, not to mention the minimum hardware requirements. I truely do believe there are memory management issues with this program, but it's not uncommon in a lot of windows programming. One normally has to find ways around that.
I look forward to this game in 6 months, when it has been patched a few times and a lot of these issues will be worked out. I can be patient and wait; but darn it, it would have been a lot more encouraging if it worked like it should "out of the box".
One suggestion, on a positive note: It would be really nice to see a "server" setup where we could take one of the machines on our network and make it the game server, running either Windows or linux/unix/bsd and serving the game. The server would not require the graphical overhead of the gaming machines and might prove to be the key to getting good performance out of the game over the network. Heck, it could just be a normal install in windows which runs in "server mode" with no graphical output, but keeps track of the game, save files, etc.
GP
* Freelance Unix/Linux/FreeBSD SysAdmin
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. I have already pointed people in the direction of all the polling which has been done-both here and on other gaming sites-showing an average of 60-80% of people being very happy with the game, far more than ever liked Civ3, even at its height. Oh but, I forgot, all of those polls are controlled and moderated by the Big Brothers of Firaxis/Take2 apparently. Are you starting to see how ridiculous your arguments are starting to look when they are reflected back at you guys? I should point out that even Amazon.com has a rating of almost 3 out of 5-not bad given that only 100 people have in fact posted a review for the game-and that a 5-star rating system is pretty inaccurate in my opinion. All the other gaming sites (such as Gamespy, Gamespot and IGN) have reviews from over 1000 people in some cases, with scores in the vicinity of 7-8 out of 10 in most cases.
