3.13 patch, multiplayer, and loss of sync

[kapurider]

My friends and I are experiencing the same OOS problem. Regular Friday game, same 3 players/systems for 2 years, all installed the patch through the in-game prompt, problems all night. As far as I know:

1. 3 player Direct IP
2. All run XP
3. new game with constant problems, then tried through Gamespy - no different, back to direct IP, suffered through miserable night

I will say this: it was always the same guy out of synch. Only notable change with him was he let his virusware expire this week. ???

 

[Digma]

Huzzah! Success! All right, here's what I did, and worked for me. I uninstalled Civ4, Warlords, and BtS in addition to removing all data from My Games and from Application data folders. Then I reinstalled all three from CD's. I patched my desktop through the Advanced option in-game, then made a copy of the patch on a CD which I then used to patch the laptop. I tried both LAN and Gamespy MP for about 30 turns, with no OOS showing up. Other than deleting old game data and reinstalling the whole thing, I only changed one thing, which may or may not be important. My desktop has all my games in a C:\Games folder rather than in C:\Program Files, and when I reinstalled on the laptop, I put the install in a C:\Games folder as well (it was in Program Files before I uninstalled the game). I would guess that this is totally irrelevant and that removing old game files with inconsistent data was the main difference-maker on my success. Hopefully, reinstalling may work for you as well. Thanks for all the advice people!

 

[Bhruic]

Yeah, this semi-confirms my belief that people having this problem are experiencing it because of file mismatches between clients. Both of us have done the exact same method (direct copying of installation from one system to another) and it has resulted in no problems. Hopefully the people still having problems will take me up on my offer to verify their file checksums.

Bh

 

[Lobsang1979]

I love how people vehemently condemn the 3.13 patch for problems without first taking people's advice that it might be corrupted/incorrect installs. Doing a completely clean install when problems occur is just good housekeeping.

Also, if people are running virus scanners/firewalls in the background and playing any game (especially multiplayer) there is always a good chance that there will be problems. Despite what virus program developers tell us.

 

[vilemerchant]

FWIW I just had my regular Sunday game with a bunch of aussies. We started a new 4 player game thru the lobby and played for about 4 hours with not one OOS occurring. I personally think 3.13 is an absolute disgrace, but multiplayer doesn't seem to be one of its problems from my end.

 

[IronCrown]

I love how people vehemently condemn the 3.13 patch for problems without first taking people's advice that it might be corrupted/incorrect installs. Doing a completely clean install when problems occur is just good housekeeping.

It shouldn't be neccessary to do a complete reinstall just because the game was patched. And it never was for any game I played before. Besides, I don't want to delete the MyGames folder with all my custom data, and I shouldn't have to.

 

[whiplash_CDC]

Huzzah! Success! All right, here's what I did, and worked for me. I uninstalled Civ4, Warlords, and BtS in addition to removing all data from My Games and from Application data folders. Then I reinstalled all three from CD's. I patched my desktop through the Advanced option in-game, then made a copy of the patch on a CD which I then used to patch the laptop. I tried both LAN and Gamespy MP for about 30 turns, with no OOS showing up. Other than deleting old game data and reinstalling the whole thing, I only changed one thing, which may or may not be important. My desktop has all my games in a C:\Games folder rather than in C:\Program Files, and when I reinstalled on the laptop, I put the install in a C:\Games folder as well (it was in Program Files before I uninstalled the game). I would guess that this is totally irrelevant and that removing old game files with inconsistent data was the main difference-maker on my success. Hopefully, reinstalling may work for you as well. Thanks for all the advice people!

Firaxis, It's insane to expect your customers to go through all of this hassle to get your product to work.

 

[Bhruic]

It shouldn't be neccessary to do a complete reinstall just because the game was patched. And it never was for any game I played before. Besides, I don't want to delete the MyGames folder with all my custom data, and I shouldn't have to.

I'm semi-supportive of your position, but I have to disagree with your last line. If you have custom data in your My Games folder, that data is going to be based off of the 3.02 version. It's not practical (or even desirable) for Firaxis to try and patch that data. It is up to the end user to make sure that any mods/changes they've made are properly updated to 3.13 - and if you run into problems because they aren't, you can't, in good faith, blame that on Firaxis.

Bh

 

[IronCrown]

The patch should just overwrite all files it needs to overwrite, where's the problem? Any additional files should not prevent the patched game from working. Besides, I wasn't talking about mods, I never use any. But I want to keep my hall of fame, replays, etc.

 

[Bhruic]

Oh, ok, those are different. You shouldn't need to delete those. In fact, I wouldn't delete those at all - when doing a "complete" reinstall, I'd just delete the CustomAssets folder to make sure there's nothing there.

Bh

 

[Lobsang1979]

The patch should just overwrite all files it needs to overwrite, where's the problem? Any additional files should not prevent the patched game from working. Besides, I wasn't talking about mods, I never use any. But I want to keep my hall of fame, replays, etc.

The great thing about Civ4 is that there are so many ways to mod the game to each user's taste.

The bad thing about Civ4 is that there are so many ways to mod the game to each user's taste.

I say this because I have had no problems with the BTS 3.13 yet other than those stated in Bhruic's unofficial patch thread (which I have installed with great thanks). However, due to the many combinations of different file versions and mods out there for BTS and Civ4 I would really hate to be in the developer's shoes when it comes to creating patches.

From my experience, after a few mods or tweaks have been added to the game it becomes almost impossible to remember where all the files have gone. Now you may not have added any mods, but that is not to say that your opponent in a MP game has not. And if there are file mismatches between the two sytems, I am not surprised that errors like this are occurring.

My advice, if anyone is having problems, is to always do a completely clean reinstall (i.e. manually delete any leftover files in \Program Files\Firaxis). I didn't do this as I had a clean install of BTS anyway, and so far no problems.

Good luck.

 

[Digma]

An additional update concerning the OOS problem. I met my across-the-country friend on Gamespy to see if we were still having OOS problems after my clean reinstall. No surprise, we were, so he did a clean reinstall himself. After that, no problem. So it looks as if Bhruic's original solution was correct, a clean install will solve the problem. I have to say that it's nice to have a solution, but not nice that there was a problem in the first place. The patch should have overwritten any files that needed to be changed, and since neither my friend nor I have ever used mods, I don't think the blame can be cast on us. This is a bug that should have been caught and fixed, but at least we can still play MP after a couple of hours of work. Good luck all!

 

[rdm180]

I was also experiencing the same OOS issue after every 10-15 turns when playing on a LAN with one other person. We both uninstalled and reinstalled and went at least 200 turns in a new game with no problems.

-rdm

 

[Lobsang1979]

'Mystery' solved?...

 

[Gyprsn]

Same problem in my MP games. I haven't gone a single game without OOS. A lot of the time it happens right as the game begins for the first two. Sometimes a single person keeps going OOS, other times its the same two people. After the 3rd or 4th OOS people just start leaving because rejoining slows things down incredibly if you have to do it every other turn.

 

[Qigee]

Not sure if this is much use to people, but I noticed that I was getting the OOS problem just as either player was getting a random event message e.g. tornado or some other kind of disaster. I started a game without random events and it now works fine. It's not ideal as it takes away one of the point of the expansion pack, but at least it enables multiplayer play to work. I guess I'll just have to wait for the 'patch of the latest patch' to use random events again.

 

[Doomed_UK]

Home LAN of 4 machines and 2 remote machines belonging to other friends.

Not one OOS.

Big wars, random events, even using our own game speed and graphic mod.

One machine is Vista, the rest XP.

No one re-installed, no-one has any issues, except for the Vista machine not auto installing.

 

[Capt_Logan]

My Newphew's second computer was getting the out of synch error while his main one was working fine.

He tinkered with it all weekend with scan disk, defrags, and finally he rolled back his system before the pactch and then repacthed it again fresh.

That seemed to clear it up with his LAN games. We will test it on internet games on Tuesday.

Good luck.

 

[AfterShafter]

I was also experiencing the same OOS issue after every 10-15 turns when playing on a LAN with one other person. We both uninstalled and reinstalled and went at least 200 turns in a new game with no problems.

-rdm

So this is with the patch 3.13 patch that it's working after a reinstall? I'm getting really sick of blowing my weekend play sessions trying to fix up shoddy patches.

 

[redifederal]

I'm semi-supportive of your position, but I have to disagree with your last line. If you have custom data in your My Games folder, that data is going to be based off of the 3.02 version. It's not practical (or even desirable) for Firaxis to try and patch that data. It is up to the end user to make sure that any mods/changes they've made are properly updated to 3.13 - and if you run into problems because they aren't, you can't, in good faith, blame that on Firaxis.

Bh

I will not uninstall BTS and Vinalla just so I can get my game to work (my son ruined my vanilla cd so I cant reinstall vanilla even if I wanted to). I should not have to reinstall my games because the programers at Fireaxis neglected to do extensive testing on the patch before releasing it (do they need volunteers to test any new patches in the future for MP and SP because I will help). The game comes with an auto update feature and thats what I am going to use (only because Im not getting paid to make my game work and the programers at Fireaxis ARE GETTING PAID TO DO THIS). However, if they want to refund me my money I will gladly uninstall and reinstall all day long until I can get the game to work. Otherwise Im done with civ for awhile (yeah right Im just working on finishing my scenarios and mods).