Euro/North American Multiplayer Warning

[Duuk]

When a Euro tries to connect to an MP game hosted by a North America, the host receives a warning that "Some files are changed in Player <X>'s version. Verify this is a trusted player before continuing."

The game can be played with no issues, but the warning is disconcerting.

All players have patch 3.02 (the game will not connect unpatched), and the 3.02 patch notes involved unifying the versions

 

[Duuk]

*bump* This is kind of important, since I tend to play with people from all over the world.

 

[ainwood]

Are you sure its a Europe / US thing? Anyone trying to play with a cracked version? A steam version? A direct2Drive version?

 

[Duuk]

In the same game, anyone with teh North American version didn't get the warning, anyone joining with the Euro version did cause the warning.

 

[Duuk]

So no one plays multiplayer but me?

 

[Capsavian]

Did anything ever come of this? I have a UK player in my pitboss game who continually attracts this warning message in my pitboss server log. Is it indeed a simple bug issue, or is this something more sinister that I need to look into?

Any thoughts, appreciated.

 

[ori]

this warning is there to show altered game files and it is most likely that this is the case. When BtS was first released there where differences between european and american releases but with 3.13 this should not occur anymore. HOWEVER there are numerous people complaining about bugs here that have only partially installed 3.13 patches so even without sinister motives there might just be someone with a partially patched game...
Or he has altered his files

Edit: you are talking about Beyond the Sword, right?

 

[Capsavian]

Thanks ori, for the follow-up post.

Yes, BTS, and I do have other European players, but this one is the only UK one. He's also the only one who is showing up in the logs with that warning.

Now I need to figure out if the player simply has a corrupted patch install, or if in fact there is something more sinister going on. And, somehow, I doubt that will be an easy thing to figure out. :/

EDIT: is there a known way to manipulate a pitboss game? Is this even possible, since the save file is not local, but on the host's computer? (and even then, only may be opened via pitboss, and not, say, singleplayer/worldbuilder).

 

[ori]

what you could ask him to do is to set everything in his civilizationIV.ini that has "log" in its name to 1 and then start a game and close it. Then he should send you his init.log which is located in
documents and settings\<username>\my documents\my games\Beyond the Sword\logs\
its a short text file that contains among others these two lines:

VERSION: Build: Fri Sep 21 14:16:18 2007
VERSION: 3.0.0.1 (81539)

the time is time zone dependent but it should look something like this if it is patched to 3.13 correctly, if the date is something completely different and/or the version number is something like 3.0.0.91 or 3.0.0.86 then he either has not patched or the patch failed. In this case a complete reinstall of his Civ version is in order (hint: search my username and "uninstall reinstall" for a howto).
If however he does have the correct patch version there is most likely some kind of changed file on his computer - it might be something harmless as Blue Marble but most likely you should insist on a clean install in any case since there is no way you can find out easily what exactly was altered...