[BTS] LAN MP with BUG/BULL

[Hesha]

Hey guys!

I've played an MP game via LAN with my brother last night and it was very unstable. I was hosting, he fell out of sync (ooc) sometimes every turn, but never after more than 4 turns. He had to leave the game to main menu, rejoined and it was fine for a while then. In the end we just played OOS for a while and only reconnected occasionally, but the issue is pretty annoying.

I remember playing MP about 10 years ago with a friend (not sure if that was direct IP or via game spy) and I do remember some instability, but never to this degree.

First we wanted to play via direct IP, but we had no idea how to do that, because we seem to have the same IP because we're in the same house... or something.

Is this a common issue, do you know a fix for our problem?

 

[Hesha]

Oh..meant to respond on the MP stuff. Honestly, I'm not much into MP, but played a bit years ago - both on the servers and Pitboss.

One thing that can lead to OOS is not having matching assets. Could be related to mods used or some differences in installations. I don't think MP would work at all if yall were not at least using the same mods, but there could be some different assets.

What version of IV do you use? Disks? Steam? Some other DD? Is your bro on the same version?

What is your MP platform?

The weird thing is, I installed a second copy for multiplayer, he installed fresh as well, both from gog.com. We installed BUG/BULL the exact same way at the same time.

We couldn't get it going via Direct IP (see above), so we tried it via LAN.

 

[lymond]

Hopefully, someone with better knowledge can help you in this forum. Frequent OOS is definitely a problem and indicator that there is some kind of issue. Really you should not have OOS at all. It may be something with the assets or an issue with the LAN network. I've never used LAN, but I would imagine that it would generally be very stable.

Just check again to make sure the setup is the same. Did one of you not install the BULL DLL...not just the files to custom assets, but the DLL itself?

Do you both run the game as administrator?

If this does not get resolved in the short term you could try hot seat or pbem?

 

[Hesha]

Hopefully, someone with better knowledge can help you in this forum. Frequent OOS is definitely a problem and indicator that there is some kind of issue. Really you should not have OOS at all. It may be something with the assets or an issue with the LAN network. I've never used LAN, but I would imagine that it would generally be very stable.

Just check again to make sure the setup is the same. Did one of you not install the BULL DLL...not just the files to custom assets, but the DLL itself?

Do you both run the game as administrator?

If this does not get resolved in the short term you could try hot seat or pbem?

Thanks for your suggestions. I think the next step is to put the install files for the game as well as the downloaded mods on a flash drive and have them both installed by the same person.

I think one issue might be that the game installs some stuff on Documents/My Games and that is then used across all installations of the game. I should probably completely remove both my installations and start with a completely fresh install. Will keep you posted if that helps!

 

[Hesha]

So, thanks again for your help @lymond . My re-install ended up working. For some reason his previous installs from years ago where blocking BUG/BULL. He installed fresh, but BUG and BULL on as you are supposed to, but when the game launched, despite the fact that the BUG mod was loaded, you had the normal interface.

We wiped the game off the HD, removed every mention of "civilization" from his registry and then reinstalled and now it works like a charm. We finished that Noble MP last night. OMG - I won by diplomatic again, albeit completely unexpectedly. Mansa had built the Ap Palace, I won the vote. Worth mentioning that I have Cav-annihilated Mehmed II by that point (who was the only non-Buddhist) and every other AI was my vassal. We played co-op, so my brother voted for me in the election. I won with a score of about 4300, he had 1200 and every AI about 1000. Never experiences such utter domination in a game before, not even on noble. Must mean that I've actually learned a lot already. So has my brother by the way - we were Skyping the whole time and I was giving him tips, so he was really pleased with the game, despite losing, because he feels he learned a lot. We'll probably play again today.

Thanks again!