Multiplayer weird freezing...

[azzacanth]

Not sure if this is a RAR (rise and rule, aka Double Your Pleasure mod for c3c) bug (using v 1.03 but it happened in 1.01 too) or a c3c bug (using 1.22), since we never play our big multiplayers with regular c3c... I posted this on the RAR forum too.

--- I also posted on the bug report forum here on feb 25th, figured I would try here as I have no replies there


Anyway, what happens is, about the time we get engineers, maybe sooner? (at LEAST in the modern era, maybe in the industrial), every single turn, one of our players will lag badly, her whole computer pauses, our civ games pause briefly, are active for 4-5 seconds, and then we get the message, "Waiting for player #2...", usually lasts at least 10 seconds (sometimes as much as 50 or 55 which is scary), then turn goes over as usual and we play...

But sometimes too in the middle of the turn, especially when fortifying units or stacks of units we will get lag from player #2 also.

anybody have any idea what could cause this? The computer is the worst of all the machines we have playing, BUT other people have played fine with worse computers in our circle of civ playing freaks at different times and not had this problem.

She's tried a fresh install of civ, on a different drive. She is using the same install files that I use, also the exact same copy of RAR she distributed to all of us. We can't find any unusual processes (ie viruses or spyware) running in task manager. Its not impossible its a hardware problem.

Anybody have any suggestions??? It's real annoying and in some games she will even lose connection and we have to reload.

 

[boarder]

Sounds like its simple lag to me caused by her connection being to slow, or she has a bad connection by that i mean bad phone lines,isp re routing to much numerous things,my advice is dont play her or tell her to get a better connection
Also having a powerful comp helps more so the host then anyone else

 

[azzacanth]

That's not the problem though. Because I'm on the same LAN as her on our games, and I don't lag.

We do have the best computer host already.

her computer is a little subpar but not much. And always is very slow playing single player turns - much slower than mine even though my computer is not extremely faster than hers. (1ghz vs 1.4ghz, same RAM, etc.)

if only it were just a connection problem - but like I said I am on the same LAN and don't have the problem.

 

[boarder]

Ok, well in that case if you can definetly rule out the connection then as you say it only happens in modern times when theres lots of units i would have to guess that its the speed of your comps,the more of everything you have the longer it will take,if it runs fine until you get more cities,units etc its more for the comp to process,and 1 ghz and a 1.4ghz is very slow and im guessing you probably only have 64 or maybe 128 megs of ram? My only suggestion is upgrade time... escpecially before civ4 comes out

 

[azzacanth]

No 512mb of ddr... these are just not very new computers. Hey I ran civ3 on a 333mhz computer, with 192MB ram. 1ghz is fast

I did notice a similar lag with my dads computer on a LAN only game we tried, even from the AA.

 

[boarder]

Well sorry i couldnt help good luck with it

 

[azzacanth]

Thanks for replying, threads been up a while and you're the only reply on CFC I've gotten.

 

[boarder]

I think most on here prefer single player which is great as well )

 

[azzacanth]

single player gets sooooooooo boring after playing the big multiplayer epics..heh.

Then again I'm not playing much civ right now anyway

 

[Skybuck]

Edited: It's the CPU which is too slow <- probably not true see below

I have a PIII 450 mhz... and it constantly freezes while playing and people are fortifieing big stacks... also the workers probably cause freezes... "ai path searching" I think

Heck everything causes it too freeze...

But I have also played on a AMD 64 bit processor 2600 xp+ and it can notice a little bit of freezing sometimes... but maybe that has other reasons as well

Civ 3 is complex game I can imagine that it needs a lot of CPU juice

I also think it uses what programmers call "linked lists" or maybe "dynamic arrays"

It probably needs to search a lot in those things are something.

For me as a programmer myself it does seem like a little bug somewhere... since there aren't that many units...

For example I just played a game and we both had a total of 300 units.

But when fortifieing my 160 unit stack it would simply crash and burn the game to death.

That's definetly not normal.

Well
Bye

 

[plustaticman]

Edited: It's the CPU which is too slow <- probably not true see below

I have a PIII 450 mhz... and it constantly freezes while playing and people are fortifieing big stacks... also the workers probably cause freezes... "ai path searching" I think

Heck everything causes it too freeze...

But I have also played on a AMD 64 bit processor 2600 xp+ and it can notice a little bit of freezing sometimes... but maybe that has other reasons as well

Civ 3 is complex game I can imagine that it needs a lot of CPU juice

I also think it uses what programmers call "linked lists" or maybe "dynamic arrays"

It probably needs to search a lot in those things are something.

For me as a programmer myself it does seem like a little bug somewhere... since there aren't that many units...

For example I just played a game and we both had a total of 300 units.

But when fortifieing my 160 unit stack it would simply crash and burn the game to death.

That's definetly not normal.

Well
Bye

I have two machines connected via a 100mb switch. Both are 3.1ghz w/ 512 mb RAM on one and 1gb RAM on the other. I still experience lag when fortrifying units. (incidently, if it pops up the waiting on other player screen, if you hit the ESC key it will reset the timer). The worst problem is lag when the turn rolls. That has, on occassion, taken as long as three hours to process. I wish I knew a way to fix it, but even when I shut down all but the most essential programs, it still happens.

 

[Skybuck]

Thanks for this "reset" tip... I will try it in a multiplayer game to see if I can use it to prevent other players from dropping.

If it works that would be cool =D

 

[Skybuck]

Ok I played some nice, cool and fun tiny games 4 players, 80 procent water pangea is the best fun really but ok.

I pressed the escape button and indeed it resets the timer... but if it really helps I remain skeptical Somebody still dropped while I kept pressing escape every 15 secs or so

Thanks anyway... I think it might help a bit sometimes