Multiplayer

[Duuk]

This mod (tested with Rev. Inq.) works fine in MP with one exception:

*every* human player gets all revolution-related pop-ups, including ones that give options.

Since we know that events only happen to individual civs, how hard would it be to track down the pop-up windows for events code and restyle the revolution pop-up windows for that?

 

[jdog5000]

It's something I do intend to do as part of my planned changes to the current request and revolt system ... it's not too bad, the popups will be declared slightly differently and handling is done through a call back function.

 

[StormLord-711-]

I know I'd love to see this mod for multiplayer...although I know it wasn't originally designed for it. I was hoping that if civ5 ever came out it could be redone with this in mind, but if that's the only problem with it working now, we could really see Revolutions changed a lot when playing against humans!

 

[Duuk]

Awesome. My wife and I played and it definitely adds something, even in MP.

 

[Cybah]

AI autoplay will cause asynchronicity

 

[Duuk]

Any advances along the multiplayer front?

 

[jdog5000]

A little one ... bribing cities no longer causes OOS errors now. Popups showing for everyone are still to be dealt with though, it's coming but it's going to take a while.

 

[Duuk]

K. Just checking because well... I love this mod.

 

[Carwyn]

We play this mod multiplayer, now with the Rise of Mankind 2.501, and we just love it. The oos errors are a bit better, we still get them. Is there anything we can do to help get the mod fully multiplayer compatible? I'm no modder, but reasonably computer savvy and one of my friends is pretty good at messing with thing. We just wouldn't know where to start...

It would be great to lose the popup that shows to everyone - playing at blazing timer I don't much care to be messing around in individual windows and any other time the games take so long we tend not to finish them. Of course, when you play with several very good friends, if someone's game is not going so well in the early part, you keep starting over - who wants to play for dozens of hours with only part of your friends? We can always kill each other in massive battles at the end - but first we have to get there!

Thanks again for the mod!

 

[jdog5000]

Unfortunately the popup part of things is a big project as the solution is to switch to a very different form of popups. I'm intending to make them work like the Random event popups, but this requires the creation of all the random events which will in turn need appropriate fields to make all the different kinds of Revolution behavior happen ...

That said, even with the annoying popups for everyone set up, the goal is still that there would be no OOS errors if everyone clicks the same option. There's a good intro to what kinds of code can cause problems here. If you want to try to hunt down causes of OOS errors that would be fantastic ... they should occur within a turn of the problem line of code firing.

 

[Carwyn]

We did have one problem last night. One of our players had a city what went rebellious and he wanted to bribe it. In the past, we'd all click bribe and strange things happened to our money (it was taken out of everyone's money, we got messages saying our city didn't need to be bribed, then it seemed to be given back to us a turn later - after a turn of negative money for me!). Well, we let him click "pay" and we all clicked "reject". That actually worked fine, except that his gold went down 40,000 for a bribe of approx 1,000! oops! Not sure what happened there, we quit for the night without saving.

I'll tell you, this mod is a lot more exciting and difficult multiplayer than single! So far we are just getting going, because it takes us weeks to finish a big game, we actually work together to reach the higher tech eras with everyone still in the game. One problem with playing with very good friends, its just not fun if someone gets taken out early, we're not going to play for weeks without one of us! We're trying to get everyone that gets taken out early to take an AI and come back in though, great option! Sometimes my friends will start a game when I am busy and I can come play with them later by taking an AI for a time. It's very much a social thing for us.

Now all I have to do is to figure out how to compete with players that are younger, smarter and play more than I do! lol

 

[Carwyn]

I've been thinking about this. I read the tutorial and it's pretty far past what I know about. That said, I did learn a lot about OOS errors and how they work. Is there some form of error reporting or logging built into the game that could help to pinpoint problems and, if so, would it be enough for one of us to run it? Or would we all need to? To be honest I find the sheer size and complexity of the code to be overwhelming, I really don't know anything about python or xml or modding.

Thanks for your time on this and for making this mod - the game just isn't worth playing without a great mod and this one is my favorite.

 

[anandus]

Just a quick question on this:
If I play a multiplayer game with only BarbarianCiv and DynamicNames turned on (and Revolution, AIAutoplay and ChangePlayer turned off), will this cause OOS or will we be alright?

 

[Carwyn]

We played RoM last night multiplayer (it has the whole Revolution Mod in it) and just turned off the Revolution part. It played flawlessly for hours. We just turned up Raging Barbarians to make it interesting...

 

[jdog5000]

You should be fine with BarbarianCiv and DynamicCivNames ... the errors come almost exclusively from handling of popups which drive Revolution.

Carwyn: There is error logging build in to Civ and it could help. If just you run it that would work pretty well, I would at least learn what aspect of the game is falling OOS ... gold, units, etc. In CivilizationIV.ini in your My Games/Beyond the Sword folder turn on both the logging system and synch logging (their at the bottom). You may also want to turn on Overwrite logs so the don't multiply.

The log files are created in the Logs folder in the above path, one of them should have a name involving synch. There will also be a PythonDbg log file. If you zip up those two after an OOS error and post them here it might help me track things down. Don't need to rush though, the big issue is of course the popups ...

 

[Carwyn]

Sure I can do that, one of these days I'm sure my friends would be willing to play one of our OOS games for a bit to recreate the problem for the log files. We've had some that were awful, others that went pretty smoothly. After the latest fix of the pop ups, we were able to bribe our cities from the city screen without OOS, but any responses on the popup screen went crazy and all sorts of strange things happened. I really enjoy your mod, thanks for being willing to look at the multiplayer issues.

 

[Carwyn]

Of course, now that I turned on the logging and we are playing RoM ver 2.502 with Revolutions on, we've not had ONE OOS error yet! The pop-up window seems to remain the only drawback. I don't know if a new version of Revolutions was included in the RoM 2.502 or what, but it's played perfectly so far (with raging barbarians and Revolutions) for almost a week. We still haven't managed to get a game into the modern age though, I'm afraid we tend to restart when one of us gets really messed up. Not entirely competitive but we have a good time! I get razzed because my friends get a warning that I'm using logging, even though they know why I'm doing it!