The OOS Issues that Plague This Game

[Calbrenar]

This is a really hard post for me to write. For one thing no game has ever given me as many hours of enjoyment as this one and its free. I know what its like to work on a game in your spare time although nowhere near as successfully as you guys have so please take the rest of this post with the sincere intent it is given in which is to try to do what's best for the game in my limited knowledge of what might be helpful.

The OOS errors are killing this game for me. I don't know if most people play it single player making it a non issue or if I'm the only one who's getting them. I know that there was a multipage thread on them but it just dropped off.

There are how many people on this dev team? 5? 6? Why aren't they testing these OOS issues rather then always making new versions? I appreciate the releases but I would rather play a game all the way through then have massive tech tree changes.

Kael if you need someone to help you test these issues out in multiplayer and you can't get anyone else on the team to help (and this goes for anyone else on the team) I freely volunteer to test any games you like. I'll slug around playing any civs in any fashions. I have XP and Vista if you need different OS'. I'm available pretty much most weekends (though gf gets pissed if I don't pay her someattention) and most weekdays after 5 or 6 till like midnight if necessary. I'm not putting it all on you expecting a magic fix I will do whatever it takes and I can prolly get at least a couple people to help as well as play multiple civs myself (I can play at least 2 maybe 3).

My friends and I tried about 15 straight games of .31D that ended in turn after turn OOS' regardless of clearing caches or anything else. We reverted (sadly) back to .30K and played a game (on quick no less) for 365 turns all the way to the conclusion.... with no OOS errors. It was unbelievable. We'd never had a completely finished game of FFH before.

Tonight we started again on .30K this time raging barbs and Living World (last time these were turned off). Game went fine until a little bit after Luchuirp went AV after I spread it to them as Sheim. Things started getting buggy and once again constant OOS errors.

We have done everything we can on our side to debug it. We have tried different install combinations. Different mods versions and patches. We have approx something like 40-50 hours of FF2 with ONE successfully completed game.

This needs far more attention then its getting. Certainly more then one forgotten thread and a post by Kael several weeks ago saying "I'm going to do some OOS testing this weekend."

I work for Lockheed Martin and do qual testing. This needs multiple teams with set testing patterns to find and correct these errors and the sooner the better it will be for this community.

I love this game but I don't like playing it single player much and if these errors continue there's not much here for me. I'm willing to fix it if you are.

*EDIT* If this is a Firaxis issue that we can't solve then we need to get this enormous community to put some pressure on Firaxis. BTS has been out for what 9 months? and hasn't had a patch since like October? That is . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . and frankly if I can't play this insanely awesome mod because Firaxis won't support the game I bought less then a year ago then I won't buy anymore of their products and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way and if enough of us tell them so then we can get something done about it.

 

[ori0nnebula]

I can certainly feel Calbrenar's frustration. This is by far one of the best user-created mods for any game (the only rival imho would be War3's DOTA). The setting is rich, the design brilliant, and it just has everything you could want out of a civ game. Reminds me a lot of the old master's of magic.

At least for me tho... multiplayer is pretty much broken given these OOS issues. On a good day I can go maybe 100 turns before a string of not stop OOS.

Kael and other's put a lot of their valuable time into creating this mod, I personally would be happy to support them however is neccessary to try to get some resolution to this. Either by volunteering some time, or helping to get some action from Firaxis.

P.S. To Kael and the dev team, thanks again for all the hard work you have put into this wonderful mod.

 

[Mailbox]

Whenever I play FFH2 multiplayer I turn events off and don't get any OOS issues. It's a small price to pay and I'd rather the team wait until everything else is in place to fix these things instead of extensive testing that is solved with one game option.

 

[Calbrenar]

Whenever I play FFH2 multiplayer I turn events off and don't get any OOS issues. It's a small price to pay and I'd rather the team wait until everything else is in place to fix these things instead of extensive testing that is solved with one game option.

We haven't tried this ourselves but from what we've read disabling events removes a lot of functionality from the game and doesn't even work in a lot of instances from what other people posted. Additionally in .31D we got a ton of CTD's.

 

[Roghar]

I understand the frustration.. I've had a good run of late but up until 0.30 patch k it was a nightmare. have only had one OOS since then and luckily it was on a game we were about to abandon anyway

What is strange is that some people get OOS and others don't, and it doesn't seem to fit any obvious pattern. That makes it very difficult for a dev team to track alone. You're right, it needs a lot of teams and a systematic approach to identifying them. There is no point developing content in a game when there is such a big playability issue.

Also, can any programming savvy person out there come up with any causes that aren't directly related to game settings, operating system and game version/patch? There has to be something lower down that causes some people to have grief and others no problem, with no obvious difference

 

[Mailo]

This is rather weird, the update to 0.31d cured the OOS issue for us completely. Three multiplayer games since then, not a single OOS.
Before with 0.30k, we had an OOS about every 10-15 turns.

Kael, we couldn't narrow the problem down further and especially couldn't verify our suspicion that mutations were the (a?) cause. Sorry.

 

[xienwolf]

Kael has many times posted some helpful hints for people to isolate OOS issues for him. In general it is met with much enthusiasm, but then nobody actually DOES anything, or they do a lot of playing, but don't follow any of the hints he provided and thus don't find much of anything of actual use.

As for not developing new content till they fix it: Sorry to sound harsh, but too bad.

The developers are making this mod for their own reasons, and have stated that the Single Player mode is what the game is being designed for. Yes, they do value the Multiplayer aspects. But they WILL NOT put their development (what they enjoy) on hold to support it. Especially because, as you pointed out, there is a very limited core of the team who is actually capable of coding. The others are ideas, stories, and artwork. Add to that the fact that you CANNOT guarantee that in a given testing period they will even HAVE an OOS, and thus they must devote weeks of time to the prospect...


So yes, PLEASE do what you can do gather a group of people who, like yourself, will devote a chunk of their own time to simply playing the game in a manner which is devoted to testing and isolating issues. THEN approach Kael for advice on how precisely to go about it. I am certain that after you demonstrate that testing is actually being done that you would even get support from the Team in the form of custom downloads or options which are meant for testing purposes (like an Event File which has everything disabled that is just a random event. Though you could rather easily make this yourself as a first step to testing).



Even for just the single player game, many things don't get fully tested and tweaked before being released. For the sake of speed most testing is done on small maps with few players. So things like Blight hitting once for every player can go unnoticed rather easily. But this is still just a BETA release, which happens to have been made playable and open to the public for playing/testing. From what I understand, the main goal right now is to get all of the mechanics into the game which are desired for the Scenarios. That has been the driving goal for the Team since pretty much Day 1.

Once the Scenarios are out, you can expect a LOT of testing and tweaking of them. Then work on refining the storyline and balance of them. Then work on the AI. Then probably a chance of some Team devotion to working on the Multiplayer issues. Till then, it all relies upon the community stepping up to do the testing and being able to post: This is the Problem. This is a way to fix it. Once such a post is made, it gets included in the next patch far more often than not (and the not case is generally because that wasn't the proper solution, and nobody can figure out why).

EDIT: Seeing Mailo post reminded me that there was quite some work done recently by a small group, which is the main reason that last OOS issues thread got to be so large. I just didn't want to leave it sounding like absolutely nobody has ever done anything, when in fact some people have attempted to do a little fairly recently.

 

[leo.]

don't know what's your prob there.

i played mp with different people, from 2-5 players and didnt get oos for far more than 1000 turns in total, the last 20 patches, esp the latest.

and the reason why it happens is in most cases absolutely obvious. but for some reason it looks a bit strange for me, so e.g. trait change still caused oos one day with the one of the latest ver.

i tell you something. events in bts mp cause still oos. and that not only 1 or 2 times in 1000 games, it happens very very often.
The fact that you are able to play FFH + events like living world in MP without any issues for (nearly) ever is amazing!
and you know ffh is still not finished? : )
but in ffh you cant disable events, if you want to play the game. or you dont need most of its best features.
and if it happens, reload and start takes <30sec. the most people i play mp i know, and its not a big deal to click 2 buttons and wait a short time.

imo oos errors are in ffh a minor prob, in bts they arent - and i dont really care.
if the game crashes at a certain point of the game, even with reload, and you cant do anything, it's worse. also rarely, but still happens, imho looking after that would be much better.

 

[Tarquelne]

Whenever I play FFH2 multiplayer I turn events off and don't get any OOS issues.

Another thing you can try, Calbrenar, is turning off all but a few events. Set the "PercentGamesActive" in the EventTrigger file to o. It's Very easy using the editor, and not too bad editing the XML directly. So you could, for example, leave Adaptive, Insane and the Armageddon events on, but turn everything else off.

 

[Calbrenar]

don't know what's your prob there.

i played mp with different people, from 2-5 players and didnt get oos for far more than 1000 turns in total, the last 20 patches, esp the latest.

and the reason why it happens is in most cases absolutely obvious. but for some reason it looks a bit strange for me, so e.g. trait change still caused oos one day with the one of the latest ver.

i tell you something. events in bts mp cause still oos. and that not only 1 or 2 times in 1000 games, it happens very very often.
The fact that you are able to play FFH + events like living world in MP without any issues for (nearly) ever is amazing!
and you know ffh is still not finished? : )
but in ffh you cant disable events, if you want to play the game. or you dont need most of its best features.
and if it happens, reload and start takes <30sec. the most people i play mp i know, and its not a big deal to click 2 buttons and wait a short time.

imo oos errors are in ffh a minor prob, in bts they arent - and i dont really care.
if the game crashes at a certain point of the game, even with reload, and you cant do anything, it's worse. also rarely, but still happens, imho looking after that would be much better.

I'd be interested to hear what kind of map settings you use.

I've never been able to get living world to work successfully. We've tried games with people who have Steam Civ + FFH2 installed and games without. We've tried Two and three player games. we've tried with AI and without AI. We've tried all kinds of combinations of options. We've been able to get one game to successfully play through. Balseraphs, Calabim and Khazad. The only thing I can think of that was different was Sheim were killed off early and AC never got above 30. Barbarian world and Raging barbs were off only tech brokering aggressive ai blessings and wildlands was on. We even tried setting minimize popups because it seemed like if we got an event while we were researching a tech or having to select a building it was a guaranteed OOS and minimize popups makes that stuff appear at the end of the turn after the event happened. No such luck. We never even got that far in .31D. Our last game as .30K was me as Sheim. Luchuirp converted to sheim and within 15 turns the game went to hell and not in the good AC progressing way in the OOS EVERY turn way.

Yeah it only takes 30 seconds to reload (which unless your computer is far faster then mine i doubt its more like 2 min in a MP game) but when its every turn, literally EVERY turn not exaggerating, whether you clear cache or not. It becomes a slightly bigger deal.

 

[leo.]

settings don't seem to be very different to yours.
sometimes we play with ai, sometimes we don't. we like to play with living world and all the other features you also mentioned, rather adding than removing anything.
minimize popups i think we have all on, though the event-popups appear. dont think that is connected in any way. we have even played a lot with unrestricted leaders and let ai mix combinations from the leaders and civ (that often doesnt make very much sense imo). but it works... though i could imagine this might cause probs.
these oos errors we got mostly with someone who uses different versions because he/she havent got the latest patch or modded something. that often caused probs.
if oos happens, i save the same turn it happened, and reload exactly the same point. perhaps you should try the same. we get back in, and everything is good.
i played 3 games yesterday, two with three ppl, one with two, all vs ai, teamed or unteamed, unrestricted or restricted, all with living world, advanced start or not, different eras etc. we played about 120, 250 and about 350 turns. got one crash (= reload, because rejoining doesnt work, it wont get sync), only in a shorter game we didnt want to continue, but no in-game oos error.
perhaps other things cause that... turn timer? we play without... sim turns we do of course. and i can't tell you the reason, but i get oos from some people more than others.. but perhaps that is the wrong thought... you all tried to reinstall the mod? perhaps it would help. else i have no idea, except code/event probs etc. i didnt look after, though i think the multiplayer support for ffh is much more better than it was in past.
btw thx to the devs for that, single player is SO boring without scenarios, because playing ai and a human are two completely different things...

 

[[NWO]_Valis]

[..]sim turns we do of course[..]

I think you success may lie here. Most of MP players play simuntainus(?) turns.

 

[xienwolf]

I believe he was stating that they do NOT play with the Turn Timer, but they DO play with Simultaneous Turns.

(BTW, since you have Discworld in your Signature, did you know that SkyOne (Brit TV?) did 2 movies for it?)

 

[Calbrenar]

Yes we play sim turns and turn off turn timer. So far we've had 1-3 "recoverable" OOS'. It sounds like every OOS you get is recoverable. The vast vast vast majority of our OOS' result in an OOS the turn after every reload. You save the game with the OOS blinking. Rejoin. Finish the turn. End turn. Events, AI requests for trades etc, OOS. Save. Reload. End Turn. repeat.

Every time. Additionally with .31d in the only game that wasn't OOSing we ended up with repeated CTD's.

There's something the game doesn't like about the Sheim in multiplayer. I may try to play some test games with them with the Double AC events turned on and with the AC turned off and see how it affects OOS/CTD's.

 

[xienwolf]

Could you try the Sheaim without using any Planar Gates? Could be the issue if it is specific to them.

 

[Calbrenar]

Sure I can try that but I would imagine the OOS would occur on turns that I summoned a unit correct? I actually had 15-30 good turns of gameplay with 2 mobius witch and marauder out with no problems. It wasn't until the Luchuirp converted to AV that we started seeing issues.

 

[xienwolf]

Did that hold true in each case? (Normal, Doubled AC and No AC)

I suppose there is a slim chance that the AC is not being tabulated properly among all the players. Each player "Owns" the portion of the AC which they have directly caused. Thus it might be the case where every player is claiming that the AC which he personally owns ought to be the only AC in the world. Then someone with a different tier of AC than yourself would claim you should have a different spawnrate...

But of course that is quite the stretch, especially since you said there were still issues with the AC disabled.

 

[Xuenay]

There was one MP game where we suspected that there was an issue with the Luchuirp and golems. The human playing the Luchuirp tried not producing any golems, and suddenly we seemed to have a lot less OOS's. We still had them, though.

Later on, the human playing the Calabim summoned the Infernals to the scene. After that, we started getting an OOS every turn. We suspected it might have something to do with the Infernals, but wiping them out didn't help. Our Calabim player turned over his civilization to the AI, and the OOS'es stopped for a while. We thought that if it wasn't the Infernals, maybe the remaining Hell terrain was to blame. I sent a mage to remove all the hell terrain so Calabim could rejoin the game, but by that time the hell had spread to Calabim territory - now played by an AI, and I didn't have an Open Borders treaty with them. After getting the occasional OOS anyway, even with the Calabim AI'ed, we gave up on that game - especially since the AI had managed to ruin the Calabim economy.

 

[Calbrenar]

Did that hold true in each case? (Normal, Doubled AC and No AC)

I suppose there is a slim chance that the AC is not being tabulated properly among all the players. Each player "Owns" the portion of the AC which they have directly caused. Thus it might be the case where every player is claiming that the AC which he personally owns ought to be the only AC in the world. Then someone with a different tier of AC than yourself would claim you should have a different spawnrate...

But of course that is quite the stretch, especially since you said there were still issues with the AC disabled.

I'm saying I'll have to test this. We haven't tested it yet. I know that the one "good" game we had was on .30K with none of the human players contributing to the AC and Sheim killed off by like turn 100 (never founding AV) Balseraphs (me) as OO Calabim (human) as Order and Khazad as RoK.

My guess with Luchuirps was they were building something with some kind of malformed tag or something once they switch to AV and converted from good to evil.

 

[smjjames]

excuse my ignorance here, but what is an OOS error?