Fixing Multiplayer

Nathan

So: the new 2012 patch (details here: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/14519/game-update-1-0-2012/p1) should fix the remaining de-synchronization on area transition and other games-getting-out-of-sync problems.

If people are still experiencing issues, we need to know:

1) does it crash outright, or is it a freeze(non-responsive hang)? (if it crashes, can you send your crash report (zipped) to cameron (at) beamdog.com)
2) what were you doing when it crashed/froze?
3) can you easily reproduce it, or was it a one-off thing? Timing, like every X minutes, or usually when performing Y action? Anything that makes a pattern so we can try and reproduce it on our end.
4) does the issue occur in a non-modded/brand new playthrough?

These are things that will help us isolate and try to reproduce the issue so we can fix it.

Hey folks,

we're currently digging through multiplayer in an effort to provide a patch soon(tm) (read: as soon as we can) to fix a lot of the issues people are experiencing.

-We've currently identified an issue where the legacy code/missing rest movies causes big problems for people - copying the existing rest movie again to restinn.wbm and restdung.wbm in the override fixes the issue, so, that's what we'll be doing in an upcoming patch to "stop-gap" the problem, and then replacing those duplicate rest movies with something better in the vein of the existing rest movie (but area appropriate) going forward.

-likewise, this may be related to other multiplayer weirdness when playing other movies (again, the ghost of the legacy code causing problems),

-there's at least one general connection issue reported here that we'll be looking into,

-we've also identified many people are experiencing general instability with 3 or more people in-game (but 2 seems to work fine for most people), along with some specifics as linked here (1), here (2), and here (3) with some workarounds there too.

Now: the reason why I'm posting that here is, as the last few links above there, the specifics listed are very good. If anyone can provide us with more tight reproducible cases, the faster we'll be able to squash the bugs in question.

Cheers - this topic will be updated with more information as we identify specific issues we discover or other cases people can point us at to fix.

Weimdog

Here is one thread filled with bugs and workarounds.

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/8728/multiplayer-party-members-cant-see-eachother-moving-not-closing-dialogue-window

Edit: Good luck!

Renulan

Keep up the hard work!

Ruse

Great to hear. I know this is important for a lot of us!

Sese79

Great to hear. Just make all old movies appear instead the new ones and then no bugs and no problem for old computers.
I encountered a "funny" bug in Multiplayer. If the Game Host (Game creator) crashes, then the #2 Player becomes Player #1 instead of the original player. You can't do nothing, can't load a game or start a new, because the host changed. You can only escape and restart the game all new. Thanks.

gfm50

I don't know if this was mentioned already, but if you play with 3 or more people, you have a lot of trouble with every player even seeing everyone else in the game or game launch MP window. It's like the 3rd player and on makes the MP totally out of sync. With 3 or 4 players, the 3rd and 4th players joining would typically have to join the game, then leave, and join a second time to even have a chance of being seen by the other players in the game at launch.

Ulliam

Same issue as gfm50 just mentioned, the other two players often times could not see one another in the game world. One incident a "ghost" of one of the players was blocking the doors so the other player could not enter a building.

My system being the host I always could see the other players in the game world.

Nathan

Thanks for the extra info, everyone. Keep it coming as you got it.

Syao_ran

Really pleased to hear this. Can't wait to play with friends.

Warkiller

I'm not 100%, but i'm pretty sure that the day/night switch movie is missing too. As in if your in the same area during a transition, it doesn't ever happen, but once in a blue moon but it caused the same issues as the inn and dungeon in multi-player, though i haven't seen anyone complain about it on the fourms.

Sily

I have three questions concerning multiplayer!

Laggy Pausing!
Hitting pause does not react instantly, nor does unpausing. Instead it takes about half a second, which can really mess up your tactics since the enemy mage gets spells off first, no matter what you try.

Also, how about the.. game crashing for my friend if I initiate a conversation in another zone than my friend. For example, I go inside a building and talk to someone and bam, friend crashes but I keep happily playing. Same tested in reverse, and ends in crashing 95% of time.

And last but not least, what about Auto-Pause function? Shouldn't the game auto pause with "Enemy sighted" when we finish an conversation which turns the NPC Hostile? I mean, you have to pause manually after that, since it's not "just sighted" or what?

Also: While playing Black Pits with 3 players, we had the Genie bug and stay on the arena instead of disappearing. Now he's in the middle of the arena, looping that idle animation like crazy. Same thing in the slave pits(?) where you buy the equipment etc.

EDIT: My apologies, this should've probably gone into bug reporting?

Durlachion

Warkiller said:

I'm not 100%, but i'm pretty sure that the day/night switch movie is missing too. As in if your in the same area during a transition, it doesn't ever happen, but once in a blue moon but it caused the same issues as the inn and dungeon in multi-player, though i haven't seen anyone complain about it on the fourms.

Already added here. Grieg ran into this error near the Xvart village.

raelcari

Nice to see these problems being brought into attention. One suggestion: Since the dialogue screen overrides whatever else you do, only one player is able to buy/sell at a time (because if another player starts a dialogue with the shopkeeper, the first player is jerked out of the shop window). This might be annoying with 6 players at a time. How about changing it so that when you are shopping, you no longer see dialogues initiated by other players?

mister_ennui

I hope that, if possible, the fix for the issues being caused by the missing movies doesn't involve any of the legacy code for running them being removed. As it stands now BG:EE appears to be fairly well set up for new (or the original) versions of the currently missing movies to be brought back into the game either by Overhaul or by modders.

I see from @Nathan that it is intended that new inn and dungeon resting movies will be made, so there is apparently no problem there. It is the code behind running the other missing movies (such as sunset, sunrise, gnoll fortress, etc) that I am concerned about.

I realise that realistically the priority has to be getting multiplayer working properly, but I hope that doesn't mean that options are closed down in what after all is intended to be a mod-friendly game.

Sese79

Yeah, I hope too that the announced and advertised new movies will replace the placeholder movies one time. I wish that the old movies are added too, they just need to be converted to the new movie format. And at the beginning we should be able to choose which to watch. (My wife's computer is old, it can't display the new movies, the other thinks are working well.) For nostalgic and for old computer friendly wise...

roberteriksson

Thank you, would be excellent if this could be resolved.

We had the same problem today; 3 player party, me as a host, the other players unable to see each other. Everyone using Hamachi. Game crashing when changing areas.

Everything worked fine in Candlekeep.

Nathan

@mister_ennui We're trying to err on the side of more content rather than less content. The proper restinn and restdung movies will be in soon - we'll see with regards to the others.

@Sese79 yes, you've made it clear many times you'd prefer the old movies. The good news for you/anyone interested is that the old movies merely need to be converted to webm (you can do it for free with an open source video converter like Miro), renamed as appropriate to moviename.wbm, and placed in the override directory and they should work without issue.

We'll see with regards to providing a download or something of the like, later.

Sese79

@Nathan: why not place them in the Movies section in the Game Menus? You could just unlock them at the time you unlock the new ones. I just except to be able to watch the older ones too in-game, and it would run on old computers too (as my wife's). We could choose at the Options which set to watch.
Thanks for the help and information.

mister_ennui

@Nathan

Thanks for responding regarding the issues raised in my post. It is appreciated.

Sese79

@mister_enniui: thanks for showing me this: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/8193/getting-the-original-movies-in-enhanced-edition#latest

Will wait with it a little, bec. #1 i hope and #2 the upcoming patches are overwriting the mod anyways

ElizabethSterling

Oddest thing I've discovered. Three-plus multiplayer is still an issue until player 3 signs out and in without closing the program once. After that we get crash-on-autosave-transitions unless player 2 initiates the area transitions. It still DCs and crashes randomly a lot and sometimes we need to restart the server to get rid of the ghosts of old players and solve reconnection issues.

Essentially if I'm (player 2) dropped or suffer an issue I can't log back in to the host even when my ghosted username drops. For a while it'll tell me my name is already in use and then it'll go on to show me the login screen but then not load properly so I can't select anything. This also happened to player 3 once.

Finally I suffered a CTD any time I tried to pass items to Player 3 controlled characters but not to the host characters even when we could see eachother.

Adul

Multiplayer being fixed and movies being put back in is very nice, now if only you guys would decide to put back the rest of the missing movies. Or at least the important ones.

gfm50

One more bug to report for ya Nathan:

Playing with 3 players (may be the same with more or less), you cannot go to a new map or through an entrance into a new area with an autosave without crashing unless you give control of the party to the host player.

Nathan

Thanks for the feedback folks, keep it coming.

ObedMarsh

Pardon me if this is answered somewhere and I do realise there's probably alot of other more pressing concerns. But does anyone know when/if they are actually going to create a gaming hub for this? I was thinking something along the lines of how BG2 used to work on gamespy, but perhaps more up to date.

Vitor

When will be avaiable the conection by Beamdog client for Multiplayer play? BG was always hard as well to make it works multiplayer, and I don't want to buy a fight against my router.

Ruse

ObedMarsh said:

Pardon me if this is answered somewhere and I do realise there's probably alot of other more pressing concerns. But does anyone know when/if they are actually going to create a gaming hub for this? I was thinking something along the lines of how BG2 used to work on gamespy, but perhaps more up to date.

I'm curious about this as well. I won't be firing this thing up until it no longer requires battling routers, port forwarding and downloading third-party software.

Kozaro

@Vitor Just install 'Hamachi'. It enables great multiplayer experience with almost no effort from us, casual players .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamachi_(software)

+ I would like to announce another bugs I've noticed.
$) The XP share among 2 players is wacked. I don't know why, but the protagonist character (before entering Friendly Arm Inn) has twice as many XP as P2. Can't figure out why did it happen because noone of us died during the game, and the party was never split - as general rule of D&D suggests.

$$) In the Friendly Arm Inn area, after watching the movie everything's seemed fine. Until message '(1P NAME paused for MOVIE)' appears. Pause is eternal. Players throw unappropriate, gnasty words like drunk man throws up.

Nathan

Hey everyone, just a quick update - we think we have identified the major issue that was causing instability in games with 3 or more players - it related to the way the clients and host communicate data. We hope to have this available for you in a patch soon.

Wiggles

@Nathan

WOOHOO!! Atta boy.

Jaxx86

I was directed to Tunngle beta. It works. The program basically puts you and your friends in a chatroom with a ported and shared IP for everyone. I haven't tried more than 2 players in a game and the only problem that we've encountered is that we couldn't rest in some caves because the sleep video was synced up incorrectly. I would say Tunngle fixes the multiplayer problem temporarily until the matchmaking system is out.