Six Player Game Issues

Powderhorn

My friends and I have been trying to get this game to work for probably about 8 hours now as a six person multiplayer. We attempted port forwarding to no avail, so now we are attempting a Hamachi network, also, to no avail.

What will happen is throughout, players will connect and get dropped. Sometimes they will all make it in, but the drops are rather frequent. Once a player drops, it seems to send the game into contortions that convolute the mind. Everyone will seem to see a different instance of the game, with some players in, and some players not, and this is merely in the character selection screen.

If we DO all make it into the game, it is not long before there are synchronization issues. We've yet to make it out of Candlekeep. Again, players will be dropped, disconnected, if they DO reconnect, they'll be in a sort of limbo, where they may be able to talk in the lobby, but not show up in said lobby. They may attempt to select a character, but to no avail. Often, players will start attacking someone, and nobody else will see it happening.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our issues, and yet, they persist. Any help is appreciated. We are all using the BG:EE Beamdog client (non-Steam) and we are all on the same version.

Powderhorn

I just want to try to tag @Nathan in here to bring it to his attention, of course, any other help is still appreciated. The lot of us ARE attempting to play and enjoy the game as a group, but, we've yet to make it out of Candlekeep without it recrashing on us.

Quand

Me and my group have the exact same problem with a few exceptions:
We played in several occasions and it worked out just fine, using Hamachi. Got as far as Nachkel (the town). But since last week we have the exact same problem where people get kicked out when we start the game or the game crashes.

Sooo.. Is there anything to do or should we just wait until there is a new patch??

Powderhorn

For those of us with these issues, what can WE do to help you resolve this? Do you need dxdiags of all our various system specs? Do you want to just hop into a game with us and see it with a set of fresh eyes and perhaps solutions?

We WANT this game to work well and correctly, and we want to be able to enjoy it with friends. If we can help you get us to that point, we're happy to do so, at least as far as my own group is concerned.

Powderhorn

I'm also going to tag @Aosaw in this, since he (or she!) seems to be equally involved in the support side of the house.

deny_conformity

We've noticed the game is fairly sensitive to lag/lost packets. We've had a 6 player game going since 2013(build 6?), I host for us and got everything working fine just setting up port forwarding (thank you tomatousb for making it so easy). When I recently upgraded our router, the default wifi channel had a lot of interference and it made for highly variable ping and that game just failed to work, when I changed the frequency to one with lower inference this stabilised my ping and we've not had a problem since. The only thing we've noticed is that if someone does get kicked for some reason the host (me) needs to completely close BGEE and reopen it before they'll be able to reconnect. On the days we actually get the time (which isn't nearly often enough) we can keep a 6 player session going for a few hours, our record was about 5 hours with no problems (definitely a HUGE improvement over the mess that was multiplayer in the original).

bigdogchris

If you're on a LAN you don't need port forwarding (only local firewall opened for the Baldur's Gate application).

Also, don't play over wireless.

deny_conformity

I'm well aware port forwarding isn't needed for a LAN, we play over the internet, my comment was because the effect heavy wifi interference had on our game mimicked the connection issues people have been describing (and gives a possible cause and solution people might try).