PTW 1.04f Bug & Crash Reports

[Spanscape]

Game isn't very stable yet... very BIG disappointment for an official Civ product!

Here's my skinny:

1) Played on LAN. Was actually playable for the most part. But when you meet your friends, the diplomacy window is mostly blank, and gives you a single option to 'accept a trade'.... WTF? Also when you build your 2nd city (or others I suspect), theres a good chance you'll crash to desktop. This is with NO AI either!

2) Played on the Internet. 3 people, all sub 200ms ping. Even played turn-based, and well, pretty much unplayable. Tried 2 people, 120ms ping time, playable, if you don't mind waiting 10 seconds after you move a unit.

All playtesting done with 2.0Ghz+ machines with 1.0GB+ RAM on DSL or cable!

[statusperfect]

Anyone knows if there are more patches coming up?

[Backpack]

I haven't seen any evidence of freezing during gameplay.

Update

18th - Desktop - No luck.
19th - Reinsert - No Luck
20th - Reinsert - Success.

This pattern of desktop, reinsert, reinsert has shown up now twice..... just a coincidence so far. Time will tell.

[Gyromancer]

OK, Here's a couple of bugs I experienced last night:

Bug #1: Playing two player with 6 AI on a LAN. Using version 1.04 on both computers. Host is XP machine, other player is Win98(patched version of OS) No time limits on turns playing chieftan. (Teaching my SO how to play ;-) Host locks up on turn 5 or so. (Total machine hang--had to hit reset button) Hadn't done anything on the hosting computer for a few minutes. (Was busy explaining roads or something.)

Bug#2: Decide to continue the game on the non-host computer after it recognizes that the host is gone. It works surprisingly well, but at some point I notice that every time we hit end turn, the game cycles through two turns. (e.g. We see an AI stack of warriors show up on the outlands. Click end turn see the AI move, get some production messages, see the AI move again and get some more production messages. My theory on this one is that the game was trying to recognize the "Auto-end turn" (which apparently is automatically disabled in MP) and the actual end turn command (from the spacebar/enter/clicking the end-turn button) at the same time. After we saved and loaded the game as a SP game, everything worked normally (and the Auto-end turn was enabled again...)

Small complaint: When you move a unit on it's last movement point, the game INSTANTLY recenters on the next unit. (you don't get any time to register what the unit saw with its last move.....) I think a 1/4 to 1/2 second delay would have been nice there.

[SpencerH]

Just a thought kpwilli..... do you have two CD drives, one for the CIV3 disk and one for PtW?

[TheeLord]

Well, I played a game with 3 people last night, didnt seem to run much worse after one of the guys quit.. I had the map on tiny, game actually didnt freeze, just was slow enough to be unplayable.. guess Im gonna be stuck with single player for a while.. hopefully that stops freezing soon too.....

[Backpack]

SpencerH,
Nope. I only have a single CD drive installed. For the record it's a WPI-4424 model, which translates into a Wearnes (Products International??) 4x Write, 4x ReWrite, 24x Read. I forget what name brand it was sold under.

Later

[Inverse Icarus]

ERROR MESSAGE:

The exception Breakpoint
A breakpoint has been reached.
(0x80000003) occured in the application 0x77f7f570

Click OK to terminate the program.

[ OK ]

this happened when someone made a game, i joined, and they left.

IBM Thinkpad T30
1.8 GHZ
ATI Readon Mobile
WinXP SP1

[SpencerH]

KWP...

It was just a thought about possible copy protection.

[isak]

Originally posted by kwpulliam1973
SpencerH,
Nope. I only have a single CD drive installed. For the record it's a WPI-4424 model, which translates into a Wearnes (Products International??) 4x Write, 4x ReWrite, 24x Read. I forget what name brand it was sold under.

That's actually a CD-RW drive, not a CD-R drive

CD recorders and copy protection schemes have never been too happy with each other - if reinstalling the game doesn't fix this, you should write Infogrames and complain about it - they made a patch for this, for the original Civ3, so if enough people complain to them, they might do the same for PtW.

[Dominae]

Ok, I've been trying to play MP for the better part of 2 hours now, and I mus say (even though I don't want to), that I've never seen a worse piece of commercially-available software.

1. The game crashes whenever it wants to. Either going from the 'Staging Window' screen to the 'Multiplayer Setup' screen, or waiting for the clock to tick down in-game, or whatever, I've seen Play the World crash. It must be about 25 times now in one day.

2. The lag is horrendous. Although I've heard of some lucky few who managed to play relatively lagless games, they are very few and far between, and they were usually 1v1. In one of my own 1v1 games (with 2 bots, but that shouldn't matter), the lag was so bad that I couldn't even chat without having to wait about a mintue for the dialog box to appear.

3. After kicking someone out of my game in the Setup window, that player (or, that player's Play the World software) proceeded to reinter my game twice, taking up two seperate slots. After attempting to boot both copies of him (again!), the game crashed (see 1 above).

4. In my experience, if the host leaves a game, a crash usually occurs for the other players, although I have heard otherwise.

5. If you're behind a firewall, read the readme, because there's no way MP is ever going to work for you. This isn't a bug, but it's so important that I might as well mention it.

6. Some minor considerations (in light of 1 and 2 above): you can't chat simultaneously in the 'Multiplayer Lobby' window and the 'Staging Window' (making shopping for games very difficult), the victory conditions are available in both drop-down menus and buttons (making the Setup quite confusing), and there's no way to see who is online in the Lobby unless they say something (making finding opponents quite annoying).


So, I'm going to try again later tonight, but I think we may have to wait a bit to really play some MP. Good thing Play the World comes with some other features!


Dominae

[isak]

Originally posted by Dominae
1. The game crashes whenever it wants to. Either going from the 'Staging Window' screen to the 'Multiplayer Setup' screen, or waiting for the clock to tick down in-game, or whatever, I've seen Play the World crash. It must be about 25 times now in one day.

I haven't had a crash yet

5. If you're behind a firewall, read the readme, because there's no way MP is ever going to work for you. This isn't a bug, but it's so important that I might as well mention it.

LOL - reading the readme is probably a good idea even if you're not behind a firewall. The fact that certain firewalls are so restrictive that you need to set them up, is not really something there's a hell of a lot to be done about. They're supposed to keep internet traffic out, remember

[Dominae]

I'm not even going to try and start defending my rant about MP in Play the World, because 1) I'm not an idiot (i.e. I know when something sucks and when it's a matter of preference), and 2) the chat room is full of unsatisfied players (who presumably aren't idiots either).

As for the firewall thing, let's just say that many extremely popular internet games don't require any firewall tweaking whatsoever.


Dominae

[isak]

You don't need to defend anything - I believe you already and you have some good points too. I merely pointed out, that I haven't had any crashes yet. That doesn't mean there aren't any bugs, nor does it mean I won't ever experience a crash.

I don't think anybody are idiots either, but I do have a feeling that a lot of people just rush in without thinking about the fact that a computer is not a closed system - Firaxis didn't test the game on your computer, so there's no way to guarantee that it will work off the shelf - or even ever. It most likely will eventually work, but there's no guarantee. If there's a readme, at least do yourself the favor of going through it. I know you did Dominae or else you wouldn't be pointing those things about the router out.
But a lot of people don't read it, and then complain that the game isn't working. Ignorance is fine with me - but when it's combined with juvenile use of foul language, it really gets on my nerves.

I work as a part-time ISP hotliner, and about 50% of the stories I listen to, start out like this: "My internet isn't working, so there must be a problem with your servers, cause it was working fine yesterday and I didn't touch nothing...."
I have to be nice and don't mind being nice either, but every now and then someone gets to me so much, I almost reply: "Well our internet was working fine yesterday too, and we didn't touch nothing either, so going with your logic, sir, it would appear your internet is actually working - have a nice day!"
In about 10% of these conversations, the error turns out to be on the ISP end of the connection

As for the firewalls - do you know how many firewalls there are? Software and Hardware combined. I find it hard to believe that any but the simplest Java games could be run without any problems on all firewalls. But regardless of that, Firaxis decided to use Gamespy, and they require the Firewall tweaking actually - the instructions in the PtW readme are basically identical to Gamespy's instructions.
I would have loved to see direct TCP/IP too - but I'm sure I can live with Gamespy for now - even though I'm behind a Firewall too.

[Sinapus]

I did get a crash when I clicked on the "description" button in the choose Player Civ screen when "Random" was selected as the player. Which probably means there is no Civpedia entry for "Random" civilization. Otherwise, I just got it and haven't run into any problems yet, but probably will.