Units out of sync in MP

[ggerrietts]

Last night I put together a game with my wife and a couple friends. We were gonna abuse a couple computer players (or that was the idea anyway, it probably wouldn't have turned out to be as one-sided as I'm pretending).

About the time we would get to our first really big conflagration, we would crash with the message that units were out of sync.

I assume this problem is somehow load-related, but I'm not sure where the chokepoint is. Can anyone clue me in? Is this likely a bandwidth problem? Is it possible it's a server system problem? A client problem? Is it impossible to tell?

I don't mind buying a new CPU, or more RAM, or arranging for someone else to host, or detuning video settings. I just don't know where to start.

--G.

[jcoleman]

This is almost certainly a bug in Rise of Nations. At least I assume you're not using a cracked copy against your wife and/or friends. It is possible that it is hardware related but not likely. If you continually have problems, you might be sure you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard. We'll continue to look for and fix these instabilities.

Sorry for the difficulty,
J

[ggerrietts]

Actually, and to my embarassment, I think we found the major source of the problem.

When we thought we were patching our program that first night, we apparently did not actually get the program patched. If you try to connect to gamespy to get the patch, and then you cancel without logging in to gamespy, the patch doesn't ever get installed. We weren't interested in gamespy so much as connecting with a bunch of friends, so we all just cancelled out and never actually got patched.

We were able to replicate the problem every time prior to figuring this out, and after we figured it out, we managed to play one game to completion and a second game up to the point that the Nubians nuked us a second time. Then one of the players got lag-dropped for a few seconds and we had some kind of weird crashing problem when we tried to turn him into an AI and keep going.

But we think we've solved the original problem once we got a clue.

Thanks for the reply, and hope this helps anyone who has similarly done something dumb like this.

And thanks for the game!

[ggerrietts]

After saying there was a problem, then saying there wasn't, I'm back to report a problem again. A couple times now, we've had the notice that the game was out of sync in ammo.

We also had some flaky networking, I don't know if it's related or not, but I didn't want to record a false positive any more than a false bug.

[cobolprogrammer]

same here X4

I've played online against a friend of mine through GameSpy, and we haven't been able to complete a game yet due to sync problems. We've attempted at least four games with the same results; ammo sync fail, buiding sync fail, 'someother' sync fail. We also had a 'sprite sprite' fail whatever that is. Very frustrating, and always around the stage of the game where things are picking up.

We're good friends, so I know there's no hacking or 'trainers' going on. We just wanna finish ONE GAME!

I've got a P-III 800 w/ 512MB RAM and a GeForce GTS viedo card. Sound Blaster Live! Gamer sound card. Running Win XP Pro. His PC is the same, except for an Athlon processor of comparable processing speed.

[ggerrietts]

I wonder if this isn't something that can happen when lower-end systems are in the mix. Depending on the mix of players, we sometimes see these errors and sometimes do not. It's when the lowest-end system drops out that we almost never have a crashing problem.

[cobolprogrammer]

We're comfortably above the minimum specs so I don't think it's a hardware issue. The game runs fine up until the sync drop. It's like some code is triggered which is checking for out of balance situations caused by a hack or trainer program.