Multiplayer problems
Phil Sohn
ISPs over modems? Last night was hysterically bad. In 2:30 hours of trying
to play, we actually played for about 15 minutes. There were four main types
of problems:
1) Machines would hang when trying to join the game.
2) When starting a game, loading a new area, or saving people would be
dropped from the game often causing their machine to hang. It looks like
there is a hint of this problem in the readme.
3) Baldur's Gate can crash or hang with Alt-Tabbing. Again this is mentioned
in the readme, but when you don't know why people can not connect, ICQ can
be helpful.
4) The server crashed twice.
Has anyone else had similar problems? I can not find any info in the readme
for the new patch that addresses these issues. In fact, I have heard from
people running the patch that these problems get substantially worse.
^( However, the readme does provide some clues for why this might be
happening:
* Multiplayer: Failure to Connect
Baldur's Gate will sometimes display a "Connection Failed" message
when you are attempting to connect and are suffering from slow ping
times. This could happen as often as 1 in 4 times if your ping time
is greater than 500ms. Try again and you will connect.
It is not unusual for us to have ping times greater the 500ms worse case. I
wonder if this is why people get dropped. I suspect that this threshold
extends into other parts of the game aside from just the initial connection
process. Whenever I use GameSpy to find a Quake II server, the lowest ping
that I can find is usually around 300 or 350 and values above that (way
above that) are common. If that's about as good as it gets then a 150ms to
200ms is an awfully small operating margin. My gut feel is that we regularly
exceed 500ms and would be lucky to sustain a session at or below 500ms for
any period of time. If that's true then some bonehead probability tells me
that 1 in 4 disconnect odds does not make for a happy four or five player
game and does not bode well for this title.
* Multiplayer: Minimizing BG During Loading
Using Alt-Tab to minimize Baldur's Gate during Game Creation or Area
Loading may cause the application to either hard lock or terminate.
If possible, don't do this. * Multiplayer: Character Doesn't Appear
In a multiplayer game, if the host is controlling more than one
character(s), and Alt-Tabs during an area transition, the secondary>
character(s) will not appear until the host restores the game. This
cannot be resolved as the character data cannot be transferred to
other game machines if the host machine is not active.
The Alt-Tab is a big problem. I think that the game's Alt-Tab sensitivity
also goes beyond the information in the paragraph and extends into the game
itself. I think I've noticed that you run the risk of Alt-Tab disasters
anytime the game has to move any information around other than simple
chatting. This is a really bad thing because if you don't have ICQ running
and you can't Alt-Tab then all you can do is sit and stare at the
arbitration screen all evening and wonder what the hell is going on. This is
a bad bad situation. Personally I don't trust Baldur's Gate enough to allow
it to be my only source of communication with my gaming buddies. Kind of a
Catch 22, huh?
Any work arounds for these problems? Any chance of these shortfalls being
addressed Interplay?
phil
Andrew Boatwright
Phil Sohn wrote in message <785p86$p...@news.dns.microsoft.com>...
>Does anyone have work arounds for multiplayer problems when connecting to
>ISPs over modems? Last night was hysterically bad. In 2:30 hours of trying
>to play, we actually played for about 15 minutes. There were four main
types
>of problems:
Our group have had MAJOR problems when trying multiplay; the only real
solution we've found is to use HEAT (as packaged with the US version; others
are not so lucky without a 5 MB download); IP connections either hang
machines, boot players or (in one case) let you transfer messages but don't
allow you to actually link up with your characters and play!!
jc6...@my-dejanews.com
I've had this game for less than 2 days. So far it's been more work than play.
Here's the summary:
First day, tore open the package and installed the game. Wondering why the
graphics ran so slow and ugly on my PII300 w/Millenium 4MB. Tried the game in
windowed mode, looks beautiful; tried to run windows mode with desktop
resolution lower than 1028x768...back to smeared colors and bad cursors. Read
the README file, tried all the BLT stuff mentioned in it, reinstalled DirectX
6.0 from CD, reinstalled latest Matrox drivers, no go. After searching
through dejanews, found out that you need to use the middle BLT AND set the
color depth to 16-bit. That solved the problem! I want to know how the QA
people knew about the problems with Millenium card enough to provide specific
BLT fixes in the README file and failed to mention that you have to set the
screen resolution to 16-bit. Played 0.5 hour afterwards, no problems or lock
ups.
Second day, my brother-in-law came over with his copy of the game and we
tried to run multiplayer over a 10Mbps LAN (the main reason I bought this
game is so we can advanture together; he's right next door anyhow). We ran
the game for about 4 hours straight and got at least 5 hard lockups, 10-15
kick back to desktop. We tried changing the protocol from IPX to TCP/IP, and
back to IPX...same old crap. Most of the crashes occur on the host side;
though occasionally the client gets dumped also and of course I don't have to
tell you that these crashes are NOT due to bad pings. Observations on what's
happening on screen when the game crashed; note that we both have the most up
to date drivers/bios...etc and did the recommended install with 300MB cache
file:
PC 1: PII300, 96MB, Millenium 4MB PCI, CL V2, Yamaha OPL3/4, IDE HD/24X
CD-ROM, 3COM 10/100 PC 2: PII450, 128MB, TNT 16MB AGP, SBLive! Value, UWSCSI
HD/12X CD-ROM, Intel 10/100
1) Resting outdoors: This is the most annoying one of them all; when resting
a party outside of town, the campfire video loads from the CD and the problem
occurs: First, our CD-ROM drives are not identical, so naturally the video
doesn't show up at the same time. If he get's back to the game earlier than
me AND I click on the mouse to get rid of the video, the game will lock up
about 85% of the time. Note that by leaving the video running does NOT
guarantee that there won't be crashes (still occurs about 50% of the time),
but trying to skip the video is a big no no for us. 2) In the room at
Candlekeep where you have to kill a bunch of spiders, his machine would lock
up every time he enters the room. I suspect that it's due to the SBLive!
Value card because the blue screen of death mentioned something about the
EMU10K. Never saw that bug again after leaving the room...then again, I'm
still at the beginning. 3) This bug is much rarer than the first (it happened
twice within the 4 hour period): if I enter the room, and he doesn't follow
into the room within 2 seconds, sometimes his game would drop back to
desktop.
> The Alt-Tab is a big problem. I think that the game's Alt-Tab sensitivity
> also goes beyond the information in the paragraph and extends into the game
> itself. I think I've noticed that you run the risk of Alt-Tab disasters
> anytime the game has to move any information around other than simple
> chatting. This is a really bad thing because if you don't have ICQ running
> and you can't Alt-Tab then all you can do is sit and stare at the
> arbitration screen all evening and wonder what the hell is going on. This is
> a bad bad situation. Personally I don't trust Baldur's Gate enough to allow
> it to be my only source of communication with my gaming buddies. Kind of a
> Catch 22, huh?
I have a solution for you (well kind of): try to run the game in a window
instead of full screen until you connect to each other. I had to do it due to
the Millenium bug just to get the game to run properly and there's no
discernable ill effects from switching apps while the game is running; with
the bonus that you can see the chat screen even while playing.
Argh, this game is suppose to tide me over until MPS fixes Falcon 4.0's long
list of bugs but so far, I've managed to play for probably 2 hour and debugged
my problems (drivers/hardware) for the other 6 hours. If anyone has any
suggestions, please let me know.
Jerry
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