Multiplayer feedback

[Flavorable]

So me and my friends are trying to get into the multiplayer for the Pandora beta, good multiplayer has always been a serious element of the replayability of a game for us. This is what I've noticed so far:

What's good:

-Turn times are awesome!
After playing Civ 5 multiplayer the turn times are fantastic. I'm used to waiting minutes, but we rarely had to wait more than seconds!

-The game is well suited for multiplayer.
Most 4X games are very impractical for multiplayer because they are such a massive time commitment and don't lend well to dropping in and out. Pandora has shorter games that play at a faster pace. This makes starting a multiplayer Pandora game much more ideal. On top of that, the military game provides a lot more choice in approach which makes it much more exciting to play with other players than many other 4X games.

-It's multiplayer is already in a better shape than Civ 5 on launch!
The completely botched multiplayer launch for Civlization 5 permanently hurt that game's online community. Pandora has some serious online issues but is already is in a much better shape than Civ 5 was.

What needs work:

Constant disconnects.
This is definitely the most important issue so far. Many of our games were plagued with constant disconnects. The game would continue for everybody except the person who was dropped. The person who was dropped would simply get a message saying 'connection lost' and then would get dropped back into the main menu (not the game browser). It seems it gets less stable with more people.

'Can't connect to Master Server'
My friend Emperor_Blarg had another issue (If it's relevant his first issue was here: viewtopic.php?f=204&t=45482) where when trying to join a game where he would get an error saying: 'Can't connect to master server'.

Latency issues when playing with 4 people
It's difficult to know if this was the netcode or if it was one of us, but our suspicion is that it's the netcode. On the other hand, playing with 3 people was silky smooth.


Pandora is really starting to get good, and it's multi has bright future ahead of it. I hope some of these issues can be ironed out because we're all excited for what it can become.

[SephiRok]

Did always the same person drop?

Were the latency issues always in the beginning of the turn?

Thanks,
Rok

[Flavorable]

Did always the same person drop?

No, everybody except for the host occasionally dropped. It likely wasn't a problem with a specific host as we changed hosts several times. Something to note is that it wasn't a consistent problem. Sometimes we would have nobody drop for 40 turns and then 2 people would drop over a very short period of time.

Were the latency issues always in the beginning of the turn?

No.

[SephiRok]

I'll add a ping somewhere and we'll keep an eye on the latency. It could simply be the host or the connection or bandwidth. We do use way more bandwidth than we would have to, there's a lot of room for optimization there. But it sounds like there might be something more going on there. If you play any other games together do you have any latency issues elsewhere?

The disconnects are curious. I'll take a look and ponder for a bit.

[Flavorable]

I'll add a ping somewhere and we'll keep an eye on the latency. It could simply be the host or the connection or bandwidth. We do use way more bandwidth than we would have to, there's a lot of room for optimization there. But it sounds like there might be something more going on there. If you play any other games together do you have any latency issues elsewhere?

The disconnects are curious. I'll take a look and ponder for a bit.

We play a lot of games together with minimal to no lag, including the occasional FPS, where latency is much more important. So far it only seems to happen when playing with 4 people, and one of those people (Emperor_Blarg) has had other issues with getting the multiplayer working.

I think the bigger issue is definitely the disconnects. They've occurred with and without Emperor_Blarg.

[SephiRok]

Emperor_Blarg's issues are fixed though, right? It was just an account name issue.

[Flavorable]

Emperor_Blarg's original issue was fixed. (Very fast, which is awesome)

Now he faces another issue when trying to join a game where joining will occasionally fail with an error reading: cannot connect to Master Server.

It often takes several tries for me to join games he hosts, and vice versa.

[SephiRok]

0.25.6 should be live in about an hour. I've changed a few things in the network backend. Every incoming message now prevents timing out instead of just a particular one. Also added a ping display you can bring up with Alt+F1.

Would be amazing if you could give the new version a try. If there are issues, please keep an eye on the ping and if there's disconnects or problems connecting I would need logs from both the host and client right after the error occurs. The simpler and shorter the steps are before the issue occurs, the easier it will be to figure out what is going on from the logs.