More TCP/IP errata

[Grand_Armee]

I began my second online game with Garoco yesterday. Most things functioned well except that my production settings kept getting changed. Also after every 6 turns, the game would crash (after a long delay to let us know it has crashed).

Irritatingly, my diplomats wouldn't function completely. I sent both of them to warsaw to organize a coup. For four turns in a row, I set them to coup only to find at the beginning of the following turn, they'd gone back to the goodwill setting. IN the events screen, they would give more positive feeling towards my nation. In the end, I had to bring them home where they could influence more neighbors.

Very frustrating considering it didn't take a war to partition Poland 3 times.

[Naomi]

My problems migrated to you. :p

[ericbabe]

Thanks for the reports. We're looking into some of these issues. We're having problems reproducing them, though. They seem to be working properly in the games we test them in. It'd be helpful if, when submitting TCP/IP bug reports, submitters include information about their configurations:

1) which scenario playing (sounds like you're in 1792)
2) LAN or Internet
3) Whether it was the server/client/both-or-all players who were receiving problems.

Also, during beta testing before release we had a class of bugs that was dependent on the order of player turn submissions. That is, some bugs only showed up when a client submitted his orders before the server player had submitted his orders, or vice-versa. We watch for this in the games we play, and try to vary the orders of turn submissions. If you find any bugs, this might be one thing to watch for to help us narrow down which particular situations might be creating the bug.

[mogami]

Hi, Eric why don't you join us this saturday?

[Naomi]

Heh, this enquiry says everything.

[ericbabe]

Hi Mogami!

Thanks for the invitation. I'm not sure if I can play on Saturday. When will you be starting?

[garoco]

all the saturday we are playing TCPIP. The Game start more or less between 9:00 pr 10:00 am time New York City.
Regards
Gabriel

[ericbabe]

I may have found something that just *might* have been causing all these TCP/IP errors. It's a small bug in the code where the client sends the orders to the server player -- I forgot to put the trailing end-of-data markers on one of the data packets, and all of the other data packets after that one are things that players have sometimes been having problems with in TCP/IP.

It's a good guess that this might be the problem since much of the time random memory already contains a zero, and so often the data packets would work as expected (as I've mentioned, we've been totally unable to duplicate any of these errors, but this may simply because with my memory configurations the allocated memory occurs in areas that are already filled with zeroes.)

I can't say with certainty that it's fixed yet, but hopefully we can test this with the next version of the patch (which should be available soon) and see if we're still having these problems.

[Grand_Armee]

That would be good, Eric. AS it is now, I can't even set my diplomats to capture/expel. We were by the way playing with tcp/ip, not LAN. He's still been able to do everything with his French diplomats that he's wanted thus far.

[Grand_Armee]

...by the way, what do people need to play LAN? If it was faster than tcp/IP, it might be worth trying.

[ericbabe]

If your computers are connected in a LAN, then you should be good to go.

I sometimes have difficulties seeing machines on the part of the LAN setup interface that lists other machines hosting COG games if those machines aren't in the work-group of the client attempting to join the game, but I've always been able to type the name of the server machine into the form provided and connect directly. This is not always the case: sometimes prospective clients can see servers that are not in their work-group. It seems to vary from client to client -- my laptop on the WIFI, for instance, never sees any host computers and I always have to specify their names manually.