Harle Armistice

Join Date 02/2008

Various Multiplayer Problems

Urgh.

I really enjoy this game, but I've been having so many problems with it that I am considering just putting it away until they're fixed in a patch. I'm sure they will be at some point, but the level of frustration me and my friends have been facing trying to jury rig this game to work is making everything rather cranky.

First of all, only one of us has managed to actually successfully host a game. Myself and another friend have had zero luck. I have opened ports(perhaps incorrectly, it's been a while since I've ever needed to mess with a router to play a game online), DMZed my computer from my router, turned off Vista's firewall, all to no avail.

And the one person who can host a game seems to have a problem where me and my other friend freeze after a while, at which point we have to leave the game. And to make it all worse, for some reason we can never load saved multiplayer games.

All in all, multiplayer is absolutely unusable for the three of us. Like completely, utterly broken.

If there is one thing you guys need to do in 1.03, it's fix the multiplayer issues. I've seen these problems reported in other threads, but to date nothing has fixed them. And frankly, in this day and age, having to go through this much trouble, strongarming a game to function out of the box, just doesn't seem right. I haven't had this much trouble getting a game to run online in years. If ever.

I hope that the various posted work-arounds aren't *the* solution. Please, patch the game so that it works without having to dig into router foolishness and turning off firewalls and such. We shouldn't have to make our computers more vulnerable just to play the game. It should just work. Every other game I have does.

Anyway, I do hope these issues will be addressed. As far as I'm concerned, gameplay balancing elements are nice and I'm looking forward to them, but they're totally pointless if I can't even play the game with friends.

Thanks.

multiplayer

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the_Monk

Join Date 01/2008

+222

Port-forwarding and firewall excepting (correctly mind you) does far less to make your computer "vulnerable" than asking the devs to "encapsulate" data traffic so it "by-passes" all security.

Without knowing it, understanding why, and obviously caring, you are asking the devs to actually make your computer more vulnerable. But hey, to each his own...

the Monk

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What people don't realize is, outside MMORPG's and centralized server games where you are not really hosting, but are the first to join, like diablo 2, most games require this NAT configuration and firewall settings stuff. I keep hearing, "my other games dont require me to do this!", when in reality most multiplayer games on the market do require you to do this stuff to host games, and this is not going to change. Its not the games fault your connections will not go through, its the routers, and its just doing what its designed to do.

All I can say is make sure you are entering the correct IP address in your router config when you open these ports. Go to start menu - Run - Type cmd. In the command prompt type ipconfig. the 192.168.1.X number is your IP, and the one you should be entering to forward your 6112 port. As long as you do this correctly, and do not run a firewall that is actively blocking the outgoing connections, you should be fine.

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I have opened up ports before. I had already done everything that you suggested, Chroniss, before I made the post.

When that failed, I turned on UPnP. Nothing. I DMZed the computer I was hosting from, which has always been a last resort when port-forwarding has failed for one reason or another. And that also failed. I turned off my Vista firewall, and still nothing.

Now, I am no network expert, and I am sure there is a way to make this work, but honestly, I cannot fathom why a fully DMZed, firewall-inactive, UPnP router/computer configuration would be experiencing any kind of problems hosting. Essentially, everything that could possibly be stopping connections is -turned off- and I still can't host.

That is my problem here.

If it was just a matter of opening the ports, I wouldn't have made the comment about the game forcing people to open the computer up to hazards. As I said, even my friend who got it working was unable to host a game, with ports opened properly, until the Vista firewall was disabled. Even after specifically setting Sins of a Solar Empire as an exception in firewall settings, the firewall was still blocking it. It had to be turned off. This shouldn't be the case.

As I said, I have had to open ports for things before. For this game, nothing is working. I think that is a legitimate concern. I am not sure why we can't get it to work, it may be a Vista thing, it might be something else, but the amount of frustration and difficulty we have had getting this game to work has been above and beyond anything else we've played. Period.

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And that's to say nothing of the freezing issue, and the multiplayer game loading completely failing. I've seen a jury-rig to fix the loading problem. We haven't tried it yet. And frankly, with the frequent freeze-disconnecting, it's not worth it.

There are real problems here that should be addressed. The directions posted on the technical FAQ for bypassing the router should work. They do not, at least not for everyone. Setting the router UPnP does not work. I may have made some stupid mistake in setting the port, but I've gone over Portforwarding.com again, I've read the FAQ, and nothing said here has made me think it's wrong. It just doesn't work. And DMZing at the very least should make the thing work. That kind of makes port-forwarding moot point, from what I understand.

So... why isn't it working?

The way the game is structured to work with Vista appears to not be so great at present. I am no expert, I don't claim to have a huge amount of knowledge on the subject and I am sure there is someone out there who could fix this problem. If the instructions given by the FAQ don't work, I think I'm entitled to ask for either clarification, elaboration, or a fix in the patch. Just because it is working for you doesn't mean it's working for everybody.

Thanks.

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Blair Fraser

Join Date 10/2006

+292

You are right, if your forwarding is correct and the firewall is either allowed or bypassed there should be no problem and at the present moment we have no idea what it could be as this has never come up for us. I'm not saying you aren't having a problem its just that we have no idea what could be causing it if its not something that wasn't addressed in the FAQ. Please email support@ironcladgames.com outlining your network architecture, what you have tried, what the specific errors are and we'll work with you to figure it out.

Edit: A few other questions I just thought of to add to the email:

1. Are you at a university or something similiar?

2. Does your router have its own firewall? We are getting dozens of cases reported to us where people only allow Sins through their software firewall but not their router firewall. I'll be adding this to the FAQ.

3. Are you 100% sure your TCP/Winsock isn't corrupted? This is the only other case where we've seen this behavior. Details on this problem can be found here: http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/03/troubleshooting-how-to-reset-internet.html

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the_Monk

Join Date 01/2008

+222

an aside...
...not to mention ISP's blocking more and more traffic these days. When I was helping the WiC community (world in conflict) get "connected" I determined that WiC traffic (allthough not p2p in nature) was being seen by many ISP's worldwide as p2p-traffic and several of them were in fact "filtering" without their client's knowledge. Some people were able to get their ISP's to stop doing that, other's weren't even successful in getting the ISP to admit they were doing it in the first place.

@Harle

1. Have you actually confirmed that your cable/dsl mode is nothing more than a "pass-through" for your internet connection? I can tell you this, if your cable/dsl modem is doing more than that it won't matter one whit what you do with your router, computer firewalls, as the connection will be being blocked long before it even gets to your router or computer (the same goes for outgoing connections).

2. Follow the trail, step-by-step. When you port-forward AND use UPNP you're actually creating a -1 +1 = 0 scenario, so don't be surprised when it doesn't work. Do ONE thing at a time, NEVER try something, then without reversing it ADD something else to the mix. That's just asking for trouble (also makes it damn near impossible to troubleshoot later).

Network transport is exactly like the highways you drive to work on everyday, we all travel where the freeway goes......so does network traffic. It can't just go anywhere...

the Monk

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The game runs great on Vista, I run two comps, one XP and one Vista, and I host on both. You did not mention it so the first thing I would do is what Monk said, connect directly to the modem to check if thats the issue.

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Took me 5 minutes to set up the fowarding since then I hosted at least 40 hours without any problems nor problems to resume from a saved file. We do crash randomly from time to time but it isnt too bad. Looks more like a local problem to me then a bug.

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Yes, the port forwarding thingy is quickly fixed. No problems with vista and xp firewalls from this game. also, im not really sure you even need to set up dmz. I can host without problems without it.....

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Alright, thanks for the various replies. For the tech peoples;

I ended up spending another three hours reconfiguring, rebooting, and attempting to host a game(wash-rinse-repeat). I didn't want to send in anything to support unless I was absolutely sure I couldn't get it working. My router's(D-Link with the newer firmware) port forwarding is not particularly straight forward, and as it turned out, even when I'm able to host a game it says that I can't. And while I tried a half dozen different configurations and asked a friend to try to log in(unsuccessfully), I went on assuming that when I had the settings right, the message would stop coming up.

It didn't. Which meant that even when I had it right I thought it was wrong. I couldn't just ask my friend to sit around trying to log in repeatedly for hours. But a tech savvy friend helped me get it configured to a point where he was puzzled that it wasn't working, so I asked a friend to try to log in anyway, and it worked despite the error message. We had no problems for the hour that we played, so hurray.

That's the good. The bad: UPnP just flat-out did not function with the game. Not sure why, it might be my router. I did try having someone connect with no firewalls in place and just UPnP set on, and it didn't work. But that's fine, since it doesn't stop the game from working. It's just a pain that it wasn't an option.

Also, my friend still can't host games without the connection freezing on everyone.

So anyway, I take back some of what I said. Most of it was just router nuisance.

That network error detection could stand to be adjusted, though. The problem could well have been solved before I even wrote the forum post, if it hadn't been giving me bogus feedback. =P

Thanks!

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i had the same problem, i was playing at LAN with 2 friends of mine and after 2 hours of play, the game just freezed and my friends logged out the game.

We try 2 times to load the saved game and after a couple of minutes, the game freezed again and they had disconnected from the game.

Same problem as Harle.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

I run into a problem of false positives (i.e. Ironclad online telling me that peopel won't be able to join my game) but people are actually able to join no problem.

My XP box doesn't have the problem. Just my Vista one. I'm not sure what the deal is. But it does work.

I wonder how many people are actually genuinely having problems versus people who are simply seeing that warning message and assuming no one can join their game.

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Well I know for a fact people can't join my games

I have followed all of the instructions given and I'm still having problems. I don't have any anti-virus or anti-spyware firewalls either

UPnP and SSDP are set to automatic, port 6000 to 6112 is open, windows firewall is disabled and I'm still not able to host

I have absolutely no trouble hosting in other games, I don't understand why this is any different

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the_Monk

Join Date 01/2008

+222

Please download and read my guide "Networking and SINS" linked-to from the "how to: see/connect-to/host Servers" thread on page 3 (POST #66)stickied in the technical forum.

If you follow those instructions exactly, you should have no problem playing/hosting.

btw.....the latest satisfied "sins-host":
WWW Link

If you have any trouble implementing the instructions in my guide, I'll be glad to "talk" you through them via my TeamSpeak server as I did for the fellow in the above-linked thread.

the Monk

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is it possible to play mp if im using university residence internet? cos I'm not able to port forward. i tried playing today, i got in a game, but it kept on saying i was lagging

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I'm in the same boat as josephc1986 and I've read the majority of your posts. Since you are a bit of a network guru, do you think this will come down to a developer issue? I mean, it seems hard to fathom that a developer would create a game that has issues on any type of network. I mean that from a strictly economic standpoint...

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I'd like to add that a minute before my practice run on mp for sins, i was playing cs source with a 29 latency and no lag whatsoever

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I'd like to add that a minute before my practice run on mp for sins, i was playing cs source with a 29 latency and no lag whatsoever

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My best friend and I were all excited to get this game... but we are pretty much unable to play at all. We generally manage to load the game after a while of struggling, but once its 'up and running' I end up pinging at around 5000-6000... to say lag that high kinda sucks would be an understatement, heh. He wasn't even able to join my game, so we haven't been able to try a scenario where I host.

We both are college students running on college networks- I don't know for sure about his, but I know mine is strict NAT and his is probably the same. I honestly know very little about computers, so forgive this rather likely foolish question; is it the NAT that is messing us up? And if it is, is there any way around it or are all college students doomed to not play this otherwise fantastic game? The main reason I ask is because he and I HAVE played computer games online before and had no problems (we used to play Homeworld 2 all the time). Thanks for the help!

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