New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.583_MP_Hardening
This one has some mod updates to the Sidekicks mod, and then it also solves some issues that could occur in multiplayer.
Most notably, this makes it so that doing a resync in the middle of an MP game no longer causes a rash of spurious errors, with an additional risk of the game crashing. Secondarily, it hardens some methods against potential exception in general during regular partial syncs on MP clients.
Overall I would not expect this to be a panacea for MP, but every time a full sync is done, things generally clean up nicely. And a lot of the things that cause a client to diverge are based around errors, so that also helps from the other end.
Beyond that, why exactly sometimes clients get into a strange mode that is only fixed with a resync is a mystery to us. It’s not something we can easily replicate with two players, as it pretty much always works perfectly for us that way — but then some players run into problems quickly with only two players, even on LANs. The larger the game, and the further apart people are, the more likely problems seem to be — usually. That’s what is so frustrating about those particular MP gremlins, is that not only can we not reliably reproduce them at all, but the conditions others are experiencing to cause it are really varied. That is deeply frustrating.
So the improvements in this build should help ease that substantially, and if you’re using auto-resync then that should be way cleaner in particular. But as a perfect solution for the issues that folks still run into more than I had realized, I don’t think that’s there. If you are playing multiplayer and you run into outright exceptions rather than strange behavior, always do send those to us, though — that really helps, since those are things where we can tangibly fix something that is a contributor.
Thanks for reading.
Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you’ve been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing will likely resume in March. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It’s really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you’re interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
