Map Intercontinental not working in Multiplayer

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 06 Feb 2007, 19:41

Hi, last night we tryied, with EE Decimator as Host to get a Game on Intercontinental going. The Map works fine, as far as i tested it - with Bots, in various Mods and AllyCombinations.

We used EE 171 and after all had readied up, the usual loadingscreen appeared, pathing was done an i got a short (part of a Second) Glance on the Map & the list of Players. Then drop- spring disappears, without warning, failure or errorsign. No Bluescreen. This happened several Times, tried with fixed Positions and other Things. So we finally tried to see, if it was mod or Host related (Thousand Thx to Decimator for a hour of Patience, even rebooting his PC for this ) and started a Game on FAs MoonMap, it worked perfectly. So no Firewallisue..

I am cluelless, i can`t even erase the source of the evil withing my Map, because i don`t know what is causing the Troubles. Is it the Size ?

Plz Help

hunterw · Post by **hunterw** » 06 Feb 2007, 19:57

Just start eliminating potential sources of error.

First, try compiling with a solid-color texture map.
If it still crashes, try compiling without features.
If it still crashes, try with a minimalist .smd file (no skybox, no detail tex)

It will eventually work, and when it does you will have identified the culprit!

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 06 Feb 2007, 20:02

Does one of the loading steps take an extraordinary long time?

(I sometimes drop if I accidentally have something running that's eating 100% CPU: ie. spring starts, so it only gets 50% CPU and esp. generating trees takes so long then that my connection to the host times out.)

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 06 Feb 2007, 20:15

It has indee a lot of trees... So kicking Features will solve this ?
I can make A Version without Trees & Palmlettos..

Thx for the Advice -

will try this out

Pic

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 06 Feb 2007, 20:29

Nah, that was just an example. Actually, I dont think tree generation time is dependent on map size at all...

I just loaded the map though, and I noticed the "creating ground shading" step was taking a pretty long time, quite possible it takes more time then the network timeout (esp. on a bit slower PCs, I have AMD 64 3200+), which results in lost connections with springs poor networking while loading.

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 06 Feb 2007, 23:59

So if i understand it right, with everybod having Shadows turned off, it should work ? Just thinking that Epic is bigger in Size - 40x 40 and works with turned off shadows..

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 07 Feb 2007, 08:49

I don't thinkg creating ground shading is really related to shadows being turned on or off, especially now since you can turn shadows on and off on the fly using "/shadows".

If it is what I suspect though, it is pretty easy to fix...
(so it's on my todo list already)

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 07 Feb 2007, 12:28

Thx Tobi.. so the Map can be again dlded without me to do big changes ? Hurray

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 07 Feb 2007, 14:06

If it is what I suspect, yes. But obviously it won't work well until next spring release, except for games in which everyone has an uberfast PC.

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 07 Feb 2007, 15:42

I will add a Warning in the Unknown File Description... Thx again for the fast Diagnostics ... :)

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 07 Feb 2007, 21:44

The long loading times are caused by the amount of tiles in the map (ie. the raw size of the .smt). I will have fixed the time outs due to these loading times tonight.

EDIT: ouch, I'm too optimistic. The biggest chunk of load time goes to the actual decompressing of the 7zip file, making it a design nightmare to fix it

EDIT 2: Some stats:

(sdd) Loading step `Loading tile file' took 0.468 seconds
Loading step `Reading tiles' took 0.687 seconds
=> Total 1.155 seconds
(sdz) Loading step `Loading tile file' took 2.8 seconds
Loading step `Reading tiles' took 0.191 seconds
=> Total 2.991 seconds, slowdown factor 2.6 (relative to sdd)
(sd7) Loading step `Loading tile file' took 14.783 seconds
Loading step `Reading tiles' took 0.2 seconds
=> Total 14.983 seconds, slowdown factor 13 (relative to sdd)

It is easily seen that .sd7 maps take 5 times more load time then .sdz maps (this excludes everything but loading the .smt).

So, my recommendation is to rerelease this map as .sdz. I'm pretty sure it will load fine then, at the cost of 20M file size.

I can not guarantee I will fix this bug for the next Spring release anymore, that depends on the 7zip API and whether I feel like rewriting the .smt loading code, the CFileHandler and some other classes possibly...

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 07 Feb 2007, 23:12

So i will have a 90 MB Sdz that runs fine ? Got to try..

PicassoCT · Post by **PicassoCT** » 08 Feb 2007, 19:09

SDZ Version - Just to let you know and with this the problem should be solveable.

http://spring.unknown-files.net/file/23 ... 32_Zipped/

Spring RTS Engine

Map Intercontinental not working in Multiplayer

Map Intercontinental not working in Multiplayer