ZOMGWTF PARALLEL UNIVERSES!!!

from Sins Forums

So... my brother and I both downloaded Entrenchment today and start happily destroying AI computers in a multi solar system large map. After playing for a couple of hours my brother(who was sitting right next to me) told me that yellow was attacking one of my planets. Upon hearing this news i thought "oh crap", but when i looked at the planet everything was fine. So i went and looked on his screen and sure enough, on his screen i had already lost the planet. We continued playing for a couple more hours and constantly observed how things were vastly different on our screens, but we were still connected to the same game. Saving and reloading did not fix the problem. It got to a point were we couldn't take it anymore and quit. So my question here is, has anyone else had a problem even remotely similar to this?

PS. if you want more info i can try and figure out how to upload save files, screen shots, i can even record video if you want some of that.

technical
1,087 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

 

You have what's called a Desync error.

Some aspects of the game are deterministic and based on certain variables and/or deterministic random number generators and if for some reason those numbers end up differing between the two computers you can end up having parallel universes.  This can sometimes be a problem for online multiplayer games.  You will see your ally's fleet sitting idly at his home system and notice that he hasn't taken more than one or two planets when he'll type out that he's just killed his nearest opponent.  You then start asking him how many planets he has and how may ships are in a certain well, etc.

Anyway, you can help reduce the likelihood of a desync by closing and reloading the game after every game.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

ah, that makes sense(kind of), why would the host not push those variables out to the clients? or even check that the clients have the same values for the variables?

BTW, did you play cod4? i seem to remember a dirty sanchezz in cod4.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

 

I wish I could answer your questions and provide more details but that's all that I really know about the desync.  I don't understand it either but apparently it's an issue in many RTS games.  I have never played COD4 so that is not me.