Desync

[Tharkun]

What's the story with the desync? Few games now where myself and my team are playing 2 different games.

[Armynator]

Had this problem the last 3 games I played too.
One thing always was the same yet: it desynced around the point where the first priest entered the map, in all 3 cases. I noticed this in the newest version only. (4.9.3)

If you found any similarities in the games, let me know please - I'm still investigating this issue a lot, but didn't found a safe way to prevent it, or all possible causes yet.
You can try to play smaller maps for now, maybe not bigger than 2vs2. You could try to avoid arty spam or even the full arty doc too. Sadly, desync happens really often lately, and it's not really possible to do tests with it, cause it's pretty random at all.

[Tharkun]

It's happened in 2v2s and without anyone playing Royal Artillery.
What makes it even more annoying is that the person that drops is not replaced by a bot, so all his shit just goes off to die.

[Armynator]

Is always the same player getting desync?

[atazs]

Desync is a huge issue. Sometimes my units keep moving on their own and i can't control them. Other times they won't move only with a huge delay. Also no allied units move at this time, and even the CPU units stop attacking. For the others, the game continues on, for example they could see their units where i could not etc...
I played a bunch of games last night:
First one i hosted, my friend lagged out (he had massive delays in moving his units) but did not drop. I had no lag whatsoever. Not sure about the other guy.
Then my friend who lagged out hosted another game, this time nobody lagged out and we finished the game.
Then we joined someone's game. This time it was the host that lagged out, apparently he couldn't move his units either. None of us had any problems.
Then me, my friend and the guy that lagged out joined someone else's game. Yet again the guy that lagged out before lagged out again. Nobody else had any lag or problems whatsoever.

All games were against expert CPU, and in all games i noticed that whenever i or my friend quit, the game crashed to desktop with an error. I could see my friends them restarting the game. This also happens sometimes when the game ends, meaning we win, then i click continue and the game just crashes. This happens in 90% of the time. My friend said it's my HDD which can't handle the game that's why these desyncs happen. Maybe he is right since my HDD is really bad. I can run the game 60fps with everything on ultra and dx10 but the maps take a long time to load.

[Tharkun]

The players vary.

It's doubtful that it's a hard drive problem (the crashing might be) but in the instances I've experienced there are no crashes.

[Warhawks97]

Well the desyncs are often different. Sometimes the units are partly controled by a bot. They sometimes move but often just stay arround. The player that got desynced plays only with bots sometimes.

Also it happens that the units are still produced by the player, but they do not move anymore. So once a mate build many tanks and we saw that. But for us the tanks did stay only arround the building or CW truck.


And sometimes the player is neither replaced by a bot, nor do we see what he builds. He is simply inactive then.

I dont really know what causes it. It happend to pretty much all of us already on every map, with every faction etc.
Sometimes relic/steam servers are down for while. That could be one reason.

[SuperSpy]

I have noticed huge desync issues as well. We used to have problems in one of the 4.8.x versions, and it seemed to go away in the final 4.8.x version. But suddenly the 4.9.3 version is really bad. I'd guess around 20% of the multiplayer games I've played so far have ended without desync.

In the 4.8.x series, my anecdotal reason was that it was a collision detection issue causing the desync. We always play humans vs AI, so maps that tend to have a small bottleneck (or get wired off into one) tended to be the ones that caused issues, with 2-4 players worth of tanks and vehicles having path finding issues moving around a crowded front line often causing desyncs.

In 4.9.3, the issue happens a lot more, and although I haven't played many games (maybe a dozen) it seems to again be down to vehicle collision detection or path finding. The worst game we had involved a map with all the AI players having to share a single armor exit from their base, and one of the AI built a building in front of it, causing a massive pile up of tanks and vehicles behind it. That game got so bad that each player ended up desynced in their own way, which was a first for us as usually it's one player desyncing (sometimes it's even the host).

Also, each player began to lag massively on screen, as if the game engine was struggling trying to consume what it saw as invalid net code commands. Several of those machines were somewhat high end (mine for instance has a fast SSD, 32GB of RAM, and an i7-4790K) so the sudden performance issues kinda made us think something had to be horribly wrong.

I can't recall any games we played in infantry only mode that ended in desync in the 4.8.x series, but I don't think we've played any of those since the 4.9.x patches.


EDIT: If you want to stress test any collision issues, I'd recommend playing a game vs AI on Castle Wolfenstein. That map has destructable gates the AI doesn't know how to shoot, so you can let the AI bottle up, then shoot one of them down and they will funnel out in a massive log jam. If you set it to unlimited popcap, it will really work the game engine hard.

[Tharkun]

Anyone on the development side care to comment?

[MarKr]

SuperSpy says it often happens in AI games. I don't really know if it is caused by something we did since we only changed/tweaked units and abilities but nothing about AI pathfinding and similar stuff.

What's the story with the desync? Few games now where myself and my team are playing 2 different games.

Especially this started to happen after one of the Steam patches iirc.

Several of those machines were somewhat high end (mine for instance has a fast SSD, 32GB of RAM, and an i7-4790K) so the sudden performance issues kinda made us think something had to be horribly wrong.

This is an engine problem, the game sometimes laggs a lot even on high-end machines. The lagg is dependant on several factors e.g. number of units on the map (the more the worse) - this is one of the reasons why AI games on huge maps lagg more seriously than PvP. AI tends to build vast number of units, much more than players usually build. Also some maps tend to lagg more than others - this is probably caused by something that the map creator messed up. So if you play on such a map versus 4 hard AIs, the lagg is usually horrible. Of course "chain is only as strong as its weakest link" so if one of the players has some old computer that barely meets the minimum requirements, then it slows down the game for everyone. Also I strongly recommend against playing on maps with rainy weather on - rain is an incredible FPS eater...

Maybe wait for Wolf what he has to say about this issue, he knows more about this stuff than I do.

[Opus__X]

I have installed the Blitzkrieg Mod. I can run smaller 2v2 games but 3v3 games the game desync's. I have experienced similar issues as other users have described and very frustrated. Overall really like the mod. Just wish it was more stable for me. 4.8.8 I had no issues with. I too am running win10, GTX850m 16 GB Ram SSD. I have tried running in compatibility mode win7 and same issue. If logs or other items are needed for debugging please let me know.

[Kasbah]

Always happens in Scheldt vs AI

[calste63]

This desync problem is really bad. Almost every game I played with my friends against AI since new patch ended with me and them playing different games. It's really frustrating and it's taking me away from my favourite mod for coh and maybe from coh in general.
I didn't have these kind of problems with previous patches, so I think it's 4.9.3 related.
Hope the devs will find a fix for this, really... Keep up the good work!

[RollingSherman]

Me and my group of 3 friends that used to play BK on a regular basis have given up on playing ever since the desync issue. We all have mid grade to high end systems and never had any issues prior to the most recent patch. We are thinking about rolling back to an older version (one of my friends has all the installers saved). I hope you guys can fix this so I can scratch my Blitzkrieg itch.

[Kasbah]

I play BK quite regularly since 2010 and desync is pretty new but I don't know exactly in which version it started.
I am trying to go back to the old version (no steam) where there was also the possibility to plan LAN and have no lag at all.

[Wolf]

How is the desync lately? Did someone find any pattern to it? Is it still a problem? Does it affect only some players and some not?

[kwok]

Still happens, but I think it's got to do with player side. Normally happens with bad internet connections or lagged games.
The only pattern I suspected was whenever an off map unit was called in.

[JimQwilleran]

Seems like it is more or less connected with calling in anything from off-map. Mostly planes and tanks I think.
But it's impossible to know when desync starts.

[Kasbah]

3 desyncs in my last 3 games, anything planned to fix it?

[JimQwilleran]

It's the game's problem, not the mod specifically. Even if devs would be willing to help, they can't. Everything is about relic/steam servers.

What I have noticed is that desync also happens quite often to player whose mate left the game.

[Kasbah]

again desync, seriously.
With the old version I NEVER had desync, now with steam it's a mess

[Sukin-kot (SVT)]

again desync, seriously.
With the old version I NEVER had desync, now with steam it's a mess

In past game stopped in case of desync with the message "internet problem" or something, after one of the steam updates they removed this notification and game started to continue even after desyncs, fucking brilliant decision.

For me it doesnt have any regularity, sometimes I dont have it for months, in other time I get it in several games in a row.

[Kasbah]

LOL, brillant indeed... I remember the old message, yes.

And same for me, it's like the "Playback issue". I can spend months without having it and months having to delete the folder after every game. Normally desync and playback issue are related, but not always.

[SzepyCZ]

guys,try play with BK fun mode
me+friends had desyncs in 60% matches,but since we play with fun mode,we never had one(more than 30 games played with fun mode)