13 replies to this topic

[rainmaker]

Is there anything more frustrating than the game crashing 30 minutes into a heated battle? This post is about the difficulties in playing through a LAN game with 7 or 8 human players without the game crashing, people getting dropped or other anomalies happening. I maintain it's almost impossible in Zero Hour, and continues to be difficult in Contra, although the MOD improves things dramatically. I am sharing my list of stabilizing methods below and am seeking other suggestions to make the game run as stable as possible.

Contra 7 is great and really improves Zero Hour, thanks again to all those people who have and continue to put their own time and effort into it, it is appreciated perhaps more than you know.

Once a month, I have a Zero Hour LAN party, so after 2 years things were threatening to get stale and Contra certainly has breathed new life into the party. We played Contra for the first time at our last meeting and things got really interesting really fast.

Throughout the years, the attendance has steadily grown and now there are nights when we have 8 players in a LAN game. Add to that some beer and friendship, and those of you who know can attest that this is the perfect setup for a great time...

...Until you try to play a game together! An IT consultant by profession, I have a decade of experience dealing with bad programs. However, Zero
Hour still manages to elude my skills.

Sub-performing hardware aside, the game gets more instable the more people are playing it. In and of itself, that is to be expected. However,
as opposed to Starcraft for example, the game suffers from internal issues beyond the network side of the equation which really should have
been resolved before EA rolled the game out.

So here is my list of top 10 things I do to prepare for a stable game night:

1. this should go without saying, but everyone has to have a legitimately purchased license of the game, no hacked versions and be at version 1.04
2. No Vista or Mac, only WinXP and Win7
3. Everyone connects to the same network switch (Linksys 24port gigabit)
4. All wireless network adapters are turned off (lots of people have laptops)
5. Everyone go to services.msc and stop Windows Firewall service and security center (latter probably not necessary, but who knows)
6. No streaming music or other internet activity while being in the game
7. All laptops need to be on AC power, no battery power
8. No one click "send delay" option in the game
9. Best hardware hosts the game
10. No more than 10 super weapons for any one player

Even with all these precautions, the game regularly crashes when the unit count goes up. Contra has proven to be more stable, but there was a (Contra) game last game night with 6 (human) players which still crashed after about 45 minutes. If it helps with the analysis, I can post the replay here, although please don't expect it to be all that entertaining.

Looking forward to some more suggestions. Thanks all!

[Su8perkillr]

Well, when I play alone, Contra seems to have this anoying thing. after some time (sometimes 1-5 minutes, sometimes just before i finisch my enemy of, but much more times when im at mid-game (rank 3)) it just seems to get stuck. no, really. and COMPLETELY stuck. game freezes, Windows freezes. and the most funny thing is, that things like the screaming of a burning man just keep being played. also background sounds and stuff. can anyone help?

[rainmaker]

Thanks for the reply. Sounds more like a hardware problem than software (meaning Zero Hour or Contra for that matter). Not knowing anything about your system, I would make this general recommendation that you run a program that tells you the temperature of your system, like Speedfan for example. (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php). Oftentimes overheating hardware causes the symptoms that you describe.

I don't think it goes along with the problems I describe in my post above though, other than to say that the game of course needs the proper hardware to run.

[Casojin]

I rarely have a chance to play 8 player match. Even when I have a chance to play, the game tends to be filled with connection problem and lag. I'm trying to build a ZH community here in Thailand but so far so good I have only 5 (including myself). 2 of those are inactive due to real-life issue and the other two are just beginners (not playing ZH for years until I bring them back). 8 player LAN party is something incredibly great and it seems stable. ZH tends to crash with too many objects in a map in an instance. There is a suggestion.

Rainmaker, you should turn Tournament mode on to limit superweapon for each player and starting money should be around $10k. The game would be about strategy and tactic (who would utilize the resource and units effectively). With less money to produce units, the overloading number of objects could be reduce. Only the best player (who has an effective supplyline and utilizes the best tactics) would have so many units to fight. Many new players play with $50k start up and never trained for standard start up. Standard start up would make the game more interesting and more stable.

[Su8perkillr]

Well, the fun is, a friend of me has a weaker system. Runs, Vista, and Contra, without any problems (well... except for Vista. but i didnt have to say that, that is always that way )

[rainmaker]

The $50k vs. $5k startup is a legitimate suggestion. However, most sessions do not fail because of the initial build-rush, but long afterwards. Point well taken though.

Are there any other ideas? I got 8 people coming to my house this Friday for a LAN game, which will be the first attempt at an 8 player Contra.

I will report back here, and if applicable, with the error messages.

[rainmaker]

Even though all the licenses in use are legitimate, I will give the suggestion from the troubleshooting section of the cnc guild site a shot:

"All units and buildings explode in 10-20 seconds of playing. It happens when you use pirate version or lost license key. The problem is solved with DatGen.
Put it into Zero Hour folder and run it once. It will not open any windows or display messages. It is ok."

http://contra.cncgui...Eng/trouble.php

I will test that and see if it helps with anything, although the symptom (buildings exploding) is not one of my problems.

[Casojin]

The $50k vs. $5k startup is a legitimate suggestion. However, most sessions do not fail because of the initial build-rush, but long afterwards. Point well taken though.

Are there any other ideas? I got 8 people coming to my house this Friday for a LAN game, which will be the first attempt at an 8 player Contra.

I will report back here, and if applicable, with the error messages.

The game tends to crash when large number of units are battling across the map. The reason is unknown at the moment (there is too much activities to pinpoint where does it starts). If one player crashes, the other would get a mismatch. Some maps (such as 'Tournament B') have high tendency for mismatch.

What I can suggest is, don't play too much turtling. If the game can end in half an hour, the less chance the crash would be.

[rainmaker]

It's the turtle bust that's the most fun...

Aside from this, it's an either or situation: the game ends after 20 minutes because the players are unmatched, or it will run for 2 hours. Only exception is when there are 3 teams and things go back and forth.

Meanwhile, a bit off topic I guess, I am trying to get my two computers, Win7 and WinXP SP3 to play together tonight, and keep getting a mismatch right at the beginning. I tried pretty much everything I can think of, and it just won't work. Last game night though, and at work, we got Win7 and WinXP (specifically my laptop which I trying to get to work now) to work together just fine. Don't know what's so special about my Win7 machine all of a sudden. I used with Win firewall on and send delay, Win firewall off, of course added the exception, tried to have XP machine host, tried to have Win 7 machine host, tried all combinations of send delay and firewall settings on both machines, re-installed the game on the Win7 machine, loaded from the DVD (First Decade) vs. the generals application, tried compatability mode and/or run as administrator, with absolutely no change in result (mismatch as soon as the game starts). Anyone with a quick suggestion will be much appreciated.

I think it kind of goes along with the general subject of working out multiplayer LAN game issues.

[Skywalker]

I've had a couple of very exciting 3v3 matches in Garena recently, but they all crashed after about a half an hour! These were extremely intensive games, and it's really heartbreaking to have a crash during such a thrilling fight. Considering what you, rainmaker, have said, I think it's inevitable to have crashes if you play with many people you don't know in the Internet.
The replays would be really worth sharing if the games were finished. Damn, I just can't get over it!

[rainmaker]

Hi Skywalker:

I can understand 8 player Internet games are problematic to run, but here I am talking about network games, meaning I get 8 people together in the same room and we connect using the "network" game option.

Well, game night came and we had a totoal of 10 people, so we tried a 7 player Contra and a 7 player Zero Hour game among other things. The Zero Hour had a mismatch 5 seconds into the game. Contra did better in that we had the disconnect dialog come up about every 5 seconds for about 5 seconds, which we worked with for about 2 minutes, after which someone was kicked out of the game with that weird generic error message that there are not enough resources to run the game. We called the game off after that. (off topic, but comically ironic, this was this guy's brand new 64 bit quad core system which gets a steady 37 frames per second in 3D Mark and he was showing it off).

So the best this game will do is 6 players in one game. Again, not on the Internet, but on the local network. 6 players is stable and we get several hour long games finished. The only hangup is when someone builds more than 10 superweapons (usually particle cannons), which then makes the game disconnect. We had a good game like that on Friday where someone did just that on the Iron Dragon map. This is a Zero Hour game though, as you may have guessed (since it's signifiantly harder to buld that many superweapons in Contra).

It's a darn shame though, since other, older games like Starcraft worked well enough with 8 player games on Battlenet. EA really dropped the ball here. My next post will be a dare for anyone to show me an 8 person game replay that ran from start to finish, Contra or ZH. Frankly, I don't think it exists!

Related to this, in testing for game night, I ran a test game of Contra on 4 WinXP SP3 computer, the weakest of which was a 1.4GHZ P4 with 512MB of RAM. For each player, I built about 200 infantry units using the map Iron Dragon. I then used the famous "qq" command to send all units to attack in the middle (times 4 for each player). So here we had what turned out to be a little over 700 units moving at once. The game slowed down to a trickle, but never hung up, crashed or otherwise.

Also related, Windows 7 computers did not work in Contra with Windows XP computers where there were more than 2 players. Just wouldn't work. Win7 and Win7 in Contra would also not work. So to return to the original question, for a stable game, do not have a mix of Win7 or XP!

So, perhaps the final tally on this thread is this. There are no stable games beyond 6 players:

Number of Zero Hour Contra
Players LAN/Internet LAN/Internet
4 works/works works/works
5 works/works works/works
6 works/problems works/problems
7 problems/no problems/no
8 no/no no/no

If anyone had different experiences, please share.

[Skywalker]

Also related, Windows 7 computers did not work in Contra with Windows XP computers where there were more than 2 players. Just wouldn't work. Win7 and Win7 in Contra would also not work. So to return to the original question, for a stable game, do not have a mix of Win7 or XP!

Well, I would not agree. I have SP3 and my friend has Win7, and we play normally using Hamachi and Garena. Well, at least, in most cases. Sometimes crashes happen, but in general it works.

Me and my friends were thinking of getting together in the close future and playing Contra with 6 or 7 computers. Now we'll have to think it trough and try to follow your instructions as close as we can. Thank you for your patient and detailed analysis!

BTW, I'd like to ask for your advice, if I may, as you must be a specialist in this sphere. Is it possible to use 2 routers (each one with 4 outputs) to connect 6 PCs? I mean a scheme when you connect 3 PCs to each router and the 4th router's output you use to connect the 2 routers between each other? And if yes, do you need to somehow set the routers as gateways between the two LANs of two routers, or it will work without this stuff? If I explained it all correctly %)


UPD: And also, I should say, today it's the second time the game crashes when I use particle cannon, and the second time it crashes when I use cyber's drop pod.

Edited by Skywalker, 18 January 2010 - 10:16 PM.

[rainmaker]

Skywalker, I will pm you about your networking question. As far as Win7 and XP goes, it seems to be a total randomness, few times it does work, but more often than not, it doesn't. Since this post was about trying to avoid this sort of stress to begin with, I will have to advise against it for now, but certainly stick to whatever works for you...

[Skywalker]

Thank you, I'd be grateful, if you will.