Desync issue + fix for minidump crashes

Yeah the desync problem REALLY needs to be sorted out.

And yeah, changing the exe over to 4GB address space worked wonders; haven't had a single crash since. Funny thing is. the game's only going over the 1.75GB mark (2GB minus the 256MB reserved for VRAM) by 50-100MB or so

Turning down the graphics considerably and AA OFF might work, though turning off AA for me only brought it down 40MB give or take 10MB.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/375400

That's for Entrenchment, we're playing Diplomacy.

no one cares about fixing the minidump crashes? After all the posts i saw on the forum with people complaining about it, i figured the fix would get some attention.

Mussels, does it really work? I went to the techpowerup forum. It seems quite easy to implement. Can you also reverse it in Vista, because now it only explains how to implement the change in command prompt?

ps I have windows vista 32b and 4gb of RAM, which shows up as 3.2 I guess.

it takes seconds to reverse, or you could just keep a backup of the exe.

Personally i have two exe files (normal, and one with 4GB at the end), and i just run the modded one.

With 32 bit windows you have to follow the guides in the first link - while windows can see 3GB of your ram, its still capped with a 2GB limit (2GB per app, to a max of 4GB of address space) - the windows mod (not the modded exe for the game) lets you change that to 3GB per app, leaving just 1GB for the OS. - again, its easy to undo if it goes wrong (easier in vista/7 than XP, thats for sure)

I really suggest you move to vista x64 however, if you can. (you can re-use your vista CD key, just need to get your hands on an x64 disk)

"I really suggest you move to vista x64 however, if you can. (you can re-use your vista CD key, just need to get your hands on an x64 disk)"

Why is this better, is this 64 bit?

It's likely the bug causing desyncs is the same for both games. Or at least if its in entrenchment, a similar one is in diplomacy.

but all that thread offered, was a replacement .exe file - for entrenchment. Yes we could have used it and helped locate the problem if we dropped back to entrenchment  - but it wasnt going to help us stop the desyncs.

the desyncs are happening just as frequent in entrenchment 1.05 as diplomacy 1.0.  pretty much unplayable

I agree with Mussels.  This needs to be sorted out as soon as you guys can.  It really is incredibly frustrating playing a game for 4 hours and realizing that you and your teamate aren't playing the same game...at all.

It makes us lose trust in the developers and game itself, making it less likely we'll buy any expansions in the future. (Which REALLY sucks because we LOVED this game).  I'm talking weekend marathons here.

C'est la vie.

and SwerydAss beat me to it.  For the record, I whole-heartedly agree with SwerydAss.

You need to be able to identify the problem prior to being able to solve it...

I'm going to see if I can coordinate with my buddy to get you guys some files.

You all do know that the Devs know about the desync but REQUIRE those who are desyncing to send them their desync logs. That particualr special exe allows for greter detail in those logs when they are generated. Blair has said that he will has set aside time to fix the problem. He just needs all the logs he can get. This requires people who desync to set up and be a part of soultion.

If you want a quicker fix, the set up. Run the speical exe.  Force your friends and yourself to enable the logs. And send them!!!!!

Doesn't Mussels' solution solve the minidump crahes problem?

its more of a workaround, but yes it solves it. Better for the devs to find a way to reduce memory use on high end machines, so that people dont have to go tweaking their OS (its a real pain for XP users)

As for the desyncs: sure, you get me a diplomacy .exe and i'll test it. Might take a few days to talk a friend into trying it (since it desyncs, they dont want to waste their time) but i'll do my best. Short version is: we dont want to go back to entrenchment, we just paid for diplomacy, so thats all we want to play.

Just a quick note, I'm pretty sure that whatever is causing the desyncs is the same problem for both entrenchment and diplomacy, if you could take an hour out of your day (like I will be doing tomorrow) to play entrenchment and get a desync log, that would be spectacular.

The more info the better.  If you don't want to do that, then don't complain about it.  I mean, seriously.  If you aren't going to do anything to try to resolve the issue, you can't complain. period.  It just makes you a troll.  I would have gotten you desync logs tonight, but it's V-day...and I have other things I need to attend to.

Mussels, I agree it's frustrating, but really, try to help out. You'll be doing yourself, and a bunch of other people some good.

The faster they track down the bug, the sooner they'll patch and fix it for both games.

our desync didnt occur til 4 hours in. i simply dont have four hours to spend on a work day, testing - since theres no automated way to tell when the desync occurs, i cant just start it and leave it.

You can play the game, you dont have to start it and leave it. So you can play diplomacy (save often!) and just deal with the desyncs, or play the entrench.exe and possibly help with the solution. That's pretty much all you can do ATM, sorry. Maybe you can ask Blair to release a similar diplomacy.exe so you can do both.

I wonder if you can send all your auto saves to see where the desync happens...

Mussels:  I'm wondering if the Desyncs occur because of a numerical calculation error, and that error then cascades to become a huge desync (thast people notice).  If thats the case, then the desync could occure extremely soon, you just wouldn't notice until 4 hours in.

Know what I mean?  Butterfly effect style...

By the time we noticed our desyncs, there were cap ships and planets that were completely different.  For that stuff to happen it takes time, which means the desync happened a long time before we noticed.

Ok, so I played an 8 hour game (thats right, 8 hours) - I'm actually on vacation all this week - using the sync.exe file and we NEVER got a desync.

We were playing on my LAN so that may have been the issue, we also saved the game 3/4 of the way through and transferred it to another computer and ran it again (still using the sync.exe file) and still no desync.

I'm wondering if the desync occurs on latent connections because it happened every time we played over direct IP access.  I have a fast FIOS connection and my buddy has DSL.

I'm wondering if that has a lot to do with it.

We were also initially playing on a really slow laptop and my really fast desktop, just to see if that had any affect on the problem, and it appears that the only difference was the fact that we were playing on a LAN.

To help: the game we desynced on was two humans (locked teams) allied against  two teams of two AI's. Things seemed to go weird later on once pirate raids were involved... i'm thinking (without much evidence) that the pirate raids may be where things go weird - one my end, one world got destroyed and on my friends it didnt and we didnt notice til much later.

When we noticed ships and planets going weird, it all tended to start around that one planet the pirates had hit.

It may be coincidence, or it may well be where the desync started with us.

edit: we were on direct IP as well.

Weird...

We did 1 allied team of 2 human players (TEC and Vasari) VS 6 CPU players (no teams, 3 on hard and 3 on normal difficulty).

We also had pirates (4 pirate planets on this custom map).  Oh yeah, we were playing a custom map.

I'm still convinced it's LAN vs Direct Connect IP

There have been a few reports of success thanks to this (CTD fix), in a few other threads.

Heres a link to one of the threads:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/375022/page/1/#2540744