Synchronization Issues

[paulderynck]

Don and I tested NetPlay today for a few hours and although the following are avoidable, I would classify them as either bugs or worthy of mention to "NetPlayers".

Both of these occurrences happened because one player was doing something that required manual interaction from the other player's PC, so I am calling them "synchronization issues".

1. On several occasions I initiated a manual save while Don was away from his PC. (I did this because I had many land moves to make and if you goof on the order of moving units and keeping the right ones in supply in the right order, the game is fairly unforgiving with the Undo button, so you want manual saves as a better alternative to starting the whole land movement phase over again from an auto-save.) Anyway, we learned that if you initiate a save and the other player doesn't Ack it right away, and you keep moving, then your save files will have different sequence numbers and will be unrestorable, which defeats the purpose of the manual save in the first place. I suppose this is because the remote computer doesn't execute the save until the manual Ack occurs. Maybe it would be better if the save was made regardless, and the message at the remote end became just informational?

2. I'm not sure this second problem was due to manual save initiation as I don't have a saved game for it. However Production phases seem to allow both players to proceed in parallel. This is good because it reduces waiting times, but today after the Russian player had advanced as far as he could, the German player was still trying to save oil to ensure he would not tun out in the next turn. When we got to builds, the Russian player had zero BPs! We loaded the auto-save (since overwritten, unfortunately) and the same thing happened. The production instructions the German player had provided were in the auto-save (NP-Ge Prelim Production file) so in this case it appears writing that file asynchronously from the Russian player caused the issue. We backed up to the Stay-at-Sea auto-save and the problem did not re-occur, I guess because we processed through Preliminary Production much quicker (although the German found a way to avoid the Prelim Production instructions he used earlier, so maybe they caused the issue - I have provided a save game with instructions below.)

Another cosmetic issue - the Review Game feature for NetPlay is wonderful but when I use it say from the Ge Land Movement auto-save, it restores to my screen with the Russian colors and map views. The German flag is lit and the units are in the expected places, but it is a little confusing to see the Russian colors and map views up when it is the start of a Ge land move. I tried the Review Game feature with several different files where the German player is the active player, and they all restored this way.

[paulderynck]

Also here is a minor production bug. Advance German units took Stalino and the port on the Black Sea to the south of it. We are playing LOS and there's no Axis CP in the Black Sea. Nonetheless when Prelim Production came up, the Stalino red factory was producing a BP for Germany! It was being fed by the lent Turkish resource. Here is the saved game from the German PC, from:
"C:\Matrix Games\World in Flames\Scenarios\Barbarossa\Saved Games\AutoSave\NP - End Of Action - Ge.GAM" Sequence #156616

I will ask Don to post his corresponding file.

To replicate, force the turn to end on a '1' and then advance to Preliminary Production. If you then save 4 German Oil and idle the Stalino factory, the Turkish resource will go to a German factory. That will then create the Ge- Prelim Production auto-saves and you could then also check out if Issue 2 above was caused by that or by us getting too far out of sync.

Saved game.

[Timian]

A little slow, but here is the Russian save . . . Don.

[Timian]

Sorry / Forgot to attach the zipped file . . . Don.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

These are #14 and #15 on my list of NetPlay bugs to work on today (Tuesday). I'll see what I can get corrected.

After today, I will not get back to MWIF until Saturday - I need to work on keeping body and soul together (i.e., exercise).

Ideally, I'll get another Hot Patch out today: version 0.2.03.08.00 (I used 07 yesterday in one of y games).

[paulderynck]

Here's another bug - minor and strange genus - I forgot about posting from Sunday.

Take the same saved game from above and progress to reinforcements. Despite having only one pilot on the track for JA41, the Germans seem to have two for placing in aircraft at the start of that turn (see screen shot). Accepting the gift from Santa, I placed two pilots and the game was happy to let me. But then when the tray appeared with the reinforcements, only one of the planes was available. I don't see why MWiF should tease me so brazenly in this manner.

(I did check and no pilots had to bail out in MJ41.)

[paulderynck]

And one other thing. As Germany I'm pretty certain I did not see a dialog with the turn end roll and the result. Don telling me and the subsequent phases showing up is how I found out.

Again these same files from Posts 2 and 4 can be used to recreate.

[paulderynck]

I am posting this bug under sync issues since it's along the same lines. This involves the two players getting out of sync during air-to-air combat. Although if the players proceed carefully through the steps needed, this problem will not occur, IMO given neither one sees what is on the others screen, this problem happens too easily and should be treated as a bug.

What happened was the German was doing a ground strike that was intercepted by a Russian fighter and then counter-intercepted by a German fighter. The Russian rolled an 18, and the German selected his FTR to die in the hope his return fire would get rid of the Russian FTR. But he rolls a 13 at +1 (blank), and his form changed to give him the choice of staying or aborting. He immediately chose Abort but in the meantime the Russian player had yet to acknowledge a message that the German Me109 had been shot down. At that point we got out of sync. On the Russian PC, an 8 was auto-rolled and replaced the 13 as being the German return fire! On the German PC, the Main Form stated a return to base digression was underway but there was no selection window for the German bomber and we were stuck.

[paulderynck]

We repeated the process and the second time around the German misclicked and chose his bomber to die and the 13 was replaced by a 9. Essentially the same problem happened for the same reasons. I was able to select the (now surviving) German FTR and move it to the hex west of the battle and seemingly land it there, but then it disappeared into thin air, and we were still stuck. The different behavior this time may have been due to the fact the Russian fighter was unaffected by the replacing die roll as shown in the screen shot below.

[paulderynck]

Here is the German save game. To reconstruct, proceed to ground strikes and repeat what we did as reported in post #8. The ground strikes were the German rail gun on Lvov and the stuka from 47,56 bombing 43,57. Intercepting FTRs are obvious.

BTW when trying to find games to repeat a test and you need the ground strike or strat bombing phase to start from, the games are named differently in the auto-save folders. This makes it confusing to try and find the correct game, although by process of elimination, we could find it by comparing sequence numbers.

[paulderynck]

Here is the corresponding Russian save.

[paulderynck]

Here is a screen shot from the prior Russian impulse. The Vlad Militia railed from Vlad to Voronezh at a cost of three rail moves. We are unsure if this is a bug, because of course MWiF doesn't have discrete maps that count for extra rail move costs like in the board game.

[SeanSask]

I believe MWiF allows a maximum of 60 hexes per Rail Move. So if Vornoezh is more than 120 hexes away from Vladivostock, it would cost 3 rail moves.

[davidachamberlain]

2. I'm not sure this second problem was due to manual save initiation as I don't have a saved game for it. However Production phases seem to allow both players to proceed in parallel. This is good because it reduces waiting times, but today after the Russian player had advanced as far as he could, the German player was still trying to save oil to ensure he would not tun out in the next turn. When we got to builds, the Russian player had zero BPs! We loaded the auto-save (since overwritten, unfortunately) and the same thing happened. The production instructions the German player had provided were in the auto-save (NP-Ge Prelim Production file) so in this case it appears writing that file asynchronously from the Russian player caused the issue. We backed up to the Stay-at-Sea auto-save and the problem did not re-occur, I guess because we processed through Preliminary Production much quicker (although the German found a way to avoid the Prelim Production instructions he used earlier, so maybe they caused the issue - I have provided a save game with instructions below.)

Paul, we encountered the same problem today with Global War.

At the point of the Prod Plan Prelim and Final, everything looked fine, but in the Production Phase, all Allies has zero BP while the Axis had theirs.

We tried going back to the Prod Planning steps, but were not able to get any difference. Next we are thinking of trying to go back to Stay at Sea and Return to Base.

I am thinking that there must need to be some protocol to capture the Prod Planning steps without losing the other side so that it is added to rather than replaced.

We might just need to wait for Steve's fix for this.

Any thoughts on how procedurally, this can be prevented?

Dave

[paulderynck]

Going back to Stay-at-sea worked for us.

[davidachamberlain]

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

Going back to Stay-at-sea worked for us.

We tried that, but it still did not work. Maybe there is too much with Global War compared with Barb.

We did get around it by temporarily changing the value to Solitaire to allow us to get through Production and than set it back to Netplay once Production was completed and we were ready to advance to the end of the turn.

That is a little cludgy, but better than restarting the game as Solitaire or Head to Head.

Dave

[paulderynck]

If possible, you should post the Stay-at-sea or End-of-turn file saves from both computers so Steve can take a look at your more serious bug. They shouldn't get overwritten before the end of your next turn.