What's the situation on DW Multiplayer?

[Red October1984]

Im new to DW. Dont know much about support and community other than subsim.

Might have access to faster internet over the next couple of days. May want to check out MP. :up:

[magicstix]

Sadly DW multiplayer is pretty awful. There's no matchmaking service and you have to know the IP address of the person you want to connect to. Even then, I've had a hard time getting it to work.

[Joloc]

I never managed to get it to play for longer than about 30min without crashing in multiplayer.

[Red October1984]

It's a shame. I've got access to lightning fast Internet at the moment.

[To be]

The real problem is that multiplayer is locked to 1x time acceleration. While there is a good reason for this, so you can't guess what other players are doing by how they change time acceleation, I suspect the real reason is actually that the DW netcode is awful and can't handle time accel. That would be consistent with all the crashes. So you have to be ready to play a long game, and long games might crash.

[Hinrich Schwab]

To be fair to DW multiplayer, I do not think it was ever really intended for internet play. It seems more geared for LAN parties with dedicated machines and hubs than anything else. I also agree that the multiplayer coding is not that stable. It is not as bad as it was in SH2/DC before the PM patch, but it is hardly reliable.

[To be]

I should point out, buggy as it is I'm still glad it exists :)

[magicstix]

The real problem is that multiplayer is locked to 1x time acceleration. While there is a good reason for this, so you can't guess what other players are doing by how they change time acceleation, I suspect the real reason is actually that the DW netcode is awful and can't handle time accel. That would be consistent with all the crashes. So you have to be ready to play a long game, and long games might crash.

How exactly would time acceleration work in a multiplayer game? :D

You'd have to all agree to accelerate to the same amount at the same time...

[Joloc]

It would work very well in a cooperative game. It's a shame it is so unstable, I have several computers sitting around capable of running the game, it would be rather cool to link them all up and have actual dedicated physical stations for every ingame station. A friend and I tried doing the Red Storm Rising campaign together... it ended with us spending about 2 weeks doing one mission every day for 1-2 hours and then crashing out due to dodgy networking code. It was not much fun.

[Nexus7]

Is it doable to have different stations on different monitors?
It would be an excellent feature to have at least a dedicated monitor for the sonar station...

[Joloc]

Only using multiplayer - you can run DW in VirtualBox VM on one monitor and try playing natively on the other (or two VMs if that is easier). If you have more luck than me regarding stability let us know how you managed it!

[Blacklight]

My friend and I used to do DW multiplayer all the time. In my experience, getting it to initially connect was annoying, but I think that was more due to network settings on the computers and how DW reads them. I've learned that it doesn't like multiple physical network connections coming into the same computer.
Stability while playing multiplayer was rarely a problem for me. Yes, it would crash sometimes, but most times, for me at least, it was pretty stable.
What I've learned about multiplayer stability is that whenever we DID have problems with it crashing during multiplayer, we seemed to have the problems a LOT more when it came to playing over the net rather than when we just connected between two computers in the same room directly. Direct connecting the computers gave us pretty solid performance.

I suspect the crashing in multiplayer has something to do with the way the game misinterprets interprets incoming incomplete data packets and lag. But that's just a theory.

[Joloc]

Huh. I'll have to give local play a go then! :-)