Multiplayer on Fedora 16
 

I am trying to get DW multiplayer working reliably on Fedora 16. Using wine the game works well in single-player mode, but wine does not provide a DirectPlay 8 component, meaning I can't play it in multiplayer. I tried overriding the needed DLLs with winetricks, but to no avail. Does DW use a plain old DP8 or does it use some derivative of it I need to override additionally? Currently I am using VirtualBox. The multiplayer part of it works, but, I suffer a very annoying bug with this approach: from time to time the game will "skip" 5 minutes forward. This does not always produce undesirable behaviour, but often I will skip over objective triggers, making missions uncompletable, or someone will fire a torpedo at me, going from "all is well" to "you've been sunk" in a frame. These skips happen every 15-45 minutes. This is virtualisation-only bug, I do not get it in wine. So, does anyone know either how to resolve the 5 minute skips when virtualised or know how to get multiplayer working in wine?

I do not have the 5 minutes skips. Are they occurring only in multiplayer? What are your settings for VM? As for Wine, I am sure its networking part is still in not ready state.

They occur always, and when they happen if I am half way through issuing an order it never finishes being issued, the towed array/radio wires can get jammed, once I've had my active intercept stop working on me, and a couple of times passive sonar trackers would no longer engage. I know I like realism, but this is just too much like being on a 50 year old sub ! ;-)

On the navmap I can distinctly see when it happened if I turn ownship (and other ship) histories on.

https://imgur.com/9eSbEhttp://i.imgur.com/9eSbE.png

( http://i.imgur.com/9eSbE.png )

Settings:

Parent OS: Fedora 16 64bit
VirtualBox: 4.1.2_OSE (package from RPM Fusion)
Guest OS: Windows XP SP3 with guest extensions installed.

VM settings:
512MB RAM, IO APIC disabled, EFI disabled, Hardware clock UTC enabled, Absolute pointing device enabled.
1 CPU, no execution cap, PAE/NX disabled.
VT-x bit is on, and nested paging is enabled.
Video memory set to 64MB, 2D and 3D both ticked and working (through the guest extensions)
10GB fixed size storage VDI
Host audio set to ALSA (but is really PulseAudio).

Game: Stock DW 1.04
Game options: Wind, Currents, Waveriding are all on.
Graphics options: 1024x768 full screen, water quality off, reflection quality off, draw method: pixel color. All advanced 3D options off.
Sound: Speech recognition enabled, music disabled, "special effects" on.


I have just disabled the pagefile in the guest, will see if that helps, failing that will disable sound and see if it is sound related, as well as playing about with the number of sound buffers... unless this is triggered by some graphics thing or I am going off in a completely wrong direction. If you have a working virtualbox please list your settings differences!

That seems to have done it. I went through Windows configuration, disabled paging, system restore, and a slew of other useless (for a DW-centric VM) Windows services. I went through 3 missions, and not a single skip. Missions start, missions stop, triggers trigger when they are supposed to, radio wire streams when told to, array retracts when told to, there is really nothing left to complain about.

I now seem to have a working, reliable setup for multiplayer DW.



:-D

I use VirtualBox 4.1.8 (though old versions worked fine too). Settings are the same, except for disabled UTC and absolute pointing device, audio set to Pulse. Chipset is set to PIIX3 and IDE controller - PIIX4, I/O caching is enabled.

Glad that you figured out the problem. I have disabled system restore and some services too.

Still unable to have a prolongued game. Still doing the same second mission. Still crashes (for my friend) every time. Today it took around 90 minutes before it crashed. This is frustrating, we've been chasing around this Kilo/Foxtrot for weeks now, but the game is never stable enough to last the entire mission. It this just us or is the game inherently unstable in multiplayer?

I haven't had a MP match in several years, but I never remember there being any such issues with stability.

Perhaps you should try setting up a MP match with some Windows machines to see if the issue clears up. Just for comparison.

BTW, I am running DW under Slackware Linux with Wine here.

Tried it. Crashes on Windows (machine joining the game) and stable as rock on machine hosting the game. We are playing in multi-station mode driving the same FFG. Or, rather, have been trying to. Going to go to SHIII next - multiplayer works in wine and it doesn't crash.

Actually this happens on modern subs too... :haha: