Dropping games over and over

More info.. He got a lan cable and I installed via stardock. Didn't seem to help. We used the online service to play a 50 planet map and it died within a few minutes. we decided to try doing a direct connection, that lasted for 1 hour!!!! Then it died seems so back-and-forth but stays a lot at the "died within a few minutes" point it's unplayable. if it was once a hour who cares!

Is there a switch i can pass to the exe to enable logging perhaps? Then we can find out why and which client thinks it has lost connection or has stalled...

And some more info We ended up starting a new game and it died within the first few minutes. After this we did it again and I saved it 50 seconds into the game. it then died again a few seconds to a minute later. Then the next game wasn't a new game but one from the loaded save game file, we played this with no problem for another hour and saved the game and were done for the night.

Perhaps loading from the saved game makes the difference!?

Any devs watching this post?

If not, its been brought to their attention by Yarlen... poor man's job is to read every post and summarize the important stuff for them.

Poor, poor man.

Hi ThrakaAndy, sorry you are having issues playing multiplayer. Could you be more specific on how the game is dying? What exactly is happening? Is the game crashing? Does it just say "so and so has disconnected"?

Grettings Spish. My experience is that the everything stops. then a dialog shows that says the other guy is lagging. On his screen it has our names and both status is set to OK. This results in one of us quitting the game. We have left it up for a full minute before and it just sits there. I can run some more tests with him today to see if we just need to wait longer but I would hope it could get back in sync after a few seconds

As a loyal customer of Stardock for many years, and as one who has purchased a lot of its games, I feel that I must intervene :

I have a very reliable and stable high-speed cable connection (Videotron : Montreal, Canada).

I honestly certify that my download speed from Stardock's SDC service has always been 750 to 825 kb/sec. (during the past two years).

(I cannot certify what it was like before 2006 : I do not remember.)

I am sorry to say that if you experience a mere 25 to 50 kb/sec. when downloading from SDC, and then possible lag when you are trying to play Sins with your friend, one could suspect that something is wrong at your end.

I do not want to be nasty. I am simply speculating.

Hehehe please comment I won't take it personally

I also work from a Microsoft building which I can get like 3MB a second coming down. I downloaded from there also and got a great 800k a second. But other times even from MS i have gotten really bad 3k - 50k a second.

When I was complaining i was testing my connection against a newsgroup server and getting a good 800KB a second while stardock was serving me 20-50. But that is outside of the issue. I guess I've just had it be slower more often than it was faster.

I've downloaded steam games that take up 5 gig in under an hour at work, and gotten awesome connections for Fileplanet from work too. For the last 3 years of objectdesktop subscription, it's been horrible from work or home. few days ago was the first time I had ever had great speeds from there. Still though 800KB a sec from MS is slow compared to the 3MB a second But i digress..

I just wanted to give out, as we say here in Quebec, un autre son de cloche.

Of course, I cannot generalize from my limited experience : my particular home-connection download interaction with SDC (at 750 kb to 825 kb/sec.) remains only a particular case. I have no idea whatsoever what the situation is with other StarDock Central users. In my case, what is fantastic is the consistently fast and stable quality of the SDC downloading process.

Mind you, I also get those high-speed numbers as a subscriber to GameSpot FTP downloading. (When I used their download manager, though, which was advertised as faster, my speeds were always below 100 kb/sec. -- so I stopped using it.)

Consequently, I cannot belittle the validity of your OP's problem. A weird dimension of Computer Technology is that some users experience no problems, while others are plagued with very frustrating issues -- and easy explanations and solutions do not always come around.

During the past three days, I have played 8 solid hours on ICO, with the same two (trustworthy) gamers : no problem launching the game (and twice reloading the saved game to continue), low pings between our three machines (even though we live far apart), no lag whatsoever, not one crash.

Go figure. I could not explain why your experience is so different from mine. I'm behind an old (2001) LinkSys router, and the only thing I did was forward ports 6000-6112 TCP to my IP address (an expert stated that UDP was not required) -- and that was my very first (amateur) configuration of a router, in 6½ years.

Good luck.

Ive had some issues in longer games where I drop randomly. The player screen pops up and instantly says everyone else is disconnected, and that I am migrating...It sits there for a very long time until I just quit the game. When I am back in ICO chat (I am never truly losing my connection so its odd) all the other players are still in the game, and I was the only one who dropped.

I think it's more frequent when the game is caching models textures etc. I have a 24-inch monitor and the game is running at 1900x1600 or so res. The graphics and effects are all pretty high as I have a great video card. But like most games, the first time you run into something you get a tiny little hickup so after not playing the game all day and loading it up the first game is a bit jumpy the first few minutes as my client is loading everything. My partner sees the hickups as pauses in his game.

We tried to play single player before starting multiplayer to see if it would make a difference. It definitly cached everything but alas it still didn't prevent it from loosing connection over and over. We finally went to the IronClad Online and played there with intermediant connection losses and we just kept reloading. Finally we hit a good patch where it didn't loose connection for a long time then it did again and was frequent again. We were able to finish a game though! Yahhh!!

So my testing in trying to track down the cause of the issue isn't getting me far But remember, it's not ingame lag, we don't notice really any lag at all, it's just BOOM the network screen appears and sits there forever. We left it up for 5 minutes yesterday it just never came back. I sent him a msg and he sent me a msg in chat, then I kicked him. I got his message right after he was kicked so it was like it was held somewhere, the packet made it and the game got the data.

I'm still having random ICO disconnects. My connection is fine its just that I'm playing a game, then it pauses to lag like is common, but it never stops. It either brings up the screen saying everyone is disconnected and that I'm "Migrating" and never changes, or if I host it just pops up a message saying disconnected from IC Online. I then hit login and bam I am back in ICO in less then a split second.

The game only seems to wait for about 10 seconds before determining to drop me from the game, it might be a slight connection interruption but I would think the game would wait longer then 10 seconds before dropping me entirely, at least a few minutes would be much better.

Can any devs report if any bugs were discovered and if they were or weren't fixed for the upcoming patch regarding game connectivity?

Thanks!!