First impression: Multiplayer world sync completely broken & multiple other issues

[SilverFolfy]

We were excited to try this out in co-op, since it shares many similarities with FortressCraft Evolved.

Joining in multiplayer via Steam works without issue, however the world state is not synced at all to the other players. When I dig through soil or destroy rocks, the co-op partner does not see any of these changes.

This immediately led to a moment at the beginning of the game where I dug open the doorway with the pickaxe, but my co-op partner was stuck and could not get out because the soil was still there on his end. He could also not remove the soil himself because of the error "Inventory is full", except it wasn't.
Re-join fixed this and seems to load the correct world state at time of join.

Another issue with this is, when I placed a drill, the other player did not see the drill at all, and could walk through the same space on his end. He could not place anything in that spot however.

If it helps, we are in the same LAN, so Steam multiplayer should find a direct connection between our PCs, as is the case with virtually all other games with Steam multiplayer integration.

Some other issues we noticed in the first 15 minutes:
- My game started with resolution 1080p instead of my native 1440p, making everything a bit blurry. Should be an easy fix (use native resolution by default)
- Audio is extremely quiet for me, I had to turn my headphone AMP up to levels which are normally considered "ear destruction levels"
- Audio for my co-op partner started very loud, which is directly related to the next point:
- The game settings of my partner all started completely maxed.
FOV 120, Volumes at 1000%
Yes, volumes at a thousand percent, not 100. With a little wiggle of the slider it jumped back to 100%.
- Digging the ground causes short game/frame freezes
- Managing items in the inventory is very clunky and items more often than not get stuck on the cursor, vanish only to reappear once something is clicked or moved, or get stuck floating on the screen and never again go away even after closing the inventory.

All in all, there is a lot of work still to be done on Bugs & QoL :)

[rob_fhg]

Hi, SilverFolfy. Thanks for playing!

Just to confirm, you're all playing on PC on a LAN?

For the problems with the sliders, once they are manually adjusted in settings, do they function properly?

For the multiplayer sync issue, is it mainly occurring at game start, or does it persist throughout the session?

[SilverFolfy]

Originally posted by rob_fhg:

Hi, SilverFolfy. Thanks for playing!

Just to confirm, you're all playing on PC on a LAN?

For the problems with the sliders, once they are manually adjusted in settings, do they function properly?

For the multiplayer sync issue, is it mainly occurring at game start, or does it persist throughout the session?

Hi Rob,

1) Yes, we are 2 people trying to play multiplayer on PC (Windows 10), and we are on the same network behind the same router.

2) Yes, once adjusted they worked fine. I've also seen reports of people that have the opposite problem, where many sliders initially start at 0.

3) The sync issue persists. The joined player sees the world state at the point when they joined. All that I did after they joined was not synced back to them (terrain deformation, rock/fauna destruction, machine placements, etc)
Once the player re-joined, they saw the updated world, but were again not seeing anything change from that point onwards.
However when the joined client player placed a drill, I could see this change!
So it seems from client to host it works, from host to client it doesn't.
Player location data is working fine, so both our characters could run around fine and this was seen correctly.

Thanks for your efforts!

[rob_fhg]

Hi SilverFolfy,

Out of curiosity, are you in a region other than the United States? Regional Settings seem to be possibly the underlying cause of some of the problems people are experiencing where the sliders are out-of-whack at first.

In multiplayer, is the game state correct for the host, but wrong for the client? Or vice-versa? If the player experiencing the problem moves as far away from the machines as possible, then returns, does the game state update?

Thanks!

[SilverFolfy]

Originally posted by rob_fhg:

Hi SilverFolfy,

Out of curiosity, are you in a region other than the United States? Regional Settings seem to be possibly the underlying cause of some of the problems people are experiencing where the sliders are out-of-whack at first.

In multiplayer, is the game state correct for the host, but wrong for the client? Or vice-versa? If the player experiencing the problem moves as far away from the machines as possible, then returns, does the game state update?

Thanks!

Hi Rob,

Indeed, we are located in Austria (regional setting in Windows).
The Windows language of my partner is German, mine is English.

If you need anything tested, I volunteer as a tribute :)

Thanks!

[Honorable_D]

You really trying to play multiplayer in a just released EA game? What an absolute mad lad.

[SilverFolfy]

As for the sync issues, I updated my first answer to you with some detail.
It seems the sync works from client to host, but not from host to client.
We did not try to move around far away from the machines yet.
My partner has issued a refund on Steam already, but we will try to cancel so we can test it more.

[SilverFolfy]

Originally posted by Honorable_D:

You really trying to play multiplayer in a just released EA game? What an absolute mad lad.

I know it's early access, but it's a feature that should work at some point or another, so I'll try to help fix it. :)

[JoeyFHG]

Originally posted by 🐺 SilverFolfy 🎶:

Originally posted by Honorable_D:

You really trying to play multiplayer in a just released EA game? What an absolute mad lad.

I know it's early access, but it's a feature that should work at some point or another, so I'll try to help fix it. :)

We appreciate the help!

[SilverFolfy]

Just a thought for the settings slider issue: The regional standard for decimal places varies across the world.
For example:
In some places it's 10.1 (decimal separator with a dot)
In some others it's 10,1 (decimal separator with a comma)
Maybe that messes up some numbers.

[JoeyFHG]

Originally posted by 🐺 SilverFolfy 🎶:

Just a thought for the settings slider issue: The regional standard for decimal places varies across the world.
For example:
In some places it's 10.1 (decimal separator with a dot)
In some others it's 10,1 (decimal separator with a comma)
Maybe that messes up some numbers.

Hugely helpful! We're looking to see if this is our issue.

[SilverFolfy]

Originally posted by rob_fhg:

Hi SilverFolfy,

Out of curiosity, are you in a region other than the United States? Regional Settings seem to be possibly the underlying cause of some of the problems people are experiencing where the sliders are out-of-whack at first.

In multiplayer, is the game state correct for the host, but wrong for the client? Or vice-versa? If the player experiencing the problem moves as far away from the machines as possible, then returns, does the game state update?

Thanks!

Hey, another update for the multiplayer sync issue, and a fix!
Strap in, because this is a little wild
I work in IT, so I am used to weird issues, but I have not seen that before...

Through some research in the logs I think I found the problem.
It is a unicode conversion issue.

The Player.log was spammed with these entries:

Warning/GameAnalytics: Event queue: Failed to send events to collector - Retrying next time
EncoderFallbackException: Unable to translate Unicode character \\uD83C at index 32 to specified code page.
  at System.Text.EncoderExceptionFallbackBuffer.Fallback (System.Char charUnknown, System.Int32 index) [0x0001d] in <d6232873609549b8a045fa15811a5bd3>:0 
  at System.Text.EncoderFallbackBuffer.InternalFallback (System.Char ch, System.Char*& chars) [0x000dd] in <d6232873609549b8a045fa15811a5bd3>:0 
  at System.Text.UTF8Encoding.GetBytes (System.Char* chars, System.Int32 charCount, System.Byte* bytes, System.Int32 byteCount, System.Text.EncoderNLS baseEncoder) [0x0019b] in <d6232873609549b8a045fa15811a5bd3>:0 
  at System.Text.UTF8Encoding.GetBytes (System.String s, System.Int32 charIndex, System.Int32 charCount, System.Byte[] bytes, System.Int32 byteIndex) [0x000a6] in <d6232873609549b8a045fa15811a5bd3>:0 
  at Mirror.NetworkWriterExtensions.WriteString (Mirror.NetworkWriter writer, System.String value) [0x00018] in <46d5a42fd46d4071833d5f5b6710bc20>:0 
  at Mirror.GeneratedNetworkCode._Write_ActivateMachineInfo (Mirror.NetworkWriter writer, ActivateMachineInfo value) [0x0003a] in <4e67e4534d044d52bbd6befa72087916>:0 
  at NetworkMessageRelay.ActivateMachine (ActivateMachineInfo info) [0x00006] in <4e67e4534d044d52bbd6befa72087916>:0 
  at ActivateMachineAction.ProcessOnHost (Mirror.NetworkConnectionToClient sender) [0x0000b] in <4e67e4534d044d52bbd6befa72087916>:0 
  at FactorySimManager.SimUpdateAll (System.Single dt) [0x00257] in <4e67e4534d044d52bbd6befa72087916>:0 
  at FactorySimManager.Update () [0x00046] in <4e67e4534d044d52bbd6befa72087916>:0

My first instinct was to check for any such unicode characters "\\uD83C" and I found some hints on StackOverflow that this might be related to Emojis.
Well, both of us used emoji in our Steam usernames, soooo...
We deleted the emojis from our user names and tried again.
Lo and behold, the multiplayer sync works both ways reliably.
For posterity, my username was "🐺 SilverFolfy 🎶" before.

So I guess you should fix your unicode special character handling :D

[rob_fhg]

I don't know if this will make you feel any better, but so far you and your friend have found my favorite bug of launch day.

Thanks for exposing this problem! We'll looking into fixing this for an update.

[Kel]

Congrats Silverfoly on finding a unique day one bug that has a Developer excited :-)

I'm currently playing Multiplayer and currently not expericning the same problem so looks like Silver just got lucky at this point.

It's day one of EA and doing multiplayer myself and I'm curious what kinda bug/issues will find :-D

[SilverFolfy]

Originally posted by rob_fhg:

I don't know if this will make you feel any better, but so far you and your friend have found my favorite bug of launch day.

Thanks for exposing this problem! We'll looking into fixing this for an update.

This totally made my day too haha :D
Glad to be of assistance, now where is my paycheck? (just kidding!)

[JoeyFHG]

Originally posted by SilverFolfy:

Originally posted by rob_fhg:

I don't know if this will make you feel any better, but so far you and your friend have found my favorite bug of launch day.

Thanks for exposing this problem! We'll looking into fixing this for an update.

This totally made my day too haha :D
Glad to be of assistance, now where is my paycheck? (just kidding!)

In the mail.