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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
1 
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I don't think you understand.
The game and the mod are not related.
Steam sells the vanilla game as is.
The developers are Firaxis. The game was developed for 32-bit Windows about 15 years ago.
If you have a problem about the game itself, contact Firaxis.
Mods are written by modders.
If you have a problem with a mod, report it to the modders using the modders system for reporting bugs.
Why? Because that's what they have said to do.
Another reason is that they rarely visit this forum.
Where can you report a mod problem to the WTP modders?
WTP bug reports are submitted on the Civfanatics website.
"The game and the mod are not related"
That's a very silly statement, they are COMPLETELY related, if they arent related why are so many WTP subjects here in this forum?
Also man, whoever you are, you haven't answered any of my questions, or contributed anything to this conversation apart from the blatent obvious. Yes of course ive been in other forums ffs.
This post will stay, as a warning to anyone planning to purchase and play this new mod, that it doesnt work, maybe i help a random gamer, who knows.
First of all:
Yes, warning people "This mod / this game has OOS issues" is valid.
And it is nothing we make a secrect of.
------
About "Why does this mod WTP" have bugs:
We are not paid developers and thus do this in our spare time.
And also we are still constantly working on it.
This mod is not a "final game" and still in development.
A professional game company would consider every of our releases as a "beta release" or a "test release".
Every release we fix old bugs of old features.
But at the same time we implement new features and thus new bugs.
Only once we stop developing features we may really get this almost bug free.
And that is currently not our plan.
Also, I do not even know which version or release you talk about.
"Official Releases" tend to be quite stable in Single Player at least.
(Considering OOS see below.)
------
Then to set realistic expecations:
Our modding community has been fighting against "extinction".
Thinking that we are hundreds that constantly work on this is illusionary.
Only very few of us still care enough about this game and its mods to actually mod.
And even less have the patience and endurance to invest years to become an expert.
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OOS issues have been known since the first mod was created.
But even Vanilla already had a few OOS issues. (Less though than when playing with the mods.)
We had solved several ones, then created new features and then there were new ones.
It is a constant fight to try to solve them and we still work on that topic.
------
As explanation:
(I know player do not care about technical aspects.)
Most OOS happen in the EXE not in the actual game logic.
We can not debug and analyze anthing that happens in the EXE.
Thus it is only very very frustrating and time consuming "try and error".
We have no systematic way to fix any OOS desyncs.
Firaxis / 2K simply did not give us the development tools to dig deeper in the EXE and the deep engine.
(If they did they would risk that we steal their IP.)
------
At the moment:
We simply have not solved all the OOS issues.
It is not that we do not try and it is also not that we did not have successes already.
But again, every new feature may cause new OOS issues to analyze and fix again.
------
And considering Steam, Firaxis and 2K:
It is really nothing they care about and they never will.
Only we modders still care about it considering creation of bugfixes and improvements.
Why should they care about mods they never were involved it.
Civ4Col Vanilla development is simply dead. (The game is 13 years old.)
------
Telling about "Hey there is an OOS" is not needed, because we know.
Constantly complaining about an issue we know already since years also does not help.
The only thing that really helps is actually modding and trying to fix it.
That is what we modders try to do.
------
You simply can not compare us with a professional game development of a modern new game.
We try to privately keep a 13 year old game alive that expect us modders and a handful of fans hardly any still cares about.
By the way:
If Firaxis / 2K should ever decide to create a modern version of Colonization (e.g. on Civ6 or Civ7) and also directly incorporated us modders (without even having to pay us) into their development we could talk totally different.
But that dream seems to be dead.
Best regards
raystuttgart
By the way, thanks for the hint about "Wild Animals".
It may be a lead to fix another OOS.
As I said, we have absolutely no systematic way to analyze and fix them.
Every tiny hint helps.
Best regards
raystuttgart
Oh please, this is laughable, is this mod was meant to be a private thing for a handful of fans, then why do we have posts like this on youtube advertisment for it ....
cueballgames
1 year ago (edited)
Please check out the incredible mod here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/we-the-people-mod-overview.636758/
"Incredible mod" :O
you guys are clearly trying hard to push this into the fanbase, dont piss in my pocket with this "charity" bs
Then, look on the steam community page for Civ IV, 2nd most popular link, is the MOD. And what a coincidence, posted one year ago. Very detailed post, a LOT of work went into the marketing of just a simple "private mod for a handful of fans" Whos trying so hard to push this? And who posted it? i guarantee its one of you guys, now saying it was never completed in the first place.
Seems to me you guys ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, im not the one who advertised this, YOU DID, im not the one who created these long and detailed guides to install and play this mod, YOU DID, so dont ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ blame me, and point ridicule at me, for simply stating a fact......... It doesnt work.
Sorry, but this discussion is getting strange.
Where did I try to blame you and for what?
I just tried to explain to you why we still have OOS desyncs, which is no secret.
Stating this fact is perfectly fine, it is stated all over the place in our forum.
All our fans and community know it since years already.
----
The team is currently 5 core team members only and 3 loyal supporters.
So who is "you guys"? Do you include all of our community there?
E.g. "cueball" is not a team member but he is a befriended community member.
He of course told us about his post and we were flattered.
In fact, you will find very few posts or videos or twitch recordings ... outside our forums that are really made by our team directly.
90% of the advertisement outside our forum is made by fans and communtiy members.
(The rest is basically ourselfs publishing our releases with changelogs.)
----
Of course we and our community tried and still try to increase the fanbase.
And did I ever say we are not proud of it? Of course we area.
Was it "marketed"? Strange to call it like that actually, because we do not sell it.
But yes, we and our community want this mod to get known and played.
And no this is not a "private thing", since we have a community since 13 years.
But it is simply not a "commercial" or "professional" thing, which you do not seem to understand.
----
In your opinion we .... up because we have an OOS desync in MP games. (Which is true.)
But on the same hand you admit that we have a community that likes our mod.
Well then I would say there are worse ways to ... up.
If I would always ... up just like this in my life I would really be happy.
----
Considering next upcoming release we will have lots of new features and improvements.
We will of course also have fixed some old bugs, but we will definitely also have new ones.
Again, ever release gets new content.
And like with all new content there will also be new bugs.
We are simply no "final game" that published its last release.
Every release we publish is pretty fresh out of development.
Our community then hels us find issues and we then integrate the fixes into the next release.
It is a continuous modding progress ...
----
Summary:
Maybe in the future we will solve the OOS desyncs.
Currently it is simply not solved and I can not promise anything.
Thus nothing I could say currently will make you happy.
And I better stop here to not anger you even more.
Best regards
ray
The civ4 engine is build on the principle of parallel execution. This means a lot of the code is not handled by the network. Instead all computers will do all calculations. In particular the AI doesn't rely on network traffic. Natives can raid a colony and combat and what they plunder will be the same on all computers even without the computers telling each other. The major benefit of this approach is low bandwidth requirements and that it almost doesn't care about latency (ping times). It even works on dialup. That might not be that useful today, but it was when it was first released in 2005 and since nobody changed the network engine, that's what we use today.
Parallel execution is not unique to the civ4 engine. It's widely used as it's very useful to hide lag.
Parallel execution comes with two drawbacks:
- if one computer does something the other computers don't know about, then it has to tell it on the network. An example could be that the player use the keyboard to move a unit.
- the same code has to produce the same result on all computers.
If either of those fails, it will trigger an OOS. The problem is that when OOS is displayed, it tells that something went wrong, but not what. Also detection of an OOS can be delayed. Sometimes the player will have no clue to what went wrong. I have once fixed an OOS caused by a bug, which made the AI behave differently in some unexplored plots, meaning the human players had no way of spotting the issue.
To make matters worse, our usual automated bug hunting tools (assert checks and debugging) doesn't work in network games as it causes the game to disconnect. With no standard tools working, I have had to write my own, which is essentially the game logging data on all computers for comparison. When I can see how each computer views the game, I can spot differences and from there it's detective work to figure out how that can occur.
It's no easy task finding an OOS bug. We have 195k lines of C++ and some python code in addition to that. It's not like you can just start from one end and read through it to spot all the OOS bugs as they are usually a combination of calls from multiple files.
I'm working on fixing alll OOS issues, but it's a very time consuming task.
This game still does not work in multiplayer
Been almost a year now since this post, and the original post at civ forums regarding this error was started in 2017, so we are nearing half a decade for this bug. Devs would rather spend time adding more features like lakes apparently.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/important-for-all-steam-users-follow-these-instructions-to-play-wtp-without-bugs.674675/#post-16201560
For some reason many players still had not heard about it, so I repeated it.
(Many MP game issues with mods may have been caused by it.)
To summarize solution:
(At least that is what we currently suspect.)
Switch back to "Original Release" in Steam (aka the 2008 Original CD version) - which is much better anyways.
Explanation:
In the later release Steam heavily damaged mod support.
(We have no idea why or hwo they did that though - we just know they wanted to "cut out GameSpy".)
Comment:
In fact we had expected that they would make "Original Release" default installation after so many bugs with mods had been reported.
We are also a bit supprised that many players had never read about the problems with "Latest Release version" considering mods.
(It is known since many years in modding community.)
----
I can not guarantee that MP games will not have any OOS anymore with this.
But we had lots of other bug reports related to that version in the past.
(All of them can be easily prevented by chosing "Original Release Version" in Steam.)
My guess is, if you guys keep adding features, like lakes and rivers, without fixing these critical issues first, then the problem will just compound, and grow, until this mod is legit 100% unplayable.
For example, does anyone want or need these extra events that reward an Indian slave? or the shipwrecks, which are completely pointless and unrealistic. It doesn't take a coding genesis to realise, your putting yet more strain on a clearly heavily strained system. So all your updates will just mean more errors. I think ill pass on your mod for now, just seems to me you guys really don't know what your doing, and really lack the skills to troubleshoot bugs and errors. its been a decade guys, how long you need, really? that was my main OP question, you want 30 years? 40?
Ill quote my OP question
"So my main question is this, is there some kind of timeframe or estimate as to when this problem will be addressed properly and given the attention it needs? I have no desire to waste anymore time with OOS and CTD until its fixed, so i would like to know exactly how long we should wait, or if we should just give up and play something else."
You guys have not answered this question
Clearly you dont know HOW to fix it, and are merely stringing me along with false hope.
Im done with this mod
------------------------------------------------
Switching to "Original Release" is still highly advised, if you do not you will have bugs with the mod - for sure in the next release.
However we also figured out that the OOS are not solved by switching to "Original Release".
The OOS are in fact caused by feature logic both of Vanilla and of our mod.
Even Vanilla was never completely OOS free - in those days people often still e.g. used "Play by eMail" for MP games, where players moved sequentially and transitted a save game.
Considering OOS analysis:
----------------------------
We are one step further now and verified again that at least some of the OOS are infact caused by the DLL-Diplomacy events.
(Which does not mean that is the only possible cause of it.)
And we think we also know why :
Because player inputs by selecting a dialogue option - triggers "Random Calculations".
e.g. if Dialogue Choice leads to success or failure (or how big the reward is)
So at least those OOS we should be able to eliminate for the upcoming release.
(Which does not mean that there will not be any other OOS left - we will need to test it.)
Summary for OOS:
We still work on this and with next release it may be fixed.
There is no way to promise that though - we can just try.
Considering "Next Release":
------------------------------
In the upcomig release we had lots of improvements, bugfixes and also new content.
We add new content to the mod, because we try to create the game we always wanted.
The next release is thus going to be big and it will still take time.
(For sure several months - since we work on this in our spare time.)
So no, there is no "time frame" we have commited to.
We are done, when we are done - modding is not a job.
------------------------------
------------------------------
Generally please understand, we are not paid software developers.
We do this in our spare time for free and just share it wiht others.
And our main motivation for modding is quite honestly because we do it for ourselves.
We do not do this to earn money and also can not work more than our spare time allows.
Thus:
Please do not communicate to us like if we would be payed for modding.
We do this voluntarily and for free - in our spare time.
We are simply not a professional game development studio.
------------------------------
------------------------------
In total:
The "Original Release Version of Civ4Col" (selectable in Steam) prevents other bugs.
The OOS are still not yet solved and our team is still working on it.
There is no set date yet for the next release.
We give our best but we will not create artificial pressure on the team.
Sorry, but that is all I can tell.