Multiplayer Instability

[Dealman]

Is it really this unstable in multiplayer? Me and my GF are barely ~3 hours in and have already crashed 3 times.

Only mod we have is ACE as it seems to be strongly recommended not only for content added but also bugfixes and whatnot.

The game's fun and all, but see no huge appeal in continuing to play if the multiplayer is gonna be this broken as I have little interest in playing this in SP mode.

We're in the same room so latency is definitely not an issue, and I have an i7 9700k so doubt that my CPU is the issue.

Last session we played only lasted ~13 minutes before the 3rd crash.

Crash log[pastebin.com]

[YetiChow]

Hmmm, weird -- there's a lot of non-critical errors at the start of that log before the "real" errors kick in, almost like there's an out-of-date mod or you're running very slightly different mod versions. My first piece of advice would be to make sure you're both up to date with ACE, and not e.g. one of you running the most recent beta while the other is on a stable release or something like that.

Secondly, even though you're in the same room you may still have more latency than you expect -- it comes down to your network setup. I'd assume you've already tested the latency etc, but it might be worth running a network test while the game is running. Stonehearth is very bandwidth-hungry (there's a LOT of data to send back and forth to keep the town running), so if you're using a wireless network you may be hitting the limit of how fast it can send and receive.

As for your processor, that's a solid option (even skipping the whole "Stonehearth isn't a multi-core game so all those extra cores are useless" lecture, a single core on a 9700k should have enough power to run the game's "main" simulation thread without much trouble assuming you're not doing anything ridiculous), BUT does your other player have a similarly powerful core? What else are your computers doing at the same time? A common thing I see is "my computer is powerful so it should work fine", but then it turns out the person was also running multiple programs in the background and had 30 browser tabs open including a Youtube music stream... so they weren't just giving their computer a hard time, but their network too. It's worth checking that you don't have anything running at the same time which could take CPU or network resources away from the game.

Otherwise, there's the usual "ways you might accidentally be making things much harder for the game to compute than they should be" checklist:

- creating lots of items and never storing them (this creates a TON of "put away item" tasks that can never be completed, so they pile up and the computer has to check through them all every time a new storage container is built)

- making the hearthlings walk around a lot to complete their tasks, rather than keeping things close together to simplify the pathfinding

- lots of jobs that can't be completed; i.e. "set and forget" production style where you're not checking back that resources are flowing where they're needed

- really large buildings e.g. a wall around the town as a single building -- you can easily avoid this one by breaking a big structure up into smaller sections

- lots of enemies around the map, especially if they're "trapped" and can't get to your town (this was partially fixed so they don't waste CPU trying to find a path where one doesn't exist... but every time you update a chunk that's along their path, they try again. So, if you're doing any building or mining or chopping trees or placing items within the same chunk as the trapped enemies, then they'll try again until they're sure the change hasn't opened up a new path)

Playing Stonehearth multiplayer smoothly does require a little bit more strategy than singleplayer even if you both have powerful computers and ideal circumstances (which, honestly, it sounds like you might), purely because the networking technology available can only do so much and the game is very simulation heavy. It's not a case of anything being "badly made" so much as you've got a potentially unlimited amount of data to send and process and only a finite bandwidth and processor to do it with. 2 strategies which I've found will help a lot:

1) don't try to do everything at once, but split the work between both players. Why have both people try to have huge lumber operations going, when one could focus on woodcutting (and do it efficiently) while the other runs a mining operation? You can trade resources, which also allows you to "teleport" those resources between each other, saving a ton of time and work for the hearthlings who would otherwise have to walk the resources from place to place

2) remember that your hearthling counts both add up. Whatever number of hearthlings the host's computer caps out at, that's your total for all players combined now. And even then, I'd take a few hearthlings off the top to account for the extra work involved in sending the data across the network.

[Dealman]

Appreciate the very thorough reply!

Our latency is good, when it comes to network-related stuff I'm fairly well acquainted since I've studied network engineering and software engineering is one of my biggest hobbies ;)

My girlfriend's got to take over my old trusty companion an i5 3570k, certainly not the best CPU and a fair bit dated by today's standard - but I'd reckon it's decent enough for this game.

After all I got it back in the day due to its single-core performance for the early days of ArmA 3, haha.

We're not too far in I don't think, I've got 10 citizen and she's got 7. I had one get stuck in a mine, silly dude dug himself a hole directly under him. But managed to get him out in time.

As for a bunch of stuff laying around we both a have a lot of logs laying around, we're still learning the ropes of the game - but getting them to actually pick up stuff on the ground and move it to the stockpile seems to be nigh impossible at times.

We'll probably try some more and set workers to haul stuff for a while and see if that helps, if it crashes more I'll gather some more logs.

We're definitely on the same mod version. :)

Edit:

Update, we got to play ~40 minutes before it crashed again. Upon loading the save both me and my girlfriend are met with these in-game errors[pastebin.com].

And this is the new error log[pastebin.com]. From what I can tell it seems to be about the same.

Can't really see any pattern in-game as to what events could be causing it, seems to be random and happen sometime around 30-40 minutes.

We could try and create a new save, but I somehow doubt that it's related to the save since it can play for around 40 minutes at a time.

My CPU and RAM usage was fine, was checking it on my 2nd monitor whilst playing. Wasn't monitoring my GPU usage - but that shouldn't be the issue since the game is crashing - not the drivers.

[YetiChow]

Ok, checking the error log, that final couple of lines confirms that what's happening is that your game is running out of time between ticks to process the simulation (i.e. too much work for the computer to do between ticks.) And honestly, I'm almost completely stumped as to why -- both your computer specs are fine, you've got good latency so it's not something like the sheer travel time for the data getting in your way... I do notice that the restock manager gets stuck though, so I have a feeling that there's some specific task that it's trying and failing to assign/complete.

The main thing I can think of that might cause that is if an item is very far away from your town (so there's a really complicated pathfinding route to go pick it up and bring it back), or if a 'pick up item and store it' task had already been started and something changed to make it impossible to complete but the game never twigged to that. I'd lean towards the latter, since sheer distance/complexity of pathfinding shouldn't cause that kind of fatal error.

It may simply be that your clients are getting out of sync, throwing off the restock manager/task allocation systems?

As far as the large number of logs on the ground: the best trick to cleaning up a mess is to not make it in the first place. There is never a benefit to having more raw materials laying around than you can use presently, and there's always at least 1 downside (more processor work) and often more (e.g. food rots, items can be stolen or destroyed, happiness penalties), so the best strategy is to figure out roughly the rate you'll consume resources and then aim to produce at basically that rate. So, you don't chop a bunch of trees right out the gate; you chop 2-5 (depending on whether large or small), build your carpenter's bench and maybe a couple of beds, and go straight to making some storage. Then, place that storage near the next group of trees you want to cut down, so that the logs go straight into storage... presto, no mess! You can move crates that are full or partly full; but even if you consider this too "gamey"/cheating, even just establishing a permanent woodcutting grove (where you replant trees) and keeping your storage and your carpenter nearby will dramatically cut down on the work that your hearthlings (and therefore your PC too) have to do.

When you already have the mess, the first thing to do is pause the game and let the processor settle out. Then, cancel any tasks you can afford to cancel, and un-tick the "haul" button in the hearthling manager UI. This will probably be counterintuitive; but you're going to want your hearthlings to focus on building the solution to the mess not endlessly fighting a losing battle against it. Get some crates/storage made, and order them to be placed near the logs/other messy items, then re-tick hauling. Placing and moving items is still higher priority than cleaning up items on the ground, so the hearthlings will carry the storage containers over to the mess and immediately start cleaning up. You can then more entire filled crates back to town, saving many many trips. Note that you can't "un-deploy" a partly filled storage, only move it; so this will have to be done manually. Slowly ramp up normal activity again, and just make sure you're not producing (much) more of something than you're using. If you're going to want a ton of some material later (e.g. stone for a castle wall) then you can pre-prepare by designating a mining site, building a road there, setting up storage near the mine site and the construction project, and getting some resources starting to flow just before you start the construction (so the builders have materials on-site right from the moment you hit the build button, and they're replaced about as fast as they're used.)

Think of it like a factory -- while you don't want to run out of parts, building parts faster than you use them and with nowhere else for them to go is actually worse because they'll pile up everywhere.