How to Play Online

A quick step-by-step guide to hosting a match or joining someone else's group in Hive Jump.

Starting an Online Lobby

1. From the Play menu, select either "Campaign" or "Arcade".
   
   
2. When in the Loadout screen, click the "Lobby" button in the bottom right corner to switch from "Local" (no online functionality) to "Online."
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   You may chat to everyone in your party by clicking in the “Press Enter to Chat” box or just hitting the "Enter" key on your keyboard.

Hosting Your Own Game

1. The Online Multiplayer Lobby defaults to Friends-only mode. Leaving it like this will allow you to host a private lobby that’s only open to people you invite from your Steam Friends list. You can click on the three “Empty Slot” buttons at the top to invite friends via the Steam menu.
   
   
2. If you want to host a public lobby where anyone can join you, click on the “Friends” button (or “T” on your keyboard). The button will then change to say “Public” and now other players who use the “Find Match” feature will eventually start showing up in those 3 Empty Slots.
   
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3. Once players start joining you will see them fill up the Empty Slots. You can remove players from your group by clicking on them and confirming that you wish to kick them.
   
   
   
4. The colored bars and “ms” number above another player's name signifies their connection to you. The lower the number the better. Hive Jump uses a peer-to-peer system so the game will only run as fast as the slowest computer/connection in your party.
   
   
5. “Input delay” is automatically set to a value closest to average latency between the players. Increasing it can make the game smoother, but at a cost of losing some responsiveness in controls.
   
   • In depth technical details: The game proceeds to next frame as soon as it knows what each player wants to do for that frame. Input delay determines how long the players have to send in their actions for next frame, and also by how much your inputs are delayed. If the time is up, but someone's actions still hadn't arrived (usually due to connectivity woes), the game pauses to "wait up" for them. Therefore, if the connection is unstable (thus constantly out of time with the auto-picked delay), the game can become "choppy" or otherwise run inappropriately. In this case, you would try a higher delay and/or have players troubleshoot their connection quality.
     
   
   
6. Once everyone who is currently in the Lobby has finished Locking in, the game will start as normal.

Joining Someone Else's Game

1. Once you’ve entered an Online lobby (Starting an Online Lobby: Step #2) you can click the “Find Match” button (or “F” on your keyboard) to have Hive Jump automatically start searching for other players who have an open lobby. There is also a “Find Match” button on the main menu.
   
   
   
   • It does not matter what kind of lobby you are in when you start searching for a match. Whether you are in a campaign lobby or an easy, medium, or hard arcade lobby, the matchmaking system will try to find you whatever open lobby it can to ensure the shortest queue times. If you want to play a specific mode or difficulty with others, you should try hosting your own lobby.
     
   
   
2. When the game has found you an open lobby, you will automatically join and will be able to change your loadout like normal. Once everyone has fully Locked in the game will automatically start.
   

Common Issues and Solutions

Low Framerate / Performance in Online Multiplayer. There are two primary causes of low framerate in Online Multiplayer.

1. Poor internet connection between players. Because Hive Jump is a peer-to-peer game, if one player’s internet is slow, the entire game will slow down to wait for their inputs. This means that players trying to play across large geographical distances on slower connections might not be able to play with each other at a reasonable/enjoyable speed. Players with upload speeds slower that 1MB/s up will generally have issues as well. The only way to fix this is to improve your internet speeds, or try playing with other players who you have a good connection with. You can tell if internet slowdowns are the cause of framerate issues because you will see connectivity bars like the ones in Loadout appear next to a player’s UI if their internet is slow. Kicking a player with a bad connection in-game will result in the game speeding up for the rest of the players.
   
   
   
2. Poor hardware performance. Hive Jump ramps up a lot more with 4 players, allowing up to 80 enemies to be spawned at any one time, and drawing a lot more processing power from the CPU. Players who had decent performance in single player might not in Online Multiplayer. There are some solutions however.
   
   
   • Check to see if your Hive Jump is using your computer’s GPU. For many laptops using NVidia chips, sometimes you have to make sure an application is set to use hardware acceleration (the GPU), otherwise it will use the laptop’s CPU to render graphics as well. This bottlenecks the CPU pretty drastically in Hive Jump, and can cause slowdown in general, but it is very noticeable in online play. Quick steps for NVIDIA users are:
     From NVIDIA Control Panel
     3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings
     Tab "Global Settings"
     Preferred Graphics Processor
     Select: High performance NVIDIA processor
     
     Do a google search if your setup differs and you think this might fix your issue.
     
     
   • Turn of Lighting and Particles. Even the increased number of dynamic lights in the game due to adding more players and enemies can cause issues for some users with low-end hardware. In Hive Jump’s “Settings” menu, you can turn off Lighting and Particles. If you’re having performance issues, turning these off will help a lot without sacrificing any of the core readability of the game.
     
     
     
   • Turn off background applications. Are you running 11 Chrome tabs, Skype, Discord, and a bunch of other applications using CPU in the background? Try turning those off and seeing if it helps!
     

Help! I’m stuck somewhere I shouldn’t be! Whoops! Luckily for you, we know that ♥♥♥♥ sometimes happens, and we’ve put a few commands in the game to help out! If you’re stuck outside the level, or somewhere else you can’t move or escape from, type /stuck in the chat window. This should help.

Thanks for reading! If you have any additions, tips, thoughts, or questions leave them in a comment below!

[OverdriveR]

2020 here and I think the MP is pretty dead, sadly this game is great would love to play it COOP!

[Phoenixspark]

ok cool THX

[SpawnC137]

Excellent. Thank you.