I host a number of games on a VMware virtual machine hosted on VMware server. I’m familiar with VMware platform as I manage a VMware cluster at the datacenter I work at. I’ve never had any issues with VMware until now.
Basically the VMware guest that runs the games started to act up when I upgraded the host to an AMD dual-core system. The time on both the OS and the game would go about 2x faster than normal. After lots of research I found out there is an AMD patch that addresses the issue… sure enough I installed it and the OS and other applications on the server started to work fine (though it still gains a minute a day – nothing a simple time synch program can’t fix).
I assumed the problem went away in my dom3 games as well as I didn’t notice any drastic time changes there either. However, the timekeeping issue didn’t disappear with Dom3 is just got better. Now, instead of time going 2x as fast it goes about 1.175x as fast. So hence if I set the Dom3 timer to host a turn in 24 hours, time in Dom3 will speed up and host the game in approximately 21.5 hours. Not huge, but still unacceptable.
So my question – why is Dom3 the only application/game that still messes up? How does the server track time? Do the Devs or other knowledgeable people have any suggestions on how to fix this? I assume Dom3 looks to the hardware in some way for timekeeping and ignores the OS… (wah!).
Currently with the game I am going to just increase the hosting time. This isn’t a permanent fix as it is confusing though. I have a laptop I don’t really use anymore that I’ll setup to do the hosting, but I dislike the thought of an extra physical machine with I have processing power still available to use on an existing machine (habit I suppose).
Any suggestions would be welcome… otherwise let this server as a warning to anyone planning to host games on a virtual machine as I did…
Interesting MP Server Hosting Bug/Issue
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