What are these SEV-PBW problems, and what can we d

[Dan_]

SEV 1.25, Stock gametype

1. Expected results from technology are all jumbled.
- Researching Biology results in Troops
- In my other game, starting tech was wrong - could build baseships etc at turn 1, but not things like life support.
- Was reported to correct itself in some cases.

Q. What's causing this?

Q. What do we need to do so it doesn't happen?

2. When PBW (or perhaps other person) processes a turn newly created designs disappear and construction queues items are replaced with designs from other empires.

- Everything appears normal at first.
- After 1st turn created designs are missing and planet is constructing other races colonisers etc.
A test pbw game with just myself did this:
- Set to build facility, troop, and ship in 1 turn.
- Sent turn to PBW which processed it.
- Next turn the facility built ok but no troop or ship. The troop and ship design were gone as if they were never created.
When processing the exact same .gam and .plr files locally by logging in a host it worked normally.

Q. What's causing this?

Q. What do we need to do so it doesn't happen?


These two problems are preventing us from playing a pbw game, although there seem to be plenty of other SEV games active.
A bug report for support was logged here, which is being completely ingnored as usual.

Q. Are other people experiencing these problems?

Q. Does anyone have any advice or tricks we could use to manage a relatively bug free pbw game?

[geoschmo]

Are you using custom race files? There is a known issue with SE5 in that it doesn't handle custom races well unless the custom files are on the server where the turns are being processed. With SE4, the turn could be processed without all the custom shipsets on the server and as long as you had the custom shipsets on the machine where you did your player turn everything worked and looked fine. Unfortunatly with SE5 it doesn't work so well.

We've reported the problem to Malfador, but nothing has been done about it as of yet. Perhaps if more people submit it as a bug report it will become more of a priority. In the mean time I'm afraid all I can suggest is only using stock races for SE5 PBW games.

Geoschmo

[Dan_]

Thanks Geoschmo, I'll make sure the host of the replacement game knows to only use stock races.

Thank you also for having the patience to deal with malfador - I don't.

Some more info...

Last game: #1(tech) & #2(designs, construction)
Some people were using custom race styles, but I'm not sure if they had issues. I was using a stock race and got problem #2.

Test Game - #2(designs, construction) - no custom races used

First Game - #1(tech) - I don't think there were any custom races being used.

[geoschmo]

Well, it was just a theory of mine that the design and queue problems were related to the custom shipsets. It sounds like you have confirmed they are not with your test2 game. The only thing I knew for sure about the custom shipset issue was that the images would get swapped when the turn processed, and would not revert to their original images when the player opened the resulting turn.

There was a problem with designs and queues at one point with SE4 as well. It was related to the way the game would handle simultaneous turn orders. Newly created designs would be assigned the same index number internally in the game, and then when the turn would process on the host it would get confused by the duplicate index numbers and people would start getting each others designs. It's effect would be limited by player order. Either the first player or the last player would never see the problem, I can't remember which though.

This sounds suspicously like that same issue. I will report it to the beta team. It as eventually patched out of SE4, but the workaround until then was to always wait a turn after creating a new design before putting it into a construction queue. This was a bit of a headache as you ended up with extra dummy designs that you would go back later and modify with newly available technology. Modified designs don't have the problem, only newly created ones because after they've been through the host process at leasat once their index number is locked in so to speak.

Geoschmo

[Dan_]

That fits most of the symptoms I've seen. If the new design got an ID of a design used by another player it may cause the server to silently trash the new design, and any reference to it (via ID) would now reference the other players existing design - construction queues. Buy why then did the problem not occur in the pbw test game when I processed the turn localy? I was very carful to make sure it could only use exactly the same files as those sent to pbw. I can't remember, but I may have only had one player (myself) in that game too.

[Baron Grazic]

It couldn't be something as simple as the Empire file was created with a different version than the game is running on?

[aegisx]

Has anyone seen a sign of this being fixed in the changelog?

[Dan_]

Baron Grazic: Empire files created in older versions were likely to have been used in the last game since it took a while to get started and there were a lot of players. Normally I would be surprised if this caused an issue as it is trivial record and check the version of any data files (empire file) and halt on version mismatches.
The test game I ran with designs disappearing (#2) was all done with the same version.

What does happens when empire file created in an older version is used in an updated version of SEV?

I'm sending a link to this forum topic to Strategy First and Malfador support so they can provide some answers.

[capnq]

Dan_ said: I'm sending a link to this forum topic to Strategy First and Malfador support so they can provide some answers.

It's better to send a detailed description of the problem, including a saved game which illustrates it, directly to Malfador.

[Dan_]

I've sent the savegames to Malfador.

Stretagy First's advice was to use the 1.25 patch - strange given the first line in this forum topic, and to use the spaceepires5 website.