Be the First To Try our New Multiplayer Tech!

[Krille]

I'll be very grateful if we were still able to change our username before a multiplayer game actually started. I've become fed up of the Forum name that I can't change, but that's fine because it's only on the forums. However, I never ever use it for playing MP games and I don't want to be forced to do so.

Hi!

You should still be able to do that in the lobby. It will default to your username though. The feature of changing your in-game nickname per game has not been removed. Please let me know if you don't get it to work!

 

[Krille]

Is this feature working already? A friend and I went into a quick game to try out any account/friend list/chat features but it didn't seem to be working. There's a paradox button with a 0 on it that I presume is the friends list/account stuff but the button doesn't do anything when pressed.

Hi!

Can you try to close Stellaris, log out from the splash screen / launcher and log in again with your Paradox Account? It should bring up a friends list when clicked. Please let me know if it doesn't work!

 

[Alexivan]

Is the level 0 Corvette spam (almost no maintenance cost) fixed in this build?

This has the same stuff as 1.6.1, so if it's not fixed there it won't be fixed here either.

 

[Alexivan]

When you say "Those that assist in the game beta will get access to a portrait early" does this mean those who downloaded the beta or those who found bugs? What if i downloaded the beta and didn't encounter a single bug? Will I still get access to the portrait?

It means that you can play the space shrimp in this version, if you're logged on into your pdx account.

 

[Alexivan]

@Escher @Alexivan
I did everything step by step as you posted, but I didn't get a popup to connect my accounts (maybe because they're already connected?), and when I clicked on Multiplayer and logged in, everything was like before, with an exception that there is no more lobby in multiplayer where we can chat, and this new window:
Now, how do I change that profile pic?

Yeah, your account might have been connected already, could check that on the account settings I believe. We don't currently support changing your friends list picture, but we will continue developing the friends list and the ability to change it will probably be implemented later, we want to focus on making the MP as stable at the moment.

 

[Alexivan]

I am not very thrilled. Paradox should focus the next several patches just on fixing bugs. No new features. No massive rebalancing, no goodies. Just fixing bugs. Maybe a dozend at a time. So we can even track the progress. 1.6 Patchnotes were nice and overwhelming, but there where so called "Fixed" bugs, that are still in game...

The people involved with this are different from the people working on the gameplay patches, so we're not stealing resources from the game team

 

[Krille]

Does this include improvements to Observer Mode?

No, not at this point. This is more or less about the underlying multiplayer layer and not focused on feature improvements or development.

 

[Krille]

I saw a game in the lobby, it said "Starting" and when I tried to join it said "game not found". I refreshed the list and it was still there.

Thanks for reporting! Have you been able to join any game? I would appreciate if I can reach out in a PM and get some further details on your hardware (for example if you're behind a restrictive firewall).

 

[world_citizen]

Thanks for reporting the friend list and chat problems. We are currently looking into a bug with the automatic login feature if you have connected your Paradox and Steam accounts, causing friends list and chat to not work. It would be very helpful if you could try to disconnect your accounts on the "Settings" tab of https://accounts.paradoxplaza.com/profile, and then skip the connection step next time you start the game, and let us know if this resolves your issue. You can always re-connect using the Paradox Logo at the bottom of the game screen, or using the same website.

Regarding the "game not found" issues, it would help if you could provide us more details, for example details about your network setup, as well as the name of the session you were trying to join. Feel free to send me a PM!

Thanks!

 

[Alexivan]

Okay, but what are exactly the features of this new multiplayer? Besides this account syncing and new friend list, I don't see anything new...

It's not that there's a new feature, it's that we've rewritten the code for multiplayer. We want to test this so we can catch bugs before going live.

Is the plan to eventually force players to login to a Paradox account to play multiplayer for the live release? Absolutely awful idea if so

Yes, we know it's a extra step, but we need a method to authenticate the players. It's hopefully not too much of an effort to create an account, and the next build will have an easier create account screen. Also, If you link your paradox account to your steam account, login should happen automatically.

If you had an actual bug tracker instead of a forum it may be even easier for Devs to get relevant information instead of ignoring posts in the bug report forum.

We have a bugtracker internally, and we add bugs we find in the forums, they aren't not getting ignored.

 

[Alexivan]

What improvements are planned to be added based on this change of code? More fluid multiplayer, as in if host drops game continues? Fluid hotjoining process?

None at the moment, we have some ideas about things what we wanna make, and this is gives us the infrastructure to we need to make those things possible. But we've noticed that this new implementation seems to work a bit faster, so that's good

 

[Alexivan]

can't find any game without password, so can't try it out atm.

EDIT: found one, tryed to connect - Game not found.
i'm at work with heavy corporate firewall, so it would be good to know what ports\protocols game use to connect host and client to each other.

You could try port forwarding 17780 - 17790 on both TCP and UDP, let me know if that helped

 

[Alexivan]

Is it really necessary to reinvent the wheel ? Stellaris has been the only game from PDS so far where i didn't have major issues playing MP (no desync etc.). Only issues I had were performance (slow end game) related and happen in SP as well.

Sorry, it is. We have to look forward and make sure our future games are even better These changes are on a lower level than the gameplay ones, so they shouldn't change too much, let us know if you find any issues.

 

[Krille]

I am hosting a game now.
Hotjoining is extremely fast. Time to join has reduced by 70-80%. Great job on that!

Now, adding players is a bit difficult. I sent a request to my friend and he had to click 20-30 times in order to add me. Accept friend request may be bugged so take a second look at it.

Even though we are now playing the game, he appears as offline. This is definitely a bug. We can chat, but it still says offline.

Also, it would be nice if you added this feature:

So, everytime I try to join, it says game not found, but when I hosted a game an hour ago, people joined and played with me...

Hi!

Yes, it's a bug that has been logged. He was likely added the first time but the UI didn't update. The online presence should work if you restart Stellaris.

Good suggestion! Thanks for the report.

 

[Krille]

So, I updated, booted it up, wasn't prompted to fill in any username or such, even set a nickname, perhaps since i'm already linked, I can find only one game which is someone with 1/32 slots, but cannot join, and upon hosting a game, no-one else joins, So i'm wondering if i did it right? I'm running 1.7

Hi!

Yeah, it's most likely due to your account already being linked. I would guess that you're doing everything right, it's probably just too few people testing right now. I will try to get some people from our end to host some games during tomorrow.

Thanks for testing. We appreciate it!

 

[Krille]

Hi all!

We just updated the 1.7 beta branch (Bradbury) with 1.7.1 to get some further data on the networking layer. You will likely have to restart Steam in order to get the new update.

If you're testing, make sure that it says version 1.7.1 in the bottom left corner of the main screen when running Stellaris.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to thank all of you for helping out with the testing. During tomorrow we will try to get a few people from here to host games just to make sure there's something running that you can join.

Thank you all!

 

[Alexivan]

Since I couldn't find anyone else asking about this in the thread, is the beta available for Mac users? (asking because the dropdown menu only has the one option,"opt out of all betas") I know sometimes developers who make games for both Windows and OSX have players who experience problems between multiplayer sessions on the two platforms; I was just wondering if helping out with that would be a possibility. Also playing as a space appetizer would be cool too.

Yes

 

[Krille]

What is the reason for authenticating via a Paradox account?
The steam API already allows for user authentication using their steam account. Is there things that cannot be done with the Steam API calls?

Hi!

There's a few reasons to why a developer may want to use another system than Steam for multiplayer (and therefore another authentication method). Let's say you wanted to allow players buying a game on Steam to play with those who bought the same game through GOG or Twitch. Another example would be a game that wants console and PC players to be able to play together.

 

[Krille]

Hi again!

We see that a few of you get the "Game not found" issue. In the update yesterday we added the option of logging some more data in case that happens. We would really appreciate that if you get an error when trying to connect to a game please run Stellaris from the command line with "Stellaris.exe -pdxmp_max_log". This will produce a pdpmp.log file in your game directory (i.e. "<My Documents>\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\logs\"). Please send me that file in a PM and we'll dig deeper.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[world_citizen]

We have a possible resolution for the many "game not found" connection issues, and would appreciate if you could try to replace the pdx_mp library file in the root of the game installation, next to stellaris.exe, before we push this fix through in the next patch.

Windows: https://s3.amazonaws.com/paradox-assets/misc/pdx_mp_20170819/pdx_mp.dll
Linux: https://s3.amazonaws.com/paradox-assets/misc/pdx_mp_20170819/libpdx_mp.so
OSX: https://s3.amazonaws.com/paradox-assets/misc/pdx_mp_20170819/libpdx_mp.dylib

Let us know if that resolves the issue here or in a PM!