Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but does multiplayer work with HIP?
Does Multiplayer work with HIP?
- Thread starter Rorgloin
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My wife and I played a bit last tonight together over a LAN, she lagged out and dropped after a few years though. I think it has more to do with her using my old laptop than anything HIP related.
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To the best of my knowledge, yes. I'd really like to start organizing a HIP multiplayer group... Just a casual Steam group or something for HIP-savvy players that are interested in polite, perhaps even cooperative multiplayer. I imagine that if I got sucked into playing a multiplayer campaign, EMF would be coming out with special features specifically to enhance MP for awhile.
As a reminder, HIP is a combined collection of different, optional modules and not strictly a mod in and of itself. In this case, all modules are known to work with multiplayer, so I can say, "yes, HIP works with multiplayer." However, it'd be no surprise if HIP w/ SWMH enabled tended to require faster computers (esp. the host) and may not work as reliably with MP as HIP w/ the vanilla map. [TBH, I don't know personally, but I reckon that's the case.]
As a reminder, HIP is a combined collection of different, optional modules and not strictly a mod in and of itself. In this case, all modules are known to work with multiplayer, so I can say, "yes, HIP works with multiplayer." However, it'd be no surprise if HIP w/ SWMH enabled tended to require faster computers (esp. the host) and may not work as reliably with MP as HIP w/ the vanilla map. [TBH, I don't know personally, but I reckon that's the case.]
zijistark, gotta say your Seahawks are in the midst of a dynasty. As a Chiefs fan I can only dream of such things. I love the way your team plays the game, but remember the Chiefs roughed you up last time you came to Arrowhead!
Haha, TBH, I haven't actually watched a game all season! They are in the midst of a dynasty, though.
Good, good. I need to practice playing on speed 3-4 instead of speed 5 and not pausing reflexively for everything first.
I'd like to add some features to EMF that make MP more workable in friendly environments. E.g., scenario customization decisions ought require unanimous player approval, and it'd be really handy if multiplayers caught in a death spiral could petition the group via a decision so that they could receive relief (e.g., clear all their debts, give them a little free money, and end their wars-- because nobody wants to see a comrade go completely down the drain and out of the game). Another idea would be optional, MP-specific "house rules" that only take affect during MP games (such as no assassination plots against other players or some kind of penalty system for being a jerk). Also, certain types of anti-player supercharged AI features might be nice in MP games since having multiple players on the map means a lot less challenge if the players aren't hardcore trying to take each other down. [Which obviously is fun too-- right up until you've ruined someone's game.]
I find the prospect of getting together with a familiar group and playing episodes of a campaign over a period of time in a nice, casual, and much more interesting way very, very appealing.
Using the modules SWMH, PB, VIET, EMF, ARKO and one non-HIP mod (better looking garbs but compatible,) has casued a lot of desync for my friends and I. Admittedly with some tweaks of my own, but nothing major (mostly editing history files.) Often it occours during the first few years, and then later on it just desyncs forever without any fix I am aware of. But we get desync even from other heavy mods (like Game of Thrones and Elder Kings) so I don't think there's really anything they can fix? Of course, the desyncs may be my fault seeing as I throw in another mod into the mix and tweaking. We haven't played in a while though so I am just making that judgement from earlier versions.
Other than that, some goup for HIP MP would be cool nonetheless.
Other than that, some goup for HIP MP would be cool nonetheless.
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The majority of my time playing has been in multiplayer, and the majority of that has been with HIP in some form (PB, VIET, and EMF, but without SWMH or ARKO); my experience with that setup has been that desyncs are no more or less common than they are with vanilla. But we haven't been playing as much lately, so I'm not sure about the current state of things.
I would be interested if it hadn't been for my crappy computer, probably cause constant desyncs.
You host a local game and your buddy connects to it over the same internet connection. Either use wireless connection or have a switch/router with enough ports to handle two ethernets. Communications between two terminals within a network is simply LAN as opposed to a wider area network, WAN.
zijistark said:
Wow bro! You gotta enjoy these seasons when you can if you enjoy the game. I hope Seahawks / Patriots and I got Seahawks repeating. Much tougher game than the Denver blowout though.
I'd totally be interested in this, but my wonky schedule often prevents me from doing anything cool.
FWIW, while I think EMF+SWMH is worth testing out in multiplayer (and maybe would be fine if everyone had very fast machines), I'd probably actually choose to play the vanilla map with HIP for a nice, long [multi-session] multiplayer campaign. Multiplayer is just so sensitive to performance issues compared to singleplayer, and the vanilla map does indeed run more cleanly and reliably performant than SWMH. I think the novelty of HIP multiplayer would far outweigh the loss of SWMH.
That's just a direction; if everyone in the game (esp. the host) was running a beast of a machine, I'd probably look at that the other way around.
That's just a direction; if everyone in the game (esp. the host) was running a beast of a machine, I'd probably look at that the other way around.
I just tried to do a multiplayer game with two friends, and it said we couldn't connect to each other because we were running different versions of the game. We just have the HIP mod running, which we all installed with the same installation options. Any ideas what our problem might be? We can connect fine in non-HIP.
Double-check that the following is true for every person in the would-be multiplayer game, and you should be fine:
- All of the same DLCs selected in the launcher. [Theoretically, it should gracefully drop to least common denominator, but it's known to not.]
- Same 4-letter checksum shown in-game (not the checksum in the launcher-- the one shown in bottom left of the game's main, initial menu screen). This verifies that the mod content is identical in addition to the base game files, including any differences from potentially accidentally selected other mods or base game files which have accidentally been modified.
[Just guessing...] The parity of the speeds of the clients and host is still the main cause of lag and desyncs in MP. If everyone in the game has a similarly fast computer, you should get slightly less than singleplayer equivalent speeds. CK2 uses extremely little bandwidth.
It's a neat trick that prevents much data from having to be synchronized between the clients and host:
You'd think that with hundreds of thousands of events, decisions, AI unit control, faction joining/leaving, etc. etc. all going on at once that there'd be a lot of information to be constantly synchronizing so that all clients see identical game state. However, due to the deterministic nature of a) code that's guaranteed to be the same on all clients and thus can be trusted to act the same given identical inputs, and b) random number generation (even for a million randomized events and AI choices, if all clients start with the same random number generator starting seed, they'll always make the same random decisions), multiplayer is actually a lot like singleplayer. Those thousands of AI characters / random timing / etc. are being simulated exactly the same by the same code and starting state on all clients simultaneously without the need for communication.
Think of it this way: if players in an MP game just spectated and never interacted with the game in an unpredictable fashion, there would be zero communication overhead after scenario initialization for an infinitely long campaign of a theoretically infinite amount of clients. That seems obvious when you think about it. So, the only things which require synchronization are when players do something that cannot be predicted (essentially, serve as their own black box random number generator inside the simulation). Clicking on stuff, browsing the map, etc. require no synchronization because they don't change game state. That just leaves things that only matter when players do them, called "commands," such as:
- Player takes a decision (simply the ID of the decision taken would suffice for the communication, e.g., as all the decision code is identical for everyone)
- Diplomatic interactions between players and AI or other players.
- Raise levies
- Hire retinue/change its reinforce rate
- Dismiss/disband unit
- Merge/re-balance/split unit
- Move unit from province X to province Y (the paths are all precalculated, so the whole path and progress along it will be deterministically known just from the endpoints)
- Create/destroy a title or change primary titles
- Player chooses an event option
- Auto-stop plots is enabled/disabled
- Auto-invite plotters is enabled/disabled
- Daily ticks (just a ping saying that the client has finished executing the next day of the simulation so that the host can keep clients in approximate lockstep-- the random variable is just how long it took a particular's player to finish processing the day)
- Join/create/leave/abandon a faction/ambition/plot/focus
- Pause/unpause game
All in all, the only information here that isn't highly compact and extremely rarely transmitted (relative to the millions of bytes per second that most people's Internet connections have available to them) and that's time-sensitive is making sure that unit movements are kept very well in sync (which is more of a latency problem, assuming perfectly equivalent computer speeds).
One of my specialties is writing networking code (with some time spent on games in addition to real-time distributed systems control and the like), so I've just come to these conclusions on my own due to my non-Paradox understanding and experience of the nature of the engine, and thus I think is the way the engine should be handling things. I could be wrong. It could be very poorly implemented, after all.
This is the reason that CK2 supports 32 simultaneous players (and EU4 256) in theory. It's the simulation itself that's super slow, and that's the main problem in singleplayer as well. Local client processing time will strongly dominate any extra processing due to multiplayer (except for the host, but again, that's just more processing and not so much about transmission).
That said, lower latency and higher bandwidth connections are always better.