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HOI4 Dev Diary - Tech bugaloo II - Dragonslaying

Hi guys! Today's Diary is going to be a bit of a short one as I am away at a conference (it has free breakfast! Two most magic words!)

Last week we celebrated HOI4’s 3 year anniversary and released 1.7 ‘Hydra’ along with Radio Pack and Axis Armor. I hope you enjoyed them :)

After the weekend we looked at our telemetry data after 1.7 released and noticed that the amount of multiplayer out of syncs were more common than before. This indicates that we introduced a new OOS problem. While HOI4 has resync and hotjoin its still pretty annoying when you out of sync so we are currently investigating this for a small hotfix patch (1.7.1). Out of syncs can be really tricky to find and nail down so no definite ETA yet on when the patch is ready as we are still hunting. But we acquired a solid lead on the problem just yesterday, and we're currently working out a good solution.

Technical section (warning!): What is an Out of Sync?
For those interested what an out of sync is I figured I’d dig into it a bit. Feel free to skip this if you are a... normal human being, I guess ;D

An Out of Sync (OOS) happens when the host and clients in a multiplayer game start acting differently. This could for example be something like a battle ending in the favor of Germany on one of the computers and in the favor of Soviets on the other. Usually though its nothing that big as the state difference is usually spotted earlier at say one of those units having a 1% higher organization than the other or the like. Once it happens everyone’s experience will very quickly start diverging, so we stop and alert the players. At this point the host can click a ‘Resync’ button to bring the game back into sync. Resyncing will reset the state of the game, send the current host state over as a savegame and have everyone load that, and then things can resume.

So what can cause an OOS? This is where it gets tricky, and its pretty much always a new reason when a problem appears. Some good candidates are multiplayer between different platforms because underlying code libraries can behave differently in some cases. Other common reasons are multithreading. We thread a lot of our code, yet to stay in sync we must assure that events still happen in the same order on all machines in the end if they affect the world. There can also be issues like touching illegal memory or the like that can alter the game state in unplanned ways (or crash… but those are easy to spot and fix!).

Finding and fixing an OOS can be a long process simply because they are often quite rare occurances and it usually takes many steps and iteration to home in on exactly what it is. To find them we run multiplayer tests with QA with special settings that spit out giant log files (which makes everything horribly slow generally) and once and OOS happens we compare log files and savegames to see what differs. This will usually give us an area to start looking at. Lets say for example that you have a unit’s org being different. This could be due to many reasons - battle damage, weather, bad supply etc. So we add more logging to the relevant code areas and do another test. Hopefully this will tell us which of our guesses was right, and we repeat again with more logs and more details for this area. Of course the most fun-to-find OOS errors disappears when you add logging and framerate slows ;P

Some of this can be done automatically over night as well if the problem is unrelated to players, but this is often not the case.

Once found and fixed this is usually the stage we make an open beta patch to verify that it is indeed fixed, or if we deem it sure that we found the problem we will go straight to regular patch. Speaking of beta patches, thanks for the help testing 1.7! we got something like 30k game sessions of testing on the weekend before the final build which was a great help!

Hopefully this little look into some of the technicalities behind working on HOI4 was interesting. If you got questions feel free to ask away!

The part of the team that isn’t trying to solve this OOS has now moved fully on to 1.8 ‘Husky’ and next expansion work, but its early days and its going to be a while until we have things to show off. So this will be the last dev diary in a while as we go into radio silence (and soon glorious socialist swedish summer vacation!) until we have things that are ready to show off.

See you on the other side! And keep an eye on the forum for announcement about the 1.7.1 hotfix when that is ready.
 
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Frankly, I was hoping for more attention to fix bugs in 1.7. My hope was a smooth game in 1.7, but we have still Germany wins in France before Scandinavia and Denmark, Italy joins war in 39 and loses its army and fleet against French, Germany emigrates in Western Africa with whole army, no coordinated lend lease, allies that saturate my frontiline.

You're not longer indie and nice software house, Paradox. Take more cares about your game.
Sorry, this is PDS’s highest form of releaseable quality - an update solely focused on balance and bug fixes(along with 64bit, but that’s really a PDS choice to save themselves money down the road), which was released with several bugs and isn’t much more Vanilla balanced than it was before. I suppose you couldn’t expect much for only 1 month’s worth of work, given a hard deadline due to their summer vacation.
 
Two dev posts to state that you're looking into some OoS problems? What about... bugs?
 
Are you gonna post some teasers before you go on a vacation? Like last time?
 
Can the capital ship engine issue in the building queue be fixed for 1.7.1?
 
I respectfully ask that you please make a few more minor bug fixes before 1.8. It is really frustrating to have so many bugs introduced in a major patch, then having to wait for another major patch just to fix it. Please focus on the core of the game being terrible AI before going on to make more DLC. It is very disappointing to see AI grind against a front line losing so many troops and changing nothing in a war. Italy and so many other nations never pick advisors or cabinet members to improve their nation. And the Axis still struggle to invade the UK even going into 1950.
 
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While I appreciate the OOS fixes, I'll have to pitch in to the request to improve the AI. Especially the SOV one. It is dreadfully needed for any kind of game setup.
 
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Husky - Siberian Husky - Siberia - Russia - USSR - New Soviet Tree and Communism focus for next dlc, probably alongside Spanish tree. Maybe the "Secret Weapons" focused expansion they been thinking about for years alongside an actual espionage system, as both fit with the Soviet theme.

That's my theory.
 
I'm afraid, that the next DLC "Husky" will make the game even more complex as it already is. In my opinion, the developers should now focus on the long list of fixes instead of creating a "feature creep", as someone mentioned in the forum. Further improving of the AI is on top of my wishlist. What do I want with a new DLC, if there are game breaking bugs and other things in the base game, which do not work, that prevent me from enjoying or even playing it?

The thing that your ignoring is that the way in which paradox can afford to keep updating hoi4 is by selling dlc that fund both updates and new content.
 
The thing that your ignoring is that the way in which paradox can afford to keep updating hoi4 is by selling dlc that fund both updates and new content.
Paradox is a corporation, not a small indie developer living paycheck to paycheck. They will try whatever makes them the most profit. So it's on us players to show that ignoring bugs will not work out for them, by saying so here on the forums and not buying their DLC.
 
Husky? Strongly hints at Soviet or Scandinavian rework????
1) Next update called Husky
2) Dan said something about how hard it is to serve on military ships in the arctic some time ago
3) There was a leak of new ingame managment panel that now also includes something looking alike spy activity

You know what? 100$ on soviets here (no bias) ((bias))
 
The thing that your ignoring is that the way in which paradox can afford to keep updating hoi4 is by selling dlc that fund both updates and new content.
You assume that the sales of the base game doesn't already cover the costs for their (apparently really small and limited, based on the amount and scope of updates and bugfixes) dev team...
 
The thing that your ignoring is that the way in which paradox can afford to keep updating hoi4 is by selling dlc that fund both updates and new content.

On the contrary, what has been ignored are things like

  • Wrong UI tooltips altering the outcome of the game if taken on faith
  • Land going to nations that makes no sense based on what happened
  • Supply flip flopping from green to yellow/red without any land changing hands because the game feels like routing it differently, potentially ruining entire fronts
  • Allied troops being a larger threat to your army than enemy troops, and there are situations where you can't do anything about it (basically the AI inadvertently "teamkills" players/itself sometimes)
  • Nation that wins a war can be kept out of peace conference
With naval stuff + battle planner and quite a few other things they're trying, and while some of these don't work well and nerfing right clicking was nonsense it's substantially better than 1.0 overall.

But then you open up a war screen and see that the nation which inflicted more casualties than all the others on its side combined + marched boots into a greater number of provinces than any other nation has < 20% "war participation" and remember that this also hasn't changed since 1.0.

Yes, the game would be better if more priority were put on addressing current mechanics that either don't work at all in some contexts or have degenerate incentives.
 
Paradox is a corporation, not a small indie developer living paycheck to paycheck. They will try whatever makes them the most profit. So it's on us players to show that ignoring bugs will not work out for them, by saying so here on the forums and not buying their DLC.
I think this vastly overestimates the amount of money they actually earn compared to much of the game industry. There's a vast gulf between what you are thinking of them being and "small indie developers". Their revenue for 2017 didn't even break the $100 million mark. The actual development side of things for Paradox is far smaller than the publishing side, so equating the two is absurd.

The community is being ignored, I am being ignored and I was censored by Paradox for the first time, today. I'm frustrated and I won't buy any more DLCs until the important stuff gets fixed. Oh, and I'm not worried about Paradox at all, they still make a lot of money, the "indie days" are long over. :)

What did you say in the post? What was the tone? Was it off-topic of the OPs thread? I've had my posts deleted many times and I'm not exactly what you'd call zealously anti-Paradox. Not everything has to be a conspiracy of selective censorship.
 
it is always convoys

That must be why our MP group has no OOS problems in the current patch.

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