Poll: Tried - have not tried multiplayer

[sniper297]

Let's see how this goes, and discussions are welcome. Who has tried multiplayer and how was it, who has not tried multiplayer and why not?

[sniper297]

Forgot to mention, multiple choices are okay, first four are mine - played one multiplayer game accidentally, was troubleshooting something and suddenly found myself hosting a game on Downtown Traction with two other players. Fortunately one of them was Phil Skene, the developer of Downtown Traction, who was able to provide guidance. Unfortunately, either due to my DSL connection speed or the program itself, the chat messages had a truncation delay - dunno how else to describe it, first line appears, second line is hidden until the next message moves it up in the chat window. Had fun anyway, interacting with real people instead of AI trains is a blast. :cool:

[mattmead790]

Well, I tried hosting a multiplayer session.

No one turned up, so called it quits after an hour.

Two lessons learned here:

1: Four hours is probably not enough time to find interested players. At a minimum, I would suggest posting 12 hours before hosting a session, and 24 would be even better.

2: To avoid wasting time, and bandwidth, ask intending players to post an expression of interest, so as to get an idea of numbers, and announce a 'cut-off' time to join play, whereby if nobody has joined the session by, say half an hour in, that's it for the host, and he kills the session.

Matt.

[Buster76]

I've almost exclusively ran multiplayer sessions since I bought this some weeks ago. It's fun when it works, but it takes months to download enough content to be able to select different sessions.

Another problem is that when you've ran a session for 2 hours and people are starting to join, it's extremely frustrating when someone derails after 5 min. And since this is the included Debrecen multiplayer session, it's unusable with a wreck on the main line.

It's rearly I've seen any sessions started by others, mostly I've started the session, and other drivers join after a while. At most I had about 5 drivers connected.

[sniper297]

Which route or routes? That may be the key, if you got five people spontaneously joining an unannounced session it was probably a route that many multiplayers prefer.

Key points;

1. Gotta have TS12,
2. Gotta be interested in multiplayer,
3. Best to have a first class ticket unless you have a lot of spare time and luck to download dependencies, or already have most of the more common multiplayer dependencies installed. I know a few who have uploaded multiplayer sessions that use only built in trains, with that exact problem in mind.
4. Gotta have an interest in something that enough other people also like - example, Joe is into narrow gauge steam logging, if he knows a bunch of people who are also interested in that AND have TS12 he won't have any problems finding others to multiplay with. If he's the lone logger in the wilderness he'll either need to play alone or play whatever is more popular if he wants to play with other people, even if it's modern diesel passenger trains, no logging involved.

"it's extremely frustrating when someone derails after 5 min. And since this is the included Debrecen multiplayer session, it's unusable with a wreck on the main line."

That's the kind of thing we need to know, if the developers aren't on top of that working on some way to "respawn" derailed trains and clean up the tracks, then some track configurations won't really be suitable for multiplayer. First time I've heard of that problem, do the developers know about it?

[Buster76]

"it's extremely frustrating when someone derails after 5 min. And since this is the included Debrecen multiplayer session, it's unusable with a wreck on the main line."

That's the kind of thing we need to know, if the developers aren't on top of that working on some way to "respawn" derailed trains and clean up the tracks, then some track configurations won't really be suitable for multiplayer. First time I've heard of that problem, do the developers know about it?

I'm still talking about the default built-in multiplayer session for Debrecen something route. I've not made any announcements to let people know I was hosting, but figured with some billion people in this world, at least enough people had bought TS 12, and some was probably looking for a multiplayer session.

I understand that you'll need to find others with similar interests, but I'd thought that there'd at least be some sessions running. I'm currently trying to install as much as possible of the multiplayer sessions, so I don't have to wait weeks to join.

I'm not buying any more tickets, as the last one I bought didn't do anything except maybe slowed the download speed down more. At least befor I see this game working 100% and there be more mutiplayers.

[sniper297]

Last I checked it was something like 7 billion, most of those aren't trainsimmers. :p I think the overall sales for all versions of Trainz over the last 10 years is a bit over a million, no idea what the figures for TS12 are, but probably a lot less.

Good news bad news stuff - somebody tightened a few loose screws on the upload 'bot, of the 15 assets I uploaded yesterday all were processed and appeared on the DLS within 12 hours, and NONE of them got me that idiotic email about missing dependencies which are actually on the DLS. Last version of the route I uploaded I got a list of 150 "missing" dependencies, every single one of them were on the DLS if the 'bot had just looked. Apparently that's fixed now, let's hope it don't go cattywampus again.

Bad news is whatever that delay between the DLS and content mangler is still exists, my test multiplayer session is available for download from the DLS, but does not show up in content mangler yet - the usual is a 24-48 hour delay. Which means that downloading the session manually don't work, the multiplayer New and Improved Useless Error Checker program apparently goes by what content mangler knows, and since content mangler don't know the session is on the DLS it refuses to launch it. For now, that will probably correct itself by tomorrow, at which point I'll need some lab rats to conduct evil experiments on volunteer testers to find out the true facts, I've gotten three stories on this now;

1. AI traffic doesn't work at all in multiplayer, AI trains won't spawn from portals in multiplayer.

2. AI traffic works fine in multiplayer, no problems.

3. AI traffic trains only appear in the host's computer in multiplayer, all AI trains are invisible for any joiners.

Since that session has 2 different AI trains spawning every 20 minutes, we'll find out one way or the other for sure.

One item, all you second class and steerage passengers will probably not be able to play this unless you already have a majority of the dependencies downloaded already - I have a first class ticket and it took me two hours. I keep one clean copy of TS12 on my system, before testing something I set the filter for built in = false, location local, select all and delete all so I have nothing but built in content installed. After that I selected and downloaded the route, 147 megs worth of dependencies that are not built into TS12, took about an hour to download and install all that along with the usual failure to automatically get dependencies of dependencies. As I said the session ain't listed in content mangler yet, so I downloaded that via FTP, installed the CDP and then downloaded all the dependencies the session was missing, mostly my own reskins. Along with weird stuff like drivers that needed an update for some reason;

Marc,<kuid2:68787:1449:2>
Christian,<kuid2:68787:1444:2>
Duke,<kuid2:68787:1446:2>
Richy,<kuid2:68787:1448:2>
Atari,<kuid2:68787:1441:2>

The whole smash, route and session, came to 312 megs of dependencies that a brand new user of TS12 would need to download. Again anyone who already has previous versions of the route and the templ8 session won't need a quarter of that since you'll already have it installed, but I did get screwy adding player drivable locos from IndustRail and HarborMaster. As a "brand new user" with none of it previously installed it took a bit over 2 hours to get it all.