Factorio Forums

Playing in multiplayer with only 1 friend, game is at 2 hours played.
We try to load the game back up and continue, and when he connects, after 15 minutes the bar is only 1/8th loaded. I attempt to FTP the zip file to him. My upload takes ~6 seconds and his download of the zip file takes ~4 seconds. With this, I am -very- confident that this problem is -not- with our connections. Even after sending him the zip of the save, the game still would not load any faster. (I didnt expect that it would, but we tried anyways).
Please fix this issue soon, or tell us how to work around this issue, as this completely destroys the multiplayer experience for us. 1+ hours to load a savegame isnt fun

Other than that though, amazing game!!

I am not sure, but I think Factorio uses UDP rather than TCP for communication. It is possible that one of your ISPs is slowing down UDP traffic for whatever reason...

Again - not sure if this is the problem, but I think it may be. I don't know a way to test it, though... maybe someone else does? Or can rebuke my theory?

Well, it doesn't have to be the problem of Factorio. For many other people, the games loads slow, but not that slow. (5 to 10 minutes.)

Given that we play lots of other games togeter with no issues at all, i am inclined to say no, im certain it is a factorio/udp issue. I kind of feel like I get the same runaround here that People get with their ISPs. "Oh no, something wrong on your end. Not even going to explore the possibility that something is amiss here"
Sorry to sound mean, but Im getting frustrated with the "blame the other stuff" runarounds I get with technical problems in general. If someone has suggestions or ideas, or even ways to test to isolate -why- this is happening, Im all for it. Just playing the finger pointing game however isnt productive at this point.

You are the one who's "playing the finger pointing game".

Yes, Factorio has slow map transfer, but it's an early alpha version of the multiplayer. I'm pretty sure (nearly?) none of the other games you mentioned did have such an early state of the multiplayer as public alpha. The first goal of the developers was "getting a playable version of the multiplayer out". Not nice to play, not nearly bug free, not without lags, but a playable version for most of the users. They did that. If you want to play with a fully functional multiplayer, wait for the stable version of 0.12.

The thing with the ISP you mentioned: We know that there're bugs with the version, and the developer are on work to solve them. It's okay if people want to point at errors or inadequate things, but please keep in mind that you clicked on "experimental updates".

I didn't mean to "point fingers". As Nova stated (and as is clear to anyone playing this game!) this game is still in alpha, and I do expect the developers to work out the vast majority of problems (it is never possible to get rid of ALL problems).
As I am not in any way connected to the developers, I can't speak for them, and cannot say whether there may be something wrong with the code. What I can do is try to speculate on what may be the cause. If I told you the game is certainly to blame you would still have had to play in this state until it was fixed. In giving my two cents I was only trying to point you in a direction you may or may not have tried looking into already, which may be faster for you to solve than waiting for a fix.

I hope I have made myself clear.

Anyway, if what I suggested is indeed the case, maybe the developers can go around it by making the initial map exchange go through TCP, as it should not be realtime/synchronized... I guess we will know in future versions (0.12 should give a stable MP experience according to the roadmap...)

Hi, this is a known problem and there is an open bug report here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=7&t=7195 . We will solve it, eventually :-) In 0.11.8 we improved map file size, so it improves download times a bit.