Has anyone been able to play with 3+ players and 0.11.5?

[DrummerB]

I'm running a host client on an Ubuntu server. I can join fine from my gaming PC. Playing like this with just 2 players seems to work fine. But as soon as a third player joins, trouble begins. About 50% of the time, the third player is greeted with a completely black screen after the map finished downloading. The other 2 players' game simply freezes and never recovers. The only solution seems to be for everyone to quit and rejoin.

Sometimes the third player can join too and everything works. For the very first time we tried, we probably got extremely lucky, because a total of 3 clients + the host were able to join and play for a full hour with not a single issue. Now we can't even join everyone anymore on an empty map.

Autosave is off for everyone except the host. Only the 64bit version is used.

I'm just wondering if anyone had success playing the game with 3+ people and if there is anything else we could try or should we just wait for future versions?

The only warning in the log of the client joining last (getting the black screen) is this:
Warning MultiplayerManager.cpp:649: mapReadyForDownload mismatch oldSize(1605058) newSize(1605069) oldCrc(-453208451) newCrc(1985944211)

[Xecutor]

I can confirm that we weren't able to play 3 players game yesterday. As soon as the map loads third player gets black screen and other players have their games frozen.
One more thing - while maps was being sent to 3rd player I've heard bits of sounds of the game. As if it was running for a split second.

[ssilk]

moved from General by user report

[Evicos]

We also have problem making a 3+-player game.

We have had a 5 player game up and running through versions 11.2 - 11.4 but patch to 11.5 we just can't seem to get it to work.
We have tried all the usual shenanigans.

* Port forwarded,
* All running cable ( no routers)
* Hamachii / evolve
* x64 versions, even downgraded all players versions to 11.2 not solving issue
* resetting registry on all involved computers (made everyone have to log back in to the client)

but it's just not possible to create a game with more than 2 active players.
Is there some sort of log function in the game where you can see what fails?

[DrummerB]

Is there some sort of log function in the game where you can see what fails?

There is a factorio-current.log (and factorio-previous.log) file in the main folder.

[maximus]

Initially it was difficult, but with some patience we were able to get several hours with 4 people on 11.5. However, we frequently had issues. Compared to 11.1, this version seems much less stable. Today on 11.1 we were able to get 6+ hours of gameplay (with dytech mods). On 11.3 we had a 3 player game that had 25 hours of gameplay (no dytech). I will recount below some of the issues we faced.

We had trouble connecting to each other initially.

1.) We turned off problematic mods:
- Treefarm-Mod
- Natural-Evolution
- Landfill
- Google maps Factorio style

The mods we left running were: All of the Dytech mods except Tools (that is bugged for all multiplayer versions).

2.) We used Tunngle to connect initially, but any time someone crashed or desynced, we had to wait 5-6 minutes to transfer the map. 3 of us are on LAN (map transfers in seconds), and the 4th player ended up VPNing in. This sped up map transfer to a playable speed.

3.) Here are the types of issues we encountered:

a.) Client errors - ex: not enough video memory, crash to desktop. For these, all clients had to restart & reconnect.
b.) Unknown exceptions (ex: the process crashes and you have to quit to desktop, for 1 or all 4 players)
c.) Tunngle disconnects - all clients had to restart and reconnect. Using a VPN and connecting to a local IP fixed this. Map transfer was also a lot faster because of it. Instead of 5-6 minutes to transfer a map (of 20-40mb), it took ~45 seconds. It was nearly instant for all the other 3 players not connecting through a VPN.
d.) Biter desync - The same as in previous versions. Interaction with attacking biters must not be fully deterministic. On 2 (maybe 3) occasions, my client would get desynced as soon as the biters started chewing on our base parts. The other players that were shooting the biters would get a few shots off between each desync cycle. Once the biters died (after 5-6 cycles), the clients synced up and the game was recoverable.
e.) Crash-on-join - This was by far the biggest hurdle to playing. We employed some trickery though, and instead of having each player connect to a single person, we had player A connect to B, C connect to A, D connect to C (in a chain). Certain combinations of joining seemed to work, while others did not. Once we got the order right, we were able to join somewhat reliably. You could tell when it worked, because it did not immediately enter a grey-screen-state, where the game appears paused, but is actually frozen for everyone. We also found that joining an unpaused game increased the chances of success. We stopped joining paused games, but can't say if this is responsible for any success we had in connecting.
f.) Mod bugs - In our process of determining which mods were buggy, we tried turning off mods without restarting Factorio (we normally restart it). On one such occasion, after 10 minutes of successful gameplay, I opened my player menu to create a landfill item from the landfill mod (the landfill mod had been turned off). about 700ms after I clicked it, the game froze in the pause-like state for all players.

I don't think the above is not fit for a bug report, but I hope it helps!

[DrummerB]

Thanks. We tried joining in a chain (instead of everyone joining the same host) and it worked almost on the first try and worked reliably for a couple of hours. After a short pause, we're back at the original problem and can't get everyone to join the game. We're not using any mods, so that's not the issue. It seems like the joining process is the most buggy part, because once everyone's in, we have no issues until someone has to leave.

[Eurofighter1200]

Have only tried with 3 Players but it worked fine no laags and we playes 2x4 hours in two days was really fun.

[DrummerB]

Have only tried with 3 Players but it worked fine no laags and we playes 2x4 hours in two days was really fun.

It's really strange. We found a configuration that seems to work reliably. Person A hosts, Person B joins A's game, Person C joins B's game. No other order seems to work and we can't join more than 1 players to the same host, except in rare lucky cases.

[Eurofighter1200]

I have to say two of us 3 was in the same lan network you ned good internet others with internt only 6 mbits cant join even only the host was in the game but with the next few updates it will be better.