Squishing the beast
Or, Fun with Sync Bugs
Sins Forums
Hi all,
We've known that there's a sync bug out in the wild for quite some time now - we had occasional reports of it after Entrenchment was released, but there was never a full-on sighting, nothing that gave us a method of reproducing or good logs to suggest what the problem might be. The minidumps that result from sync bugs are usually completely useless, because crashes come from anywhere in the code when you're out of sync with your fellow players. But things seemed to ramp up after Trinity was released; the majority of the minidumps looked suspiciously like they were caused by desyncing. We released a special build of Entrenchment to try and help track it down, but it didn't produce enough logs for us to really do much.
But as usual, a few of the more dedicated Sins players came through for us with error logs and suggestions of what might be causing the problem, and today we managed to isolate and stomp that little mother. This isn't to say that all sync bugs are gone; there's still a chance that other bugs exist which we haven't yet found, but this was a fairly major one, which could potentially cause desyncs anytime you played a game with a host who had played previously and not shut down. We'll get the patch out as soon as possible, likely early next week.
A big thanks to anybody who sent us in minidumps and error logs, but especially:
- Warren Tabada
- Jordan Rideout
- Kyle Leppert
- Landon DePasquale
- Frank Galati
- Ben Horsley
- Quarantine
- Tristan Halverson
You guys rock.
Stardock Forums