Profile of wuff

Jump back to quoted post15 Dec 2015, 21:19 PMInverse

Does anyone have the IP addresses of the battle servers? It would be fairly trivial to set this up externally if you could ping them. Wouldn't be perfect of course, but it would be something.

Jump back to quoted post14 Dec 2015, 21:39 PMInverse

It's technically possible but extremely difficult to do and almost certainly not worth it. RTS engines are deterministic, which means the state of the engine at any point in the game depends entirely on the commands issued by every player up to that point in time. That's why replays are so small; they just encode commands, and the game essentially replays the match using those commands. Even Starcraft 2 doesn't have reconnecting in multiplayer matches. They have rewinding in replays, sure, but it's not truly granular rewind. Instead, they just save the state of the game at certain intervals and let you skip back in time to those states. You can't choose an exact second to rewind to in SC2 for instance, you can only jump back to a preconfigured save point. It's a clever workaround, and something Relic could probably implement in CoH2, but it wouldn't help with reconnecting.

When you don't have a server to store game state for you, a crash means you lose all information about the game up to that point. Starcraft 2 has a special reconnect from replay feature that essentially speeds through a replay and pauses at the point of disconnect and lets you resume from that point, but it's buggy and only used for tournaments because it's an impractical feature to add to automatch. CoH2 saves a temp replay as the game progresses, so it could potentially implement a similar feature, but it would likely be restricted to custom games.

In order to add a reconnect option to multiplayer, you would either have to pause the game for everyone immediately once a disconnect was detected, or somehow use the observer feature to fast-forward a reconnecting player up to the same point in the deterministic simulation as the rest of the players still in the game. The first solution is painfully annoying (who wants to wait in automatch for someone who might or might not come back?) and technically challenging (if there's even a one-command discrepancy between the state and the disconnected player's replay you'll sync error), while the second solution is technically challenging to an extreme (what do you do about CPU commands that occurred during the disconnect, how do you make sure all clients are synced, when do you give control back to the disconnected player, etc.).

In short, it's a problem RTS developers haven't been able to solve in 20 years, and that's not because they're all lazy.

Jump back to quoted post14 Dec 2015, 16:14 PMRMMLz

They can't add this. You can this very website, this game uses P2P system with BattleServers acting as relays. It is not technically possible to add such a thing as "Reconnect". Because there are no dedicated servers for this game.

As @Cr4wler said, people start a thread about this every couple of months. This has been discussed before, and it's not possible at the current state.