Reconnecting

[tatsu]

People have been telling me that it used to be possible to reconnect to 8 player games in GPGnet and still is in steam.

I told the BS but they insisted anyways.

is this true? was it ever possible?

[Sheeo]

So it wasn't possible to reconnect to 4 player games? If it's still possible in steam then why not test it? What do you even mean about reconnecting?

[IceDreamer]

It wasn't possible before. It's not possible in Steam to my knowledge.

[codepants]

I understand it might not be possible but it would be nice... my router takes about 2m to restart, add change for my computer to connect and resolve, I'm just over the 2m boot time.

(may not be exactly 2m but I am referring to the time at which FAF kicks you, not the conventionally agreed upon time at which all the players click the "kick" button)

[Deering]

I think its 3 minutes for autokick. Also the lack of reconnection after might be due to a ip change or something (root was working on making you able to reconnect after this).

Most of the time people will kick before the time your router will have restarted anyway.

[tatsu]

oh okay so it was never possible in the sense "quitting FA.exe and reconnecting to match"

[Deering]

If FA is closed. its game over. no chances. People have worked on theories of how to do it but nothing concrete has ever been done.

[codepants]

What happens in 1v1? I remember reading the first few disconnects are free and after that they count as losses, but I can't seem to relocate that information.

[Sheeo]

That's misinformation.

Disconnecting will count as a loss so long as your opponent stays in the game and the results get reported

[Poch]

Considering how the game engine works and having developed multiplayer games that work with the exact same sync paradigm i can tell you than YES it is impossible to reconnect to a game if you left it. The game doesnt save any state over time or context information, a replay just simulate every command you gave. The only exception is saving/loading games but GPG didn't implemented it for multiplayer.

It works the same in multiplayer. If ennemy ask a tank to kill your mex, your game doesnt "receive" the information about that tank coordinates, firing pattern or anything like that. You just receive the information that other player selected the tank and then right clicked on your mex to attack it. Then your computer calculate what happens next. The "magic" is that the exact same thing always happens with the exact same starting context. Otherwise it desyncs and game is over since everyone is playing different versions of the same game. (think parallele universes where anything can happen ^^)

The only viable option is to allow external player connection to the P2P network of players in the game. > huge problems already, do they need to vote to take you back, how do you reach them, how do you maintain a list of active games, etc etc
Then everyone would have to be automatically paused. > not really cool for them
Then you have to replay all the commands since game start until you catch them back. > so if you have a crappy CPU, it can mean 40 minutes of waiting time
Then if it didn't desynced or anything like that, you are back in sync with people and game can resume...

AFAIK no multiplayer game that is based on exact simulation prediction with P2P netcode ever tried that ?

Even with source code access no one would develop that it is just too "useless", it would be better to spend efforts on improving network code in the first place.

If the replays were "seekable" somehow it would be more doable to think about that kind of feature since catching up would be feasible in a reasonable amount of time, but again better to implement better peer (re)connection code i think.

TLDR : even if FA was 100% open-source it would probably not happen