It seems Bin\SYNCERROR gets written to as a SAV file when sync error occurs. The file is just a text/lua file and seems pretty useless. It is very long however and I may have missed some of the information it contains.
Don’t see an option to attach files to posts…
Clicking during the loading screen crashes the game. Don’t know if that’s been fixed yet.
Also, bringing up the Steam overlay during any phase of the game causes the shift key to be stuck until pressed.
There’s no proper keyboard recognition in the game. I’m using a QWERTZ keyboard, and it makes chatting ingame quite unpleasant.
I didn’t have time to read all the replies.
I would suggest picking maps off of the community, gather the balanced symmetrical maps made by the guys who crated the maps or maps made from the devs, and after testing and confirming the maps balanced positions auto patch the game by adding those maps as part of an official multiplayer maps. It seems that the only way to fix dropping players during loading time on a hosted custom map is that the other players will have to have the custom map being hosted. This will definitely lower the count of long loads and having players drop before the whole map can be loaded to play the maps. Another suggestion is that to auto upload the custom maps to the deatmatch map file location. Something like putting the custom maps for the players who do not have the map automatically upload the custom map permanently (with exceptions of being able to delete any of the maps on your deathmatch folder). Finally, my other request or suggestion is to make an official site for everyone to see in Homeworld main menu to go to for loading up new created maps. This will encourage everyone new and old to have an “official” access to the latest maps that are out there being hosted. If every one had my maps, the long load issue would be fixed and I guarantee that the drop rate of players during load time will drop significantly.
My two cents of the things I thought of. Posting my map files on forums can be easily bump to the bottom pile of new posts being created every day and it will be hard to find the topic for a map pack site for players to download. Creating my personal web site for my maps will not reach the masses without my extensive advertisement alone on game lobby or other forums. Having an official site on the games main menu for custom maps to download will reach all the guys who joins and play Homeworld. So in a sense, this will kill 2 birds in one stone. Advertisement for your maps and fixing the loading and drop player issues that we are having. Other wise, our firewalls will not allow such a smooth transition for any custom map to load and negotiate with our computers security firewalls.
I have a wierd one
Hosting a Custom Map works with multiple players ,if you first host the custom map 1v1 , which works 99% of the time , then host the 6 player with the custom map within the first 5 minutes.
Syncerror files are not useless. Once collected from all machines in the game and compared, the syncerror files can be used to get a hint about out-of-sync reason. The problem is that we can only get symptoms and not cause from it (e.g. “position calculations went nuts on frame 9835” - however guessing why it actually happened is the funny part). Still even this is a lot more than “The game was stopped with out of sync message”.
Well, how do we upload/deposit those files then?
If anybody at Gearbox asks for it, the person asking should suggest something. I guess, putting files in a public space like dropbox and posting only links sounds like quite simple and straightforward idea.
Anyway, please do not post any syncfiles in this thread. Those files do not provide any information regarding lobbies or loading sequence.
Would it really take so long to load a map file? They’re text files that range from 27-77 kb.
The biggest one by that is 78848 bytes… I can’t imagine that’s taking long to load. My old 14.4 would do that in seconds.
No, it should not take long. We have just set up a game with custom map and three custom badges (each quite noisy to stress compression ratio for downloader). Content download period was not anything special. I did not time it, but progress bar was moving steadily on for a short while and that’s it. Host IP in US, three clients in Europe (2 in one city, 4th player in another city). Host vs players ping was 300-400 ms.
I have fixed two locations in content downloader code. Loading stability is now much improved. I cannot say it’s 100%, because it was only 10 custom map games, but definitely there’s upgrade from the Friday’s build. We will work on delivering it as soon as possible.
I have not thought this through, just throwing it out there -
HW, and old games in general used to have a lot of problems with routing. A lot of the drops to mp main menu, maps not loading, some badges loading and some not (seemingly) resulting in the drop to menu again, and players taking forever to update in the lobby (showing open,kushan,0.000ms) are very similar to what the weird symptoms of bad router setups or firewalls used to be. New games deal with these issues much better - is it possible this may be what is behind our many problems and that the network code needs polish?
Yeah I know. On the other hand for some reason when I host a 3v3 on any of my maps, I tend to have 1 or 2 guys load up with me and the rest would had dropped due to being impatient. So the new guy’s who do not have the map or doesn’t have experience to wait out the map load tend to leave because the loading time isn’t as fast as hosting a regular official map like Crimson Bond. I think this might be the reason why other players leave before the map gets to finish loading.
When a host changes map - it does not update all clients - in this case me. I did not see the correct map nor the 5th and 6th player
After I left my game and refreshed the list a few times - my game was still listed (no fn noobs)
Everyone ticked in but I don’t see it and can’t start.
Players also show up as unknown in chat box, but are nowhere in my list. Best case scenario they show up as open slot, kushan, 0.000 ms ping.
Awesome report, antibitx! YOU ROCK. 
(and of course 
to your friends who helped)
Question regarding one without box tick (“Everyone ticked in but I don’t see it and can’t start.”). Could you ask the person with the problem to untick and retick again if this happens again? I would like to know if it’s permanent or just some kind of lost message / synchronisation issue.
Regarding the last two screenshots: I tell players to rejoin the game, and then usually things start working correctly.
Also another likely related issue: Ive joined games before where the host cant read my messages, but I can read theirs. I have to rejoin the game and then chat messaging will work properly.
Do you know by any chance if your properties (race, name, etc) were correct in the other players’ lobby lists when you got that partial sight situation? Or were you in that half-baked-zombie state?
Thanks for your help!
My name was correct for the host, they just couldnt see my chat messages (not sure about race or checked in status). Rejoining fixed.
Also since you seem to be the right guy: Please default the distance filter to worldwide and auto refresh the game list!!! Everyone agrees this needs to be done, rather than spliting an already tiny player base! HW1 & HW2 were worldwide, and it worked great.
World Wide filters default & auto-refresh would be very much appreciated.
Yeah, it makes me tired too (even though I am only playing it for tests). I have passed your proposition to the guys who make decisions like that. I will keep you updated.
As one who was in that game the ticking and un-ticking still did not show for Snow, I had to host the game in question for the issue to disappear. The player zumpfi was set to team 2 and had been ticked in.
Seems no one has reported this yet but when the game is loading windows shows the game in the task manager as “not responding” even if its loading perfectly fine. If if you click your mouse a couple times while loading or waiting for other players to finish loading; windows bring ups the “program not responding” dialog box and prompts the user to kill the process even when the game is still working