State of Multplayer?

[Doof]

Hi, it's been years since I last since used KeeperFX for multiplayer, and even then I had trouble. It was unreliable and often cut out with "re-syncing" mid-game. I recently tried it again with a friend with KeeperFX 1.2.0, and we still couldn't get it working. We tried both UDP and TCP without much change. We live relatively close together so the latency shouldn't be an issue, and I know it isn't because I ran my own tests. I tried many times on both UDP and TCP with two machines on my own network and couldn't finish a single game. I know multiplayer was still a work in progress years ago but is this still an issue?

Here is a Github issue I found that relates to the problem, as well as a familiar log (I don't have my own): https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx/i...ent-1242781222
The things I've noticed the most in my testing is "Error: checksums_different", which seems to be the error in every single desynced multiplayer game.
I would've written this off as still an in-progress feature had the KeeperFX Wiki not mention there is a Discord where users can find players. Surely if this is currently entirely broken, nobody would have any luck playing multiplayer.
My last resort is to assist my friends through the steps of running DKG through dosbox and hoping the IPX emulation works.

[YourMaster]

If you are not too far away from your friend, ENET UDP should work pretty decently. We did a tournament a while ago across europe (still on version 1.1) and although there were certainly a couple of games that crashed out, most of them completed.
Multiplayer does still crash out occasionally yes, but unfortunately it is now usually quite late in the game without a clear cause, so hard to fix. And since people rarely play multiplayer, if we do introduce new problems for multiplayer we will have trouble getting feedback from users on that.

If you were playing ENET/UDP, I hope you were playing without tunneling software like radmin or zerotier, that adds too much latency. Also, KeeperFX does not handle temporary disconnects well, so having a solid, wired connection should really help prevent crashes. Unfortunately, nobody is working on multiplayer now and has not been for quite a while.
If you are already on a direct and stable connection, you could try if version 1.1 works better for you. If it does, be sure to let me know.

[Doof]

I've already mentioned I've tried both UDP and TCP with not much difference. We aren't far from each other, no tunneling software was used, and our latency wasn't bad. I also mentioned in the OP how I had two systems right next to each other and wired to the same network (meaning the most minimal latency) that still had the same issue. It's that damn checksum error. I'll try out 1.1 on the local network and report back.

EDIT: 1.1.0 actually works. It de-synced every now and then but it actually successfully reconnects.

[YourMaster]

Interesting. If you play more often, it would really, really help us out if you could tell us which alpha breaks the multiplayer, as that could help us fix it for future versions.

This is the full list of alphas: https://keeperfx.net/downloads/alpha
You can find the oldest one of 1.1 all the way up to 1.2, you can half the range by each attempt until you know where the problem is.