Sawwy about that!
What exactly happened?
the game was stable with 3/4 players, as long as all of the players had good connections. 4 players when one of them had a weaker connection appeared to have caused crashes for everyone.
We had as many as 6 players in the game but it crashed soon after the 6th one joined, when this new player alt-tabbed. I don't know what the cause of the crash was, since alt-tabbing does not normally break anything in this game.
We also ran into a bug where all clients saw a model of their own dino sitting up at the starting position. This model had its own ID number and didn't respond to any movement keys from any players. I'm obviously just creating an ID (maybe one lower than the lowest or one higher than the highest player) that I don't have to and I need to find out where that is.
Okay, I honestly haven't got the slightest idea why the network crashed with 5/6 people. I have a few guesses, such as the amount of data I have to send around when a player joins the game..or my game relying on connections being very very strong..but I'd love to find a way to just have the poorly connected player drop from the game rather than bringing down the whole game.
The problem is right now, when a new player joins, every computer on the network has to do a bunch of stuff and I think that's part of the problem. I can try to streamline that a bit and cut down on the amount of network activity involved with a new joining player and hope that helps a little...
but the game has also crashed at times not relating to a new joining player so this is officially very complicated.
Once again, I was getting more network activity than I thought I'd need for sending such simple data around. I'll see what I can cut back but we had everything on the slowest settings for this test...
