Personal mod creating desyncs in multiplayer

I have a modest mod that I've been making for myself and my brothers to use in multiplayer with each other. It works fine when I run it by myself versus AI in skirmish—no crashes or slowdowns. Unfortunately, any attempt to run it in multiplayer results in an immediate desync.

I always upload it to Google Drive, and have them download it to the standard \mods folder, so we're definitely all running the same version. We run several other mods in our games, too, but I've narrowed it down to my mod as the source of desyncs. (With any combination of other mods: no desync. With my mod, even without any other mod activated: immediate desync at the start of a game.)

I am at my wits' end trying to make this thing work without a desync. Do you guys have any advice? Here's a link to it on GitHub; maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

Someone is not placing the mod properly or not turning it on. Your mod seems to be all unit based changes, so there's no other reason it should desync - that I can see. I would assume that you desync only when one of the modded units enters the game - which would confirm that.

@Sprouto Hm, I'll have to double-check with my brothers. But I think it's unlikely: all mods are put into one zip file, uploaded to Google Drive, then downloaded, and unzipped into the same \mods folder. If my mod is placed wrong, then all of them should be. Furthermore, the desync hits so quickly we barely have time to give our first orders. We do usually play with the pre-built option activated, but the only extra units it gives you are some T1 mass extractors, some T1 power generators, and a T1 land factory—none of which my mod alters.

Okay, stupid question: I thought only the person hosting the game could turn a mod on or off, and as long as the other players had the same mod in the correct folder, it would work fine? Do the other players need to turn a mod on?

If someone downloads the Zip from Github and Unzips even if correctly if you had pulled master branch or otherwise. FA (or atleast FAF) WILL NOT see them as the same file due to white space differences. It is a problem I dealt with alot. Also as Sprouto said make sure all players have the mod enabled

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

somthing to check it to make sur that if the folded is Ziped that the Files are not a sub folder strutuer down. when you open the mod folder you should see all the mod files not jsut a single folded with the mod name on it

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

@NuclearAfikomen said in Personal mod creating desyncs in multiplayer:

Furthermore, the desync hits so quickly we barely have time to give our first orders. We do usually play with the pre-built option activated, but the only extra units it gives you are some T1 mass extractors, some T1 power generators, and a T1 land factory—none of which my mod alters.

If you're getting immediate desync then the issue is going to be the map - I would turn of the pre-built units to confirm that.

Another suggestion - all players should verify their files with Steam. Like yourself, other people can play with blueprint files and may not have mentioned it.

Last possibility - as suggested above - it's very easy for a player to misplace the additional mods, and besides being in the wrong place, they can also end up duplicated, which can cause it's own set of issues.

To properly diagnose these issues, I would examine the game.log files from each player involved. The very first part of these log files shows where each player is loading assets from, and quite often, you can see duplications, and conflicting issues without looking any further.

Update:

After a few hours of testing, one of my brothers and I narrowed the issue down to a problem with one specific other mod: Uveso AI.

We can do multiplayer, set up the way we always play, just fine with my mod, and any other of our favorite mods activated, using: the base game's AI, Sorian AI, and RNG Standard AI (with Uveso pathfinding turned on, since RNG Standard requires it), in any combination. But if we try to play with Uveso AI actually assigned a faction to control, the game immediately desyncs, exactly like I complained about earlier. I have no idea why this might be the case.

Obviously, this is not ideal, since Uveso's AI is pretty good, and we do enjoy playing against it. But Sorian and RNG Standard are enough to make the game fun, so that's what we'll be using in multiplayer from now on.

Thank you guys for helping! I greatly appreciate all the FAF community has done for Supreme Commander.

Please post a game.log

If you have desyncs with the AI-uveso mod, check all mod files. A desync is caused almost in every case by different mod files.
Maybe you have installed the mod in 2 different folders.

@Uveso said in Personal mod creating desyncs in multiplayer:

Please post a game.log

Here you go, the game logs for both my brother and me when our game desynced running both Uveso AI and my personal mod (called "WCT" in the files):

game_14139931(host).log
game_14139931(bro1).log

Hm... my log (host) reads "not safe" when checking the FAF gamedata files. I take this to mean they're possibly corrupted, and I should reinstall FAF.

If you have desyncs with the AI-uveso mod, check all mod files. A desync is caused almost in every case by different mod files.
Maybe you have installed the mod in 2 different folders.

I'll double-check again with them!

Could you please update my AI from your version 87 to the latest v91 ?

Maybe this will already fix the problem.
We had some problems with desyncing replays becaue i changed the c-pathing budget for the AI to early in the game.

And because your PC is way slower than your brothers, this could lead into desyncs with the old AI version.
(Your PC is calculation the waypoint markers in 13 seconds, your brothers game is doing it in 9 seconds)

You could also update Black Ops Unleased to 19.
I did not check the other versions, but please use the latest versions.

Then try agan.
If there is still a desync, please tell me.

We updated all mods we currently run, per Uveso's advice. After that didn't solve the desync issue, we finally checked the Mod Manager on my brother's PC, and found some quite old mods that had no business being listed. It turns out there were old copies of mods found in the folder "\steamapps\common\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\mods". I don't even know how those got there. He deleted that folder and we got everything working fine in multiplayer, no desyncs at all with any combination of mods.

Thank you all for your patience. (This is embarrassing. I swore I wasn't gonna be the guy who asked for help without first checking all of the extremely obvious solutions. I feel very stupid now -__- )

@NuclearAfikomen:

Thanks for reporting this back!

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers!