I'm in the same boat if it makes you feel better. I had a rating back from the early days playing and then i started playing in closed groups with friends (and mods) and the rating hasn't moved in a decade.

Would still love some help tracking this down if anyone who knows their way around a log file could take a look, or give me some idea what I'm looking for. We play with a few mods, but nothing obscure, and these desyncs are recent and seem to be ruining at least 1 game every week or two. I know I had Docsyn turn on the FAF Debugger. Hopefully that's reflected in the log.

We were talking about AI in our games last night and something that came up is that none of the AI know how to play PhantomX. Is this something that you think would be possible in the future? I imagine the simple part is teaching an AI that they need to break if they're the Phantom, but more complex is simulating how they would come to decide who the other phantoms are and who are the innocents.

Just a fun thought. Played a few games with M28 though and watching it kite me out is infuriating. Great job. lol

game_24325122.log

Here is the log from Docsyn if any of y'all could spare your eyes to look into it for a moment. I've combed through it but don't know what to look for.

Thx in advance.

Our playgroup is trying to solve some of its own desync issues. I am assuming that this snippit from my log suggests that Docsyn is the person whose logs will shed more light? I have asked them to send them to me.

But what intrigues me is that I always assumed it was just mods or perhaps bad installs that caused this, but y'all are saying hardware or drivers can cause game desyncs too? That's wild.

I'll probably post some logs here soon as soon as he gets them to me. It's not happening every game, but ruining one game a week is annoying enough.

@deletethis It's fine. Time zones have got us all by the nuts. Even our group is spread across 4 of them. Not much you can do.

Been a couple weeks so I'll bump this once more. Got more upvotes than PMs so far, but it's not too late! Nice quiet week this week due to Valentines Day. Come smash giant robots together.

@Saver -- that Survival Escape map is a classic and has been around for years, but I never saw another one quite like it before. It's really one of a kind.

ARE YOU an avid fan of SupCom and BlackOps?
ARE YOU interested in a recurring Friday Night game group based in North America?
ARE YOU chill with playing with mediocre old people who complain about stalling their eco and how bullshit restorer death balls are when they could have just built flak?
ARE YOU comfortable using DISCORD and do you know what misophonia is, and how to set up push to talk?

If so, our group may be interested in meeting you!

We have been playing as a group every week for a number of years now, but life happens and we're down a few members and would like to get our weekly average back up to around 8 folks or so (we're at 5 or 6 currently). I asked about you, so here are some things about us:

WE typically play using BlackOps mod, and play a variety of larger two-team or three-team maps (depending on numbers) and the occasional FFA or Phantom X games when we have odd numbers. Team games usually have decapitation on so you are still in until all your team ACUS are dead.
WE start at 6:30Pacific/9:30Eastern and usually get 2 or 3 games in depending on length and brain power.
WE are not pros, we are not Joes. We are somewhere in between mostly? If you don't consider yourself that good, we will happily give you tips. If you can scrub the floor with most people by minute 20 in a Setons game, you'll probably not find us terribly challenging.
WE don't play a lot of meta maps like Dual Gap, Astro or YSNP, though sometimes Setons is cool.
WE aren't here to discuss politics, but fair's fair we lean a little left on average (though we have some awesome conservative folk who ain't bigots) so no sense coming back for voice chat every week if you're not down with people being people, and robots being robots.
WE swear and drink. By god, we do, but lets not get so absolutely shitcanned you can't play.

PM me if you're interested, or reply below to mock or ask questions and we'll figure something out. Don't make me regret this like I regret posting things on Facebook Marketplace, by god.

@Uveso - I'm not sure how to get details on this for you, but hopefully you've been doing this long enough to know what i'm talking about.

Bug: Cybran ACU upgraded with maser tree works as normal. If that ACU gets in a transport and is dropped off, Maser no longer fires reliably, and commander will mostly just fire normal shot. Maser will infrewuently fire in bursts, and also fires into the dirt at ACU's feet sometimes. Does not happen if ACU teleports, only if it boards a transport.

Background: My memory is hazy, but I believe this used to be a vanilla bug, but was fixed at some point. My guess is this same fix could be applied to the BlackOps ACU if we could find it?

Huge improvement on Maelstrom, it's still pretty beefy at level 1 tho. Level 2 feels good. Level three is ok or could even be buffed a touch.

Spawning units into firing range is not real-world testing of course, but by my thinking, if the maelstrom is still too strong here, real games where units all trickle into firing rate is going to favor maelstrom even more. Anyways, heres some numbers:

T1 tanks (Strikers):
If I teleport the un-upgraded ACU into 17 T1 striker tanks ACU will just survive on it's own (no micro, no overcharge)
with Lvl 1 Maelstrom, I can teleport it into 80+ t1 strikers and it's fine.
Maybe lvl 2+ maelstrom should evaporate all t1 tanks, but probably not the first upgrade. ACU is basically unkillable by t1 land.

T2 vs Pillars seem good:
Un-upgraded ACU dies to 4 pillars.
T1 Maelstrom ACU can handle 8 and live.
T2 Maelstrom ACU can handle 20+
T3 Maelstrom kills 40+

T3 vs Titans:
Un-upgraded can handle one.
T1 Mael can handle 2
T2 Mael can handle 4
T3 Mael can handle 6 -- seems like not a lot of bang for your buck compared to level 1 and 2. Small buff like 12 or 16?

Thanks again for your time. FWIW I can confirm the hitbox changes fixed beam hits, and also the Sera missile is working great. And yeah, the Sera OC still seems capped at 15k regardless of upgrade. Did you ask me to retest? If so what would you like to see?

No rest for the wicked, @Uveso

Was doing some ACU testing with BlackOps ACUs and we've isolated a couple issues that I think are are all in the BlackopsFAF-ACU part of the pack

1. The BlackOps version of the Aeon ACU (EAL001) seems to have some hitbox issues where beam weapons pass through it and miss a good portion of the time. Probably the easiest to test (and worst offender) is the Aria T3PD (BAB2306). To recreate, make a bank of 4-8 Aria, and walk an Aeon ACU toward them on flat land. You should see many of the PD beams miss. In this test I did to get the screenshot, the ACU is standing still after walking into range, and it looks like maybe 3 or 4 out of 10 are hitting. The ACU is not taking damage from beams that are overshooting.

2. The same Aeon ACU also has what seems like a miscalculation somewhere in the QuantumMaelstrom upgrade tree. A single upgrade will kill an unlimited number of t1 tanks anywhere in weapon range (22?) in 4 seconds flat. A level 2 upgrade will kill a T2 Pillar in 8 seconds. The T3 upgrade takes a whole 10 seconds to kill a T3 Titan, but Pillars don't last 4 seconds and T1 tanks simply evaporate the second they're in weapon range. Maybe it's a balance issue, but it seems like something broke. I can't imagine that upgrade is intended to be that strong. We played @Jip 's King of the Hill mod, and it's insta-win if you use this upgrade and walk to the middle. lol.

3. Seraphim ACU (ESL0001).... the tac missile/overcharge upgrade branch seems to have two bugs in the same upgrade path;
   -- a) The tactical missile (2nd upgrade) seems to only ever need to build a missile once, after which unlimited missiles can be fired on a roughly 3 second cooldown, and there is never another 'building' progress bar, and there is no mass cost. In comparison, the UEF ACU tac missile is working properly.
   -- b) In the same tree, all three levels of upgrade are supposed to increase overcharge damage, and this is simply not happening with any of the three. I spawned a couple of GCs and turned their firing off, then compared an unupgraded ACU's OC vs a T3 ACU's upgraded OC and (with ridiculous amounts of power in storage) both overcharges do the vanilla 15000 damage.

As always, if I can do any more testing or digging for you, please ask. We play BlackOps each week and love having it kept up to date.

I always thought Aeon planes exploding in green fire was a bit much, but it was a small price to pay to get the oil slicks after a massive naval battle... god those added so much to ocean combat.

Perfect. Thanks Jip!

I don't generally play Aeon, but I tried it last Friday and the spoilsports i played with shut me down before I could build one.

It's a whole new Friday though. Lets do this.

@Uveso - can you (or someone else) explain what effect the 'DesiredShooterCap' fixes have on gameplay?

@Uveso Seems every time I @ you I owe you more and more thanks for your work!

We've had to have a gentleman's agreement not to build any of the Dreadnoughts for so long, and it was glorious last night being able to bring back the Seraphim dreadnought in a naval map. Welcome back, and thanks again.

I should add this only affects the two UEF units I listed. The Seraphim and Cybran BlackOps Dreadnoughts can be hit with torpedoes as normal.

@ZBC if you have the knowledge and time to fix a few of these outstanding bugs, as the main ringleader of a group that plays BlackOps every week, you have my sincere gratitude.

The big bug that is bothering us right now is that something has broken with torpedos vs a couple of BlackOps UEF units:

The two we've found are:

BES 0402 - UEF Dreadnought
EEB 0402 - UEF Philadelphia Stellar Generator (when built on water, obv.)

As you can see in the attached pic, torpedos from all manner of naval ships do not seem to hit either of these units, and just circle around. VERY rarely, a torpedo will land, but we're talking 8 minutes of heavy concentrated fire to finally take down the dreadnought.

I'm not sure which patch may have broken it, but it will be one of the more recent ones. This was not a problem in late 2023/early 2024.

Also food for thought -- There are other UEF BlackOps boats that are NOT affected (EES0302 - Knox Escort boat) and neither is the other BlackOps water-buildable structure (BEB5205 T3 advanced Air Staging).