Multiplayer seems to have a lot of issues and the hints I found in google didn't help too much. I think the most people, who are playing Startopia nowadays are probably on GOG so I hope this is a good place to put that thread in.

So:
If someone has further ideas or workarounds for trying to get Startopia work better in Multiplayer, please tell me. I'd appreciate it very much and others that are struggling probably would, too.

What's the trouble in multiplayer? Startopia seems to suffer from desync problems. This results in regular crashes, but those aren't the biggest problem, that I'm having.

The game saves frequently and the playtime lost after a crash is annoying but acceptable. The biggest problem I'm having is, that loading a savegame generally fails. Those who played multiplayer already probably noticed, that doing something like hitting "Esc" to pause the game may cause crashes, etc.

Now, the only way I found to restore a multiplayer game after a crash "should" be:
- Create a new multiplayer game with the same players.
- Hit "Esc" and then "Load Game"
- If all players accept and have the non-corrupt savegame, this should bring you back to play

Too bad, that trying to "Load Game" never succeeded. The game always gets stuck on "Sending Request to other Players" but the other players don't get a request.

Anyone got an idea?


Some hints I can give: Moving from wifi to ethernet seems to have improved stability quite a bit. We did a direct connection via crossover cable and that helped. Also installing the unofficial 1.02 patch made the games last longer in multiplayer. Before that it sometimes crashed while building, though Startopia still crashes after all.

Tested on a different setup. Still didn't work. It seems to have worked earlier on older computers. Since all computers tested had windows 7 maybe it works on older OS. Noone here, who got "Load Game" work in Multiplayer?

I did ask this at gaming dot stackexchange dot com (stupid noob link protection, check question 14201), and one suggestion I found was making the autosave files read-only. But ultimately what helped most was starting Startopia directly from fresh booted PCs without any other crap (like Adobe updaters) running - on new years eve we played a game for several hours without a single crash. But that's an exception, usually it's crashing after about 45 minutes... But so far I have not found any way to have the game not freeze when opening the menu in multiplayer. I don't remember if I had this issue with WinXP though, that'd be worth a shot

I found this in the readme; it is similar to the issue of reloading saved user mission games: Another ESC/pause issue in user missions is the game will not pause in-game until after the load/save pause menu has been opened; returning to the game, it now pauses in-game (with the pause key).

In other PC games I have found the escape key causes more bugs than clicking on a "go to menu" button.