Hello, im a modder and content creator. I have made popular mods and have a whole community who plays my mods. I will list here all the issues that make it very difficult to play the game without getting extremely frustrated.
I am getting tons of messages from other modders who ask me for help when their mod keeps crashing for no reason. All i can usually answer is “AOE2DE is broken and full of bugs, if you want to mod you will have to accept that the game is completely unstable and it can crash after every tiny change”.
This bothers me a lot and i hope this game will get fixed one day.
Issues:
Unit ID Limit (you cant add new unit IDs otherwise game crashes)FIXED WITH NEW UPDATE
Changing a Tech research location or Adding new one makes the game freeze and crash when clicking on it. (50% crash rate for no reason)
Invisible Lobby issue (when hosting a lobby, there is 50% chance it will not get listed)
When releasing a new data mod update, all players have to MANUALLY update it before joining the lobby or unsubscribing, or else the game wont start (shows an error message which lists all people with wrong version)
Overall random crash and out of synch problems.
When the game crashes for everyone, there is not a single error message, it just shoots you to the desktop, making it impossible to tell the reason the game crashed.
Download speed is EXTREMELY slow. Making it impossible to add new graphics and sounds to the mod without having people sit for 20-40 minutes in lobby and wait for the download to end.
I know you devs like to release new DLCs, but please fix the bugs first.
Consider even releasing a DLC just for bug fixes, im willing to pay and im sure many others would.
But adding new content of top of bugs is just irrational. Every single update you bring, kills already existing mods which people spent hundreds of hours of work.
Im hoping that you will at least fix some of these.
Thank you.
EDIT:
More bugs:
Very often when you are host and lobby is full, you suddenly cant kick players
So when someone is afk, you have to rehost because you cant do anything
When hosting with a data mod, whenever you click “Lobby Browser” the lobby gets bugged
Means when the game starts it shows everyone as “wrong version”
So you have to rehost again
Try it.
Host with data mod, click lobby browser and get everyone to ready up. It wont let you start the game.
Very often when you are host and lobby is full, you suddenly cant kick players
So when someone is afk, you have to rehost because you cant do anything
When hosting with a data mod, whenever you click “Lobby Browser” the lobby is bugged
Means when the game starts it shows everyone as “wrong version”
So you have to rehost again
Try it.
Host with data mod, click lobby browser and get everyone to ready up. It wont let you start the game.
Is not possible to play with people who do not have that DLC then, so straigth up bad idea…
The Lobby Browser itself is unstable af. There also are a lot of games that already started/cancelled that still are shown (and even still are shown after refreshing, and been started before the refresh), sometimes these zombielobbies stay there for several hours (at least once I have seen that)
This is something they can not really change. Dont get me wrong: it should not happen, but somewhere the code does stuff that the OS/memory allocator does not like and then calls std::terminate. No chance to get rid of it, unless you get out a stable game in a stable engine (that wont happen with these Devs, since they dont touch it, or if they do they break it, reworking the whole engine would be a solution…)
You actually can:
Imagine you hosting CBA V6 and get this bug. Just switch to another scenario, lets say CBA V5. Now you can kick players again, and switch back to correct version. Sadly this confuses a lot of people, assings colors to everyone and lobby behaves wired af, but you can kick people
I have another “bug”: as hoster you have to ready up after every download again. dont know why, but it is super annoying to have to click ready up after every single guy who joined your lobby
Not a bug but Steam Workshop would really help the modding community too. It was very easy to test mods in the HD edition, but now you have to restart the game every time you change a little thing which is kinda annoying.
more of a minor annoyance really. this tiny bug is like nothing in the face of the other ones, at the very least it doesn’t prevent us from playing, which is ultimately what we’re trying to do.
steam workshop would be awesome. no more forcing every player to re-download the entire mod but only download the difference, so they dont have to wait 4-5 minutes in the lobby instead just 20-30 seconds given the current download speed. though im not sure if steam workshop has auto update, right now the mod does auto update as long as player isn’t in a lobby.
my mod used to be 380MB and it only took me 3 mins, now I have constantly shrinking it down to 135MB and it still take me just as long. the download speed has gotten really slow. maybe @DodoNotDoDo could share with us any status update, a lot of these issues were brought up in the past 7-8+ months ago.
From my testing it’s not the actual download that’s slow. It will of course depend on the speed of your internet. But a 450mb mod takes me less than a minute to download. It’s whatever processing the game does after download that takes extra time. I’m pretty sure I reported this to the game team previously but I’ll double check. We are looking at other ways of helping to improve the download experience though to avoid some of these delays.
cause im on 1Gbps fiber internet and timed it with network monitoring I am only getting between 300-500KB/sec on average and it fluctuates. once the network traffic down to 1-2KB I konw it’s done downloading and the entire time is around 3 minutes.
edit: would showing a video work? maybe can show the video to them and let them know download speed is really limited.
There’s so many variables that can affect download speed I don’t know that a video is going to help. I’m checking to see what expected download speeds are and/or if there’s any additional optimization we can do. I’ll update with findings.
Faster download speed would help extremely. I cant even use 95% of the avaible materials to edit my mods since i know people would sit for 10 minutes inside the lobby for the download.
Also an automatic “check for updates” function when joining a lobby that has the data mod you already own would be a huge relief for all the people that have to constantly unsubscribe and rejoin after every update.
These 2 fixes would be a game changer. No pun intended.
