A Game Mismatch Was Detected, every f@#king time Options

[ChiEkku]

tl;dr - Shockwave will randomly cause a game mismatch in a LAN game, no pattern. And now for the details....

For the record, my friends and I all use legit copies, without NoCD hacks. I use a disk image (that I made from my own disk) in Daemon Tools, but that's irrelevant.

I've been playing Shockwave since 0.95, and have heartily enjoyed it. I'll usually duel a friend, or have the occasional 4 person FFA with three of my friends. We use Hamachi, like everyone else, and have had no problems for the...two something years SW has been around. However, for reasons that now escape me, LAN play is now volatile and unstable, crashing with the "serious errors" or mismatches at random times midway through a match. It never used to be like this...

So the other day a friend and I sat down to our first game of the semester; we had played over summer while we both worked at our summer internships, but not very often. So, we began the match on Tournament Desert like we always do (starting units on). About half an hour in, just as I was about to send in a wave of laser paladins and comanches, the game mismatches. You know, that big black box that says "A mismatch has been detected", even tho things seem to be running great. Well, it had happened before, but only rarely. So, naturally we started a new one. Eight (8) mismatches later, we realized something was wrong.

We began hypothesising why this might be happening. Game data corruption? Maybe. Nothing had changed in the past few months: no new mods, no 3rd party patches, nothing. We had hardly touched the game since Spring. Anyway, we both uninstalled the mod, then ZH, then Generals, cleared the Game Data folders in Documents, etc. Then we reinstalled everything (including the ZH 1.04 patch before SW). Once it was all good to go, we crossed our fingers and tried a match. To our joy, we made it thru an hour and half of gameplay without any mismatch (we have large epic battles, so it takes a while). So, naturally, we figured it had been fixed. Hooray! We started a new game. Mismatch; we hadn't even built up our bases yet. So we started another one. Mismatch. We tried a third time. Mismatch. Apparently it *wasn't* fixed after all.

What else could it be. Our connection? My friend was in a new apartment, and his new internet sucked; maybe that was it. So, when he went home for the weekend (his parents have high speed cable), we tried again. Mismatches all over the place. Okay, so it's not the connection, maybe it was his hardware; his computer's old-ish (single core athlon, geforce 6800) but we never had a problem before.

I had heard that playing across different operating systems might cause problems (I use 7, my friend uses XP), but it was never an issue. Still, I wasn't about to throw out the possibility. So, I tried playing with a different friend who also uses 7, and who I also play SW frequently with. We mismatched within about 10 minutes.

At that point, the only thing that made any sense was it could be the mod. So this other friend and I tried playing vanilla ZH without SW. We played three full matches without any problems.

My conclusion? It can't be the connection, hardware, OS, or files for Generals/ZH; something's up with SW specifically, and I can't figure it out. What's even stranger is after reinstalling the mod I got in one good, long match before it all went to hell. Is there some...file that get's corrupted after playing too long? And why now? It's *so* weird it's only happened in the past few weeks. Any help would be appreciated.

~chiekku

This post has been edited by ChiEkku: 2 Dec 2010, 16:06