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The game won't play campaign co-op with multi-user software.

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USrankFulano
24 months ago
We've just started using a multi-user program called Aster that allows multiple people to use one computer. This lets more than one kid use the computer for games at the same time.

It works much better than VMWare most the time... it even seems to work with normal online skirmishes. We've not played them very long yet, but the three sessions I started seemed to go without problems

But when we try to do campaign co-op online it crashes every time so far.
Usually I get the error "only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted."
Then it will crash with an access violation.
Though we've had lots of other random crashes in trying co-op today, and we've been sending in lots of bug reports.

It says something about a log file... but the dialog closes itself before I've had a chance to see where the log file is located.

Still, it would be awesome if we could get this working, but I understand if it's not possible...
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
24 months ago
I suspect you'll have trouble. The co-op campaign is hosted on your computer rather than online servers. It uses steam to abstract the difficulties of forming a P2P host-client connection to arbitrary computers on the internet, but my recollection is that it essentially amounts of LAN if you are all on the same network. It sounds like VMWare is trying to use the same real port to host as the host machine and connect as the client, which seems like trouble. Or perhaps Steam doesn't know what to make of the situation.

Perhaps look into some way to make VMWare map different instances to different real ports, to avoid conflicts.
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USrankFulano
24 months ago
Very interesting, thanks for the reply!

We were trying VMware before but the first time we ran Zero K on the VM we got a message that "This is a VM, and Zero K doesn't like VMs" and it seems true... I'm suspecting it has something to do with the way VMware emulates graphics because even with the graphics turned all the way down and nothing running on the host machine Zerk K still doesn't run great. We are working towards upgrading the CPU from a Ryzen 1300 to something with 8 or more cores to see if that helps.

But VMware does take care of the network issue since it can emulate a network device and have it's own IP address.

The one we're trying now is Aster, which isn't a VM, but instead just lets you run multiple instances of Windows at the same time. We just have it log into two different accounts on the two different 'workstations'. It's got way better performance because there is no emulation going on, but so far we have seen some minor odd issues with games being run two times from the same files.

So ya, as far as I can tell Aster can't do any network emulation which means both users use the same card. It does work with some games though.
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AUrankAdminAquanim
24 months ago
(edited 24 months ago)
quote:
so far we have seen some minor odd issues with games being run two times from the same files.

You might be able to address this by downloading a copy of the ZK source files and having the second "workstation" run the game from those instead.

Some instructions for doing this (intended for people setting up development environments to modify and test the game, but just ignore everything that looks irrelevant to your situation):
http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Zero-K:Developing

(You will need to make sure that the "source code" version of the files is running the same version of the game as your normal installation. This should normally be the most recent Github commit with a name that looks like "VERSION{v1.10.11.3}".)

If it is just minor issues this might not be worth the effort, though.
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USrankTomBodett
24 months ago
In case it is a useful data point, I've been successful in doing this with VMware ESXi and PCI passthrough of the 4 graphics cards to get 1 "workstation" for each of 4 kids from one computer. We can all play Zero-K or whatever just fine. Getting it going wasn't without its challenges, but once it's going it works quite well.
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USrankFulano
24 months ago
Interesting things to try.
I'm not sure what exactly is conflicting with two games sharing the same data files, I think it might have been both games trying to edit a file at the same time. Of the dozen or so times we ran it to test it, this only happened once or twice.

Also important to note it's better to let steam update it on one account before running steam on the second account. Otherwise steam on the second account thinks it needs to download the same update, and I've not found how to get steam to actually check and realize the game that it's updating has already been updated on another account. I'm sure there's a way... verifying the files or something.

Using GPU passthrough seems like the best solution for running Zero K on VMs. VMware Player is terrible at emulating graphics unless it's got a few extra CPU cores to chew up in the process... then it's only poor performance... Right now with only 4 cores our GTX 1050 barely gets any work at all because the VM is maxing out the CPU instead.

I didn't realize they had a free version of the virtualization software that lets you use GPU passthrough until I looked up ESXi just now. I'll give that a try eventually...

I'm also curious if there is some way to get Windows to have the two copies of the game use different network devices, but so far the things I've found about that are Windows 10 Pro features, which I don't have yet.
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