Online problems with new update

[ProgSys]

If you join a local server hosted by some players in the new update (5.1.2025), sometimes buildings, unit recruitment and flag capture does not progress. Even thogh you have good ping, below 50.
This indicates some package loss, or missing full updates.

This happens on all maps (testet on hlw_village), but is seems to happen more on maps which have neutral units (hlw_thirst).

The effects you can observe:

• (never for me) You start a new building it starts at 99% and you can not do anything with it.
• (will happen sonner or later) If you recruit a new unit, when it finished to 100% it gets stuck and the icon does not react to anything.
• (often) In some cases the units still comes out but the progress icon still stays at 100% inside the buildings card.
• (Seams to happen always) If you try to unlock somthing inside the armorey the icon turns red and nothing happans (no building animation and progress indicator), but after awhile the ability gets unlocked without any indication
• (Did not happen on my testing) Flags would just not react to you
• (Just onece) You see allied player controlled units at a different place as they should be (sometimes they walk through terrain)(but this happend only once with one unit)
• Smoke grenades did not block fog of war (not much testet could be wrong)

And now some screenshots:



At last we played with the ports "udp" and "tcp":


In the past there were similar problems, like you suddenly could not interact with your buildings.

Let's hope it helps finding the problem!

[Potatoman]

Friends and I have had the same issue.

Another problem which occured before the update as well is that we can't join local games. Connection failed after 10 times or whatever it says. Not sure if it's the host or the one trying to connect which is the problem. I know many other people have the same issues as well right now. Just started happening just suddenly prior to this update for me and my friends. I fixed it after validating the game and restarting my router. My friend couldn't join a game which I hosted locally. He tried to several times to go in from the lobby but it never worked. After he restarted the game and tried again it was suddenly working.

Not sure what the problem is or if it's connected to this. I can almost never host a lobby and start a game successfully because of this. People can't connect and drop off.

[Mr. Darkness]

Looks like the game overflow fix brought these issues with it.
I can confirm all these issues btw, these are all server-to-client related.

[Sandern]

The problems are caused by the fix for the "reliable overflow" error.

[*] (Seams to happen always) If you try to unlock somthing inside the armorey the icon turns red and nothing happans (no building animation and progress indicator), but after awhile the ability gets unlocked without any indication

Does not happen for me...

At last we played with the ports "udp" and "tcp":
...

Nothing changed in this regard. If you see these problems, then they were already there!

Friends and I have had the same issue.

Another problem which occured before the update as well is that we can't join local games. Connection failed after 10 times or whatever it says. Not sure if it's the host or the one trying to connect which is the problem. I know many other people have the same issues as well right now. Just started happening just suddenly prior to this update for me and my friends. I fixed it after validating the game and restarting my router. My friend couldn't join a game which I hosted locally. He tried to several times to go in from the lobby but it never worked. After he restarted the game and tried again it was suddenly working.

Not sure what the problem is or if it's connected to this. I can almost never host a lobby and start a game successfully because of this. People can't connect and drop off.

That's a problem of self-hosted servers. The game relies for most part on servers hosted by players. It will use whatever Alien Swarm matchmaking tries to do to make it work. However a lot of people have crappy connections combined with crappy routers, so it might not work.

[Sandern]

There are basically 3 different kind of servers (very simply put):

• Dedicated server, always has ports properly forwarded
• Player hosted server, but has firewall ports forwarded (27015)
• Player hosted server, but no ports forwarded

In the third case Alien Swarm/Source Engine will use a different way of connecting/sending data, and I think it's using the same method (Steamworks Peer-to-peer networking api). It's likely discarding data in this case. I will debug it further later this week. For now this change is reverted to the old way.