Kingdom hole 8 - the red walls. Desync’d still. We’ve tested it with our group and it
happened every time.
Kingdom hole 4 - All desync
Kingdom hole 5-18 = All desync.
This bug doesn’t seem fixed @Sketchman could it be looked into again? It does seem improved on some levels but not many.
We miss playing golf so much and it worked so well before, what happened to it?
I can look into it again, I actually used Kingdom as a test case (since those rotating walls are very obvious when they’re not in sync) and was able to use a simulated ping far greater than what would normally be playable without noticing major desync. Because of that I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to reproduce it unfortunately, but as I said I’ll take a look.
Is there any other information that you can give me? Is your ping relatively stable? This one would be silly if it was the cause but do you have an FPS count much higher/lower than 60 and is it stable?
Thanks sketchman. I really hope this can be fixed, desperate to play golf properly again 
Can I volunteer to help test or anything?
As for FPS - I play capped at 60, partner uncapped 100+. We’ve had plenty of games with awful laggy hosts and still (prior to this issue) never had desync. We played Kingdom last night with 2 different hosts, one quite high ping one very low and we had desync throughout both. We’re going to try some things tonight see if we can find anything specific to help. Did something change in a major update that’s put it in this position?
We’ve tested it with horrid ping, out of order packets, packet loss, etc. I tried messing with the FPS, and while there is some jitter from lost packets, what I’m seeing largely lines up with the physics simulation on the Host’s end. Could you maybe send a video just so I know what you’re seeing?
Strange night but we played for two hours and couldn’t seem to replicate it very much which is unusual for us. I’ll take more videos next time if I can catch it again.
Here’s 4 videos. We played with capped fps @ 24 and 60 as one of us hosting and one playing and in random games. Didn’t seem to change much. I joined a game with a high ping (average 58 but 200+ at random moments) and didn’t get any desync. I joined a game with a very low ping and really clear obvious desync. I also tested late joining which previously always guaranteed we had desync, this only worked in 2 games tonight out of many.
Our only assumption here is that it comes down partially to the host computer being poor. We could setup a virtual machine and limit it and see what that does. Even so, there’s another factor here and maybe you would have more insight than us for that, but even with very laggy hosts (network lag? not pc lag) there isn’t always desync.
Played from start, Desync - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6wnQeqmyGs
Joined at the end, Desync - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZxbwGFWHvI
Joined late, Desync - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMiUrzBSE9g
Late join, lag, no desync - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBpIWqBko8
The only thing confusing me is why is this an issue now, but never previously? I’ve owned Tower since release and this has only began a couple of patches ago (specifically Accelerate I think). Something has definitely improved since last update though.
Golf: Desync happened a LOT to me too today and I also got weird “Hurry Up” times in the thousands of seconds. One time it was ~1700 seconds (screenshot) and another time when I joined another server it suddenly was 5000+ seconds.
But yes, the desynced objects were the reason I had to (((ragequit :P))) a lot of games today. One time I even got wildly teleported back and forth every frame between the ball I “kicked” away and the spawn location until a few seconds later I got booted back to the spawn. I hope that something like this won’t accidentally trigger a cheat detection, if there even is any 
Here’s a second screenshot about something weird that happened today… Look at the top right corner. The results are printed twice there.
Any update on this? I’m still getting it sadly.
We’re still working on the issue and investigating the cause.
Just saying I can confirm. Was in a game of Golf with my friends, and the game was so out of sync for everyone that it was completely, 100% unplayable. Balls phasing through platforms, hitting walls that aren’t there, etc. Even got a weird case where the ball went through the end hole and through the map, resulting in an out of bounds instead of a win, but that may be unrelated.
Any updates to this? We used to play every night and we miss it! Seen recent updates but it’s still broken for us.
Sorry for the lack of updates, crashes became a priority for a bit, but this is on my radar. Now that a lot of the major crashes are resolved (there are still some remaining of course), but I’ll have some room on my plate to dig back into this.
When it happens, does it effect all non-hosts? Or does it sometimes only effect one or two non-host players?
All. At least in my experience. When I’ve played in a group everyone had it. In that last video I posted everyone in that game had it because they were raging in chat after a while.
Haven’t been playing as much because of the desync but since the Nov 11th update (Adjusted Ball Race/Minigolf platform synchronization rate to reduce jitters) - the desync seems to be improved somewhat. In all the games we’ve played this week I think I’ve only had the issue in one or two.
There were people in chat saying they had it when neither of us didn’t, so it’s not gone completely yet but I think that was a part of the issue.
I was able to experience it with a debug build by joining random players’ games, but of course that only gives me half of the picture. Current working theory is maybe the packets are just getting bottlenecked on certain connections and coming in on a greater and greater delay, causing time on clients to drift away from the server. If that’s true a reasonable fix would be to turn down the rate at which synchronizations occur. I’ll make this change for an upcoming patch, and monitor this thread to see if the issue persists.
Thanks sketchman, it’s nice to know we might be getting somewhere.
My only real question is why was this not an issue pre-accelerate? We’ve played since tower released and never had this issue before then. It was always perfect. Is that something you can use to help find a fix?
Edit: we’ve played a few games tonight. No desync so far. I do think the platform synchronization rate has helped massively .
You might have just gotten lucky, there was an issue we were working on prior where it was causing more consistent desynch in mini-golf, at least in our testing. There was also some other issues with it that we had to fix for Accelerate in which the client’s time estimate would just stop ticking forward, this would lead certain effects to persist indefinitely. I’m glad the game is more stable for you though!
Has there been any changes to this in the latest updates?
Yes, there were changes to the netcode in the holiday update.
