I'm trying to play Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour on netplay with some friends, and no later than the 3rd hole, our games have completely desynched. It seems the actions we are taking line up accordingly (ie, the inputs are being received across the network fine), but the game is loading different wind conditions at the start of the hole (which means we are effectively playing different holes). Sometimes this happens on the 1st hole, but we've tried 20+ rounds and we have never gotten past the 3rd hole. If we're able to finish holes 1 and/or 2, the wind conditions are the same across all players.
We're using Dolphin 5.0, the last stable release, although we've tried 5.0-8050 (the latest dev build as of this post) as well and the same thing happens. We've tried changing the buffer from 6 all the way up to 30+ and it doesn't seem to help. In the properties for the game, we turn off "Enable Dual Core" and set "Deterministic Dual Core" to none, because otherwise MG: TT will not even boot up. All other settings are default. We've tried turning off the memory card in Dolphin settings as well, although this hasn't changed anything. In the Netplay lobby, even with just 2 players, it will always say "Possible desynch detected" and the frame number will be 0, 1, 3, or 36. We can't figure out how to avoid this message showing up, but even if it does show up, we can frequently play the first 2 holes without any issues.
Does anyone have ideas for why the game is loading different holes for different players on netplay, and any ideas for things to try?
When the game says "Possible desynch detected", it's pratically desynced already, but it might be so minor that it's still playable. If everything was working as it should, you should not see that message unless you have a network error with a wrong or missed network packet, or something like that.
Disabling dual core is the very 1st thing to do on netplay, you should leave it at that for all testing. The buffer size shouldn't have an affect on desyncs, only on playability and lag.
I hope it's just some different setting that is causing this and not some issue in Dolphin. You should create a portable.txt file for each player and put it right next to the Dolphin.exe. This will allow you to test with clean and identical settings. From there, only disable dual core, if it isn't disabled by default, change your controller settings and then try it. There's no need to play the game, when you get the "Possible desynch detected" message, it's desynced already. If that message does not appear, change the settings one by one, until you have the settings you want to use.
Thanks for the reply.
I should have mentioned that we are using the Portable.txt trick already, and the only thing that's different from the clean install is that we saved the same memory card with a blank MG:TT save to <Dolphin>/User/GC (although, as said, the problem persists even if we disable memory card usage), we disabled Dual Core, we changed our controller settings, we added the path of a ROM folder to Dolphin so it can find the game, and we changed the volume in the audio options so it wasn't so loud.
My friend and I just tried all possible settings of Deterministic Dual Core (Not Set, none, auto, fake-completion) and MG:TT netplay gets locked on a black screen at launch for all options except 'none', which boots correctly but always gives us the possible desynch message before we even get to the main menu.
Often my internet is finicky, but two friends who live near each other with good internet also get desynch messages like this, so we're kind of at a loss on what to do.
Just verified that it's working on netplay for me. You may have different dumps of the game, have you verified the MD5 hash in netplay?
Like mimimi said, as soon as you see the desync detected, it means you're setup wrong.
We verified that the hashes are the same using the option in the 5.0-8050 build, yes.
My friend and I both deleted our Dolphin folders and did a fresh install of Dolphin 5.0. We put Portable.txt in the folder before opening Dolphin, then pointed Dolphin to the ROM folder, and changed Enable Dual Core to off and Deterministic Dual Core to none for MG:TT (the only ROM in the folder). We changed nothing else about controllers or volume settings or memory cards or anything from the fresh install, and we still get "possible desynch" messages within the first 60 frames every time we do netplay. It seems unlikely it's my internet if it happens every time (and also happens with a different group of friends), but tomorrow we may ask another friend to do a fresh install and see if either of us can connect to him.
We may also try a totally other game just to see if we get desynchs in that one too, but not too sure what else we could try for MG:TT.
Okay, so we tried Mario Kart Double Dash and we don't get desynchs as long as we have Dual Core off and Deterministic as "not set" (not "none" like for Golf). As soon as we set Deterministic to any other setting, Double Dash also desynchs immediately, same as Golf.
The problem is, Golf gives us a permanent black screen at launch if we have Deterministic to anything other than "none". Is this a problem with our ROM? JMC47, what setting did you have for Deterministic when you had netplay working?
We're going to see if a different ROM for Golf fixes the problem. Should I post the hash for our old Golf file to see if we had the same file as JMC, or is that not a good idea?
You just need to use single core if Deterministic Dualcore doesn't work. Determinnistic Dualcore has the same timings more or less.