Uhh, what's up with that non-fully-crossplatform multiplayer? I understand if there are issues with deterministic RTS engines, math could be slightly different on each platform and in the end the butterfly effect causes heavy desyncs. But in a turn-based strategy?.. Weird. The Steam page doesn't have a "Crossplatfom multiplayer" badge, however, in the system requirements there's a footnote "Additional Notes: NOTICE: It is possible for Mac and PC to become out of sync during updates or patches. Within this short time period, Mac users will only be able to play other Mac users." So, the Mac users can play with the Windows users and Linux users can play only with Mac users. What would happen then if a Mac user hosts a game and then both Linux and Windows users connect? Something's wrong here.

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Well, if it makes you feel better, it's not platform-specific. It's easy to find such threads about XBox One and people never solved this. At least I managed to find how the game initiates the session. From the look of it, the game detects IP/port just fine but for some reason doesn't start the actual game session. It sends a single UDP packet that's not STUN-related and that's all. With another player it works as intended so it's probably a bad implementation of a really nice idea. It should have allowed to play even when both (or more) players are behind ISP NATs as long as port numbers are not altered by the ISP. Unfortunately, there's no debug info about these connection attempts so it's impossible to say why it fails.

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I tried to connect to another Linux player (and the other way around) and no luck this time. So the right answer to the question asked is: it depends on your luck. Wireshark shows several STUN requests so I think the game doesn't listen to any UDP port but instead binds a random one and sends to the other side. Most of the packets Wireshark marks as "GVSP" [External Link] protocol, that's probably an error in detection. Other than that, the log is flooded with this (coming from me to the other player):
Simple Traversal of UDP Through NAT
    Message Type: Binding Request (0x0001)
    Message Length: 0x0024
    Message Transaction ID: 684e6b382b68454f6a4938394e2b5547

In the end, this should depend on the type of NAT both of you use. And it's not a simple topic.

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Some more info. Yesterday we tried that setup, two on Linux, one on Windows and it seemed a bit weird. When the Windows guy connected, the other Linux one couldn't connect (dropped right after entering the session). So the connect order matters for us, at least when I host on Linux. First the Linux connects, Windows goes second. We played a couple of missions without any issues then. Going to try with one more Linux player so it would be 3 Linuxes and 1 Windows.

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It could have not been broken at all in the first place. For instance, I only tried to connect to strangers and who knows what NAT type they've been behind. The game doesn't seem to support revconnect so even if I wasn't behind ISP NAT they were and we couldn't connect.

Then, my ISP almost always provides an internal NATted IP but sometimes if I reconnect long enough (I wrote a script to automate that) I can get a WAN IP that's routable in the internet. Another point is that the port the game uses isn't clearly stated anywhere unlike most of the other games. All these factors may add up to what we had, the game wasn't playable in co-op.

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Oh, I wanted to find some of these threads yesterday and completely forgot about it. So, it's official: the multiplayer in Dying Light WORKS at least between Linux and Linux, confirmed. Probably also works between Windows and Linux, a player joined me a couple of days ago and he was on Windows, I think.

Looks like you need to forward a bunch of ports as the game doesn't allocate its own port but instead seems to use Steam as a proxy. I couldn't find any "dying light port forwarding" answers in Google neither could I find an open port in netstat. It opens 20111/udp but on a random interface, so if you have VPNs it can listen on it instead of eth0. It puzzles me why they don't just go with 0.0.0.0. It's also not used for the game as I didn't forward it but my friend still connected just fine.

So, the only advice that helped me is forwarding the Steam ports, namely 27000-27050, udp. You also have to have an external WAN IP on your router, i.e. ISP NAT wouldn't allow connecting to you. I still can't join strangers (however, a stranger connected to me a while ago), even those who already play with someone. Probably they're using some sort of VPN like Tunngle and aren't available from the outside.

We plan to play through this game together, two on Linux, me being a host, and another one on Windows.

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Le Kremlin-Bicêtre is most famous as the location of the Bicêtre Hospital, where Superintendent Philippe Pinel is credited as being the first to introduce humane methods into the treatment of the mentally ill, in 1793. Its most notorious guest was the Marquis de Sade.

That and the picture... Sounds intriguing.

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Can't watch the mrdeathjr's video from Russia and Germany, too. Is it available at least somewhere? I think it would be better to upload it to another, less restrictive hosting. Or just torrent it.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: liamdaweWhat's the issue with Planetary Annihilation?

It had outstanding Linux issues with CoherentUI like freezing or crashing UI. The devs ignored the issue for years though it may not be their issue but middleware's one, they've closed their bug tracker so I have no proof now. Here this issue is mentioned as well. I don't know what the game state is now, I hope it's been fixed eventually but it was an issue for long enough for me to lose interest in the game (and my pledge was $95 or so). They're not hostile to Linux gamers but not quite caring either.

Oh, the wayback machine saves the day again. This issue is even on the frontpage when the old bugtracker was captured. So here you can check it [External Link]:
Opened by DeathByDenim (deathbydenim) - Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:04
The latest comment points to this comment [External Link] which states that the issue hasn't been resolved at least by August 2015. Which is roughly 2 years since it has been opened.

I just hate allegations so I had to find the proofs that all of this wasn't made up by me or someone. Issues like this make the game totally unplayable and that in turn means that the Linux version is broken and was broken for almost two years, if not longer, with no comments from devs (SXX is a moderator).

Edit: seems like in Titans it's fixed [External Link], probably in the vanilla PA as well. Mentioned a lot before Aug 2015 [External Link] and never after that.

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Quoting: liamdaweWhat's the issue with Planetary Annihilation?

It had outstanding Linux issues with CoherentUI like freezing or crashing UI. The devs ignored the issue for years though it may not be their issue but middleware's one, they've closed their bug tracker so I have no proof now. Here this issue is mentioned as well. I don't know what the game state is now, I hope it's been fixed eventually but it was an issue for long enough for me to lose interest in the game (and my pledge was $95 or so). They're not hostile to Linux gamers but not quite caring either.

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