RCT Discussion / OpenRCT Multiplayer Questions

Sorry if a thread already exists for this, but I'm completely new to using the multiplayer option and was hoping to chat with anybody that could help explain some things to me so I'm doing this right and not making any taboo mistakes.

So when I click the "play with other players" tab and all of the servers pop up, can I join any of the servers? All I'm wanting to do is spectate or watch - which, from reading the rules seemed acceptable. I joined one server and received what seemed to be some notification asking me to leave, which kind of threw me off and didn't want to disrespect anybody. I see some servers that say to sign up on NE, but again I just want to watch so I wasn't sure if it was still necessary to sign up for any particular server.

Also, I recently downloaded the latest version that was released today and cannot load my previously saved games. Is there a way to fix this? Why is this happening?

So when I click the "play with other players" tab and all of the servers pop up, can I join any of the servers?

You can join any server that is on the same network version as yours and isn't password protected. Servers that are on the same network version have a green light on the right side, and servers that aren't have a red light. Password protected servers have a lock icon next to them.

All I'm wanting to do is spectate or watch - which, from reading the rules seemed acceptable.

Server rules vary from server to server, but for the most part, servers that aren't password protected allow you to spectate or watch. Some servers, such as Man of Teal or Tycoon Paradise, require you to sign up somewhere.

I joined one server and received what seemed to be some notification asking me to leave, which kind of threw me off and didn't want to disrespect anybody.

How did the notification appear? If it showed up in the chat area (bottom left, press "c" to start typing a message and "enter" to send a message) then someone might nave been asking you to leave the server. If it was a popup window, it either said "network desync detected," "disconnected: connection closed," or "disconnected: get out of the server!". Network desync occurs occasionally and can usually be ignored. If the message was the "connection closed" one, all this means is that you lost connection to the server. This sometimes happens when joining a server, especially if it has a large map file size (or custom scenery). In this case, joining the server is usually successful the second time around. If the message was "get out of the server!," you were kicked from the server.

Also, I recently downloaded the latest version that was released today and cannot load my previously saved games. Is there a way to fix this? Why is this happening?

Were you able to load these save files on an older build of OpenRCT2? If so, try filing an issue on Github and attach the files to the issue so they can be investigated. Usually failure to load a park means that OpenRCT2 is missing the custom scenery needed to load the file. OpenRCT2 saves custom scenery in the documents/openrct2/object folder, but it should still be able to use custom objects located in your RCT2 directory. If you have removed any objects since you last saved them, this may be the reason why it's not loading.

Thanks for replying! I think it was "disconnected: get out of the server!".

Yes I was able to load them on a previously installed version (version 5 or something like that). Basically I'll try to load a saved game and when I click on one of the saved files, it will immediately pop me back to the start of the opening intro sequence. I haven't removed any objects.

Okay, well my command prompt screen is now telling me it is indeed missing objects. But I never deleted an object from the object folder, so I'm not sure why this is happening? All the objects I used in the saved file should still be in the object folder.

Does the command prompt tell you which objects are missing?

Okay I think I got it working. Haha. I just downloaded the H2H7 bench again and it added the missing objects. Thanks for your help!