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Operation Ratcatcher


Tacbat

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I'm trying to make the connection to 85.14.216.250, but no luck so far. First time to try this on TS3. I'll keep trying, but I might need a little guidance to make the connection.

This is the Game server IP not the TS. :)

The TS3 IP as they have posted on the pdf brochure about the campaing was:

911.familie-kuhrt.de

Copy and past it on the TS3 IP and this is it.

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Hi.

As I said yesterday, I do not believe it was a "server" related issue by itself. Otherwise we all would have crashed.

The fact that a group of people just crashed when the game was being launched reminds me similar issues with other sims/games.

On those cases the problem was that at the "launch time" the server has to place every player inside its vehicle while first it has to Create the vehicles.

And to make things more complicated some players have better pings and faster computers than others so that mean they reach their vehiicle faster than others.

However the main issue on other sims is that as soon as the server launches, some players get to do som "action with their vehicles" such moving them or activating some systems while there is still people "loading the scenario"

In other games this was sorted out imposing a 30 seconds blank screen that would prevent players to do anything on their vehicles or toi move them before that 30 seconds allowing all players to load scanrio and syncronice with server.

Yesterday scenario was not an small one with a lot of vehicles.

I would dare to say your server is running fine. Most of us had great pings to it and no lag was observed. Only a fraction of the players "lost session" at the very moment of the launch. This is pretty significative.

It was just related to the Scenario launch moment. And this IMHO is more related to the simulator multiplayer behavious and the individual players pings.

Anyway I want to thank to the people that made the ffort to prepare and organice all this. Do not let this event to make you sorrow for this "incident".

For your next proposal 3er Regimiento Acorazado Tizona would be there as well ;)

Thanks

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Sorry it didn't go well.

When people drop like that, its usually the BIOS settings on clients that need to be changed. The energy saving settings cause stuff like that - if a client is changing clock speed on the fly the server will drop it immediately on launch. But this problem would happen every single time for those affected clients.

It could also be that the ISP where the server is housed does not allow for enough "burst" bandwidth to start the game and therefore some clients end up getting dropped.

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Furia, what do you mean by launched. Did the people drop right when you went into planning, or when the action phase started?

At the very moment the action phase was launched.

We have been all connected during lest say 35 minutes while the mission leaders were doing all the planification and drawing lines in the map and when the action phase was launched, lets say 70% of the people spawned into the 3D world inside their vehicles and the other 30% ALL at the same time "lost connection to the instructor" and droped. it happened at the very moement of the launch and all the people that droped, did it fast and at the same time, so the moment I reached my 3D world Leopard I received the message that 10 players have droped.

It all happened in the 5 to 10 seconds of loading and laucnhing the action phase.

All players that droped did it "toghether" in block.

I do not know abot many of them but the ones from my unit that "droped" have their sim properly configured and use to play almost daily, long combats so I guess their sim is properly configured.

Hope this description helps.

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My experience:

1. All planning went well on the map: mission download successful, icons located, graphics applied, arcs checked and so on.

2. At STARTEX, I got to my platoon, divided it into individual vehicles, and moved the first two to their fire positions by standard route planning.

3. System crashed as I was moving the third vehicle. Total time of about two minutes from start to end.

Probably a very small part of the puzzle. Hope it helps a bit. IMHO, the concept of RATCATCHER was good, and I'm looking forward to future exercises of this nature.

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Sorry it didn't go well.

When people drop like that, its usually the BIOS settings on clients that need to be changed. The energy saving settings cause stuff like that - if a client is changing clock speed on the fly the server will drop it immediately on launch. But this problem would happen every single time for those affected clients.

It could also be that the ISP where the server is housed does not allow for enough "burst" bandwidth to start the game and therefore some clients end up getting dropped.

I don't think, that the BIOS causes the failure. When we play in our battalion, we don't have these problems. Changing the clock speed, should not kill the network connection, otherwise all other games like Battlefield etc would have the same problem. Maybe next time, we should let whireshark track in that special moment. I suggest, the it's a problem in the network design of steelbeasts.

The high bandwidth load in the phase of starting the game, hm, when starting a download, you also have these burst and our provider is specialized on hosting gameservers.

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I was not aware of the case of Tango29, however all the people I saw droping out of the sim, did it at the very launching of the action phase. Lets say within the first 5 seconds during the launch.

LOL some people were already cursing on the teamspeak while I was just entering my Leo.

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As general advice for future events like this:

If you experience drop-outs from a session, please collect the debugLog.txt files from dropped clients and the session host before starting a new scenario!

Please group the files into collective ZIP files where each archive contains either the files from dropped clients or from those that successfully participated so that we can compare the logs.

The file can be found in ..\Documents\eSim Games\Steel Beasts\debugLog.txt

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Some time ago, we also tried not to start hacking on the keyboard when the action phase begins. Waiting nearly a minute wasn't as bad.

Maybe we should test this behavior with many people, means testing without planing. So it doesn't coast so much time and helps esim.@Sean: You are also hosting many people or did it in the past. You don't have those casulties?

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Changing the clock speed during a session WILL cause that client to be thrown out. I know that to be true for SB. I don't know how battlefield does it, but SB is different I'm sure. If the clock speed is the problem, it can be seen either in the top of the AAR "clocks corrected by x seconds" or in the debug log (can't remember which).

Wireshark is good, but you should know it will cause additional overhead while running. Not sure it will reveal much in this case.

Another idea is for you guys to host your teamspeak somewhere else other than your game server. It will contribute to bogging your server down and saturates your network connection with a lot of non-sb related traffic as well as giving the processor more to do with all that compressing/muxing/demuxing of audio streams.

I've hosted maybe 35 guys in the past and don't remember lots of problems with everyone dropping at once. I do remember there were some failed sessions where the network was saturated by 50,000 tow launch network messages, but that was really just terrible lag rather than people dropping.

I'm not saying that there are no bugs in SB, just saying that I don't think that anything "new" is broken in the network stack. There are a whole lot of variables involved when 35 people are playing from all around the world, and it makes it very tough to debug problems and work out what's happening.

I'm aware of the frustration involved with huge sessions - many people coming and going, people showing up late, people dropping and needing to reconnect. It does make it a little easier when the two CO's involved have done some preplanning on their own to present to their "Team".

One other thing worth trying might be to launch the action phase and do the planning there? The graphic drawing tools are more limited but then you would see immediately what is going to happen.

I don't think, that the BIOS causes the failure. When we play in our battalion, we don't have these problems. Changing the clock speed, should not kill the network connection, otherwise all other games like Battlefield etc would have the same problem. Maybe next time, we should let whireshark track in that special moment. I suggest, the it's a problem in the network design of steelbeasts.

The high bandwidth load in the phase of starting the game, hm, when starting a download, you also have these burst and our provider is specialized on hosting gameservers.

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If its possible mark the 3rd july for the testing

For us its very important to get assistance for this test from the other side of the big pont cause we hosting game every evening with a involvement of 10-20 players and the problems with the network is only we have guests from the other side of the pond

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