ATT everyone having gate/ctd issues - TSO settings

[Muhir]

I've not heard anything on my issues.  I am still going through the same problems.  

 

A couple things that seems to be happening, as I said before its almost as if my router gets "full" then has to reset itself.  If i try to launch the client immediately the entire top of the launcher "grays" out or the server comes up as "offline." 

 

Before you simply dismiss this as an entirely "me" issue, understand that at times my son hosts a minecraft server while playing league of legends and streaming music and videos all at the same time with skype running.  The ONLY program that exists on my machine that is problematic is EnB.  I've run EnB on these two machines (laptop wirelessly and PC) since the tail end of ST2 and only since last thursday have I had these problems.  Sure I had the random gate to megan or dock to megan, but this is just flat silly now.  I lock up and have to task manage my way out of the game regularly.

 

Help would be greatly appreciated.

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Heya Muhir,

 

i wasn't answering your report so far, sorry - mainly cuz i think what you dont want to hear...  :P

 

I can offer you logging into your computer (Ultra VNC) and check your settings and optimize them if possible, could be a try.

[VincentTH]

The problem as I see it, is that the new method of client<-->server communication can overload your router/PC buffer.  Instead of issuing command and communication one at a time, the new patch "batches" all comm into a single request.  When you gate, the communication can overwhelm your router and thus, causes CTD or CTM.

 

In the other thread someone had a suggestion to separate static/large load data into a separate stream using TCP, and thus take advantage of the automatic retry, ACK mechanism of TCP.  Activities that need immediate reply from the server still use UDP, and Zackman said that may be exactly what the SDEVs will do, as they are discussing it internally.

 

Your diagnosis that your router gets full then reset itself may be correct.   I also believe that your network card and/or router may issue "throttle command" where it tell the sender to slow down by issueing PAUSE frames.  The transport layer (IP) will handle that, but since we are using UDP, the server really have very few options to handle it.

 

Just be patient for now.   I trust the devs will fix it once and for all.

 

[EDIT[ my post and Zackman's post crossed, so I guess you are in good hands now!!!

[Zackman [LDEV]]

The problem is the packet frame size.

When the UDP packet exceeds the MTU size of your router/NIC the packet is fragmented (splittet).

 

Unfortunatly there are many issues with UDP nowadays like various "Fragmenting protection" settings in routers/firewalls etc. - which is simply resulting in a packet rejection!

 

With the new gating cache, all the new sector packets are now send in one cycle to the client - and this can cause problems under certain configs/conditions.

 

Since UDP has no mechanism making sure packets are send in order, it could happen that one packet is arriving earlier than a later send packet. Eg. lag somewhere on the line for packet #10, but packet #11 has no lag, so arriving earlier - or fragment #10 simply get dropped/lost somewhere on the way to you. In this case the fragmented (and re-joined) packet makes no sense for the client and is simply dropped.

 

Note that UDP has a "standard packet drop rate" from 1-5%.

 

Interessting enough that many coders/studios do not consider UDP the first choice anymore nowadays. Sending data reliable is often more important then ultra fast communication - besides the fact that TCP can perform similar with todays computing power and line speed (Nagle Algorythm disabled).

 

In live streaming (video/audio) and VoIP UDP might be still the first choice - but a game that isn't really affected by 3ms or 120ms packet response....esp. when this game was originally designed 10 years ago....

Blizzard was obv. aware of this when they decided to use TCP/IP exclusively for World Of Warcraft (yep, WoW is completely TCP/IP).

 

TB is currently testing something and might submit another change soon(tm) - if this won't solve the issues, we will look seriously into TCP, cause something was always with gating and crashing - even already before the new mechanism - which was the reason for the latest changes!

[Muhir]

Morning Zack,

 

I wasn't ignoring you this time.  I wanted to run and see what issues/fixes were happening.  First, my issues were not so much gating/docking but mid-fight/flight/or just standing around doing nothing.  That's when most of my crashes were occurring.

 

After listening to you in chat yesterday with some of the other peoples and waling them through the resetting of the properties on the NIC, I wen back into mine reset everything to default, then shut my computer down (pc won't worry about laptop and wireless for now) then wen back and followed what you had said in chat and in this thread.  I ran fairly stable with only the occasional dock/gate to Megan (one or two times) for the entirety of yesterday.  I left myself logged in when I went afk or was doing something else and did not come back to find myself locked up.

 

I did experience significant lag while fighting mobs, much more so than is normal, but my connection did stay stable.  I will update if it changes, but for now, it looks solid.

[Kamchakk1952]

I have had some issues with lag but nothing that caused me to think "this is so bad I can't play". I do have to use Task Manager to end the locked up game to the point where I just keep task manager running all the time. Said to myself the other day, "I've never had a program that I recall having to use task manager on so often". I'm writing this today because this is the first day that I could not play the game due to lag. As has been already said, everything taking 15 to 30 seconds to happen and took me several attempts to just get past the log in screen. Hope you can fix it up soon, I really love EnB, sending you DEVs and TS a big thanks for all the hard work you do.

[Overtkill]

Question to the Devs:

 

What is the MTU and Packet size are you guys coding around? (out of curiosity)

 

Thanks!

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Hey,

 

the client was most likely optimized for 576 byte packets, that is what you will see for the lines MTU as well.

(Packets processed by involved switches/routers between you and game-server without getting fragmented)

 

But you should set your devices to 1500 for ethernet, 1492 for WiFi - and the NIC (or better chose CPU) will do the fragmenting for you.

[Overtkill]

Right, I'm aware of the variables. You are correct that the medium MTU should be 1500 for most folks on the internet side, and large framing should only be used for LAN environments. Personally speaking, I don't suffer from a lot of the issues reported because I am using a team of 2 gigabit Intel Server adapters because of the large amounts of data I have to deal with for my business clients. Not everyone can afford to update their network hardware (router and/or switching appliances), and may even be gaming on older wifi (which they shouldn't be gaming on wifi anyway, but folks will do what they will). Would it be possible for you guys to create a separate optimized setting in the launcher and client for those people? Say smaller packets (that is not the old UDP method settings)? This would help alleviate a ton of issues.

 

I guess what I am getting at is more of a philosophy in games development; Are you guys coding for the medium and lesser optimized network environments of the "medium" end user? Or are you coding for what you guys feel the modern specs of networking should be? Not everyone has the hardware that supports the spec's I've been reading about. Speaking as someone who has been a games dev in RL, we used to target the average user, with settings written in that would support the average Joe with lesser hardware, with the option to enhance playability for the higher end user as well. But there will always be the medium/average, plus the little guy, so to speak. I'm just trying to see what you guys are thinking and maybe looking for more insight to your process at work in dealing with the recent changes regarding the launcher and proxy.

 

Thanks for the speedy reply. :)

 

-Overt.

[Zackman [LDEV]]

The advantage of the Intel Server adapters is mainly that it is an ACTIVE adapter, so able to do all the computing on its own - which makes it very fast and reliable.

 

The packet optimization is not really the problem, it is already aiming at low hardware. THe fragmentation is the problem, esp. the NICs like Realtek & Co are not really doing a good job here - thats why "outsourcing" the load to the CPU is a better choice- which is done by the settings i described in the O-Posting.

 

We had this problems already before (hence the changes: Gate crashes) - but the latest proxy change is sending even more packets in one cycle, so the fragmentation problem steps in the foreground now.

Ironic: Its helping the gate crashes but now revealing another problem...sigh.

 

Every player i was able to "handle" so far (also via VNC doing it for them) had a much better game experience after the changes,

But anyway, this is not what we consider "good" - so we are thinking about something else already.

[Overtkill]

Cool man, thank you for the reply and the insight to where you guys are headed. Good stuff to know. :)

 

-Overt.

[duvel]

Landing on planets issue solved without tweaking network card

 

https://forum.enb-emulator.com/index.php?/topic/9181-nostrand-vor-planet/#entry80387

Edited June 20, 2013 by duvel

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Gratz Duvel, nice find!

 

Question, since i never disabled the landing cam and cannot try out atm:

Is the "Gating screen" coming up immediatly with turned off landing cam?

 

Sounds to me like there are changed timings (esp. handoff and "ACK" packets) without the landing screen.

[duvel]

if i dont use the landing camera i get in the sector right away BUT no mobs are showing

(it seems the toon is stuck between nav layer and mob layer) so relog to character is the minimal needed

if i use the landing camera in get in the sector also  right away (after landing video) but with mobs showing

tested it on several planets

 

i came to this conclusion by accident btw with testing my new vista partition

 

 

During landing video the proxy is already "awaiting master handoff"   (maybe a hint)

Edited June 21, 2013 by duvel

[nova2121]

Hey devs. I'm having gating issues since about 3 days ago, since the last patch was applied. Everything was working fine for me until that. I've tested it on windows 7 and xp, while xp is a little more stable, it's happening every 2 to 3 gates. It's making the game very hard to do trade runs, or anything involving traveling. I cringe every time I hit gate. I've tried disabling IPv6, disabling settings in device manager. I've tried with and without packet optimization. Tried with/without gate cameras. I don't know if you guys are narrowing this down, I'd love to try and help. I might actually be useful.

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Just a heads-up:

 

We can see that the current lag is caused "somewhere" in the network and a guess(!) is that there is some kind of a bandwith-throttleing in place currently, so the ISP is avoiding flooded switches/routers.

So just you know why there are some packet-loss/lag/crash issues currently. It's nothing you can help from your side or we can influence from the server side.

 

Please make sure that you have PROTOTYPE REORDER (Launcher) checked again after the last (Thursday) patch!

[Entity]

Hmm Unfortunately I have to use wireless to connect no way around that. The patch a while back that fixed the group gate issue seemed to help with gating solo as well and things ran reasonably well. Now with this latest patch things are worse than ever, Gating takes a very long time and about 1 in 4 gates results in the galaxy map freeze. Also if i sit too long without moving or talking the server seems to ignore me. By that I can see conversations in chat but thats it, nobody in the stations or outside, cant gate or move and mobs appear frozen. When I log out and return I find myself on the other side of the sector or incapacitated in some random location. Unfortunately my setup dosent have the option to go into advanced settings to change the tcp/udp options. Ive tried turning packer reorder on and off and dosent seem to make any difference. With the patches it seems in my case to be one step forward then one step back.

[Copenhagen]

Hmm Unfortunately I have to use wireless to connect no way around that. The patch a while back that fixed the group gate issue seemed to help with gating solo as well and things ran reasonably well. Now with this latest patch things are worse than ever, Gating takes a very long time and about 1 in 4 gates results in the galaxy map freeze. Also if i sit too long without moving or talking the server seems to ignore me. By that I can see conversations in chat but thats it, nobody in the stations or outside, cant gate or move and mobs appear frozen. When I log out and return I find myself on the other side of the sector or incapacitated in some random location. Unfortunately my setup dosent have the option to go into advanced settings to change the tcp/udp options. Ive tried turning packer reorder on and off and dosent seem to make any difference. With the patches it seems in my case to be one step forward then one step back.

 

Same with me

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Hi!

 

We just applied a patch to the play-server, trying to help/fix the gate-CTD issue.

 

Since i cannot reproduce it (never had problems here, i know i sounds mean...sorry), the fix/code is a bit "coding into the blue", changing things that maybe could cause such behaviour.

Let's hope...see...wish...dream...phantasize... 

 

[duvel]

tested group ( on same computer) without prototype reorder and packet optimization on a XP machine

 

works great again ( I stopped after 15 gates without an issue)

 

nice screenshot included ( 6 boxes 99% viewable)

 

 

[Copenhagen]

It's working great now.  Been gating happily all weekend.

 

Thanks for busting your rear ends on this!!

 

What did it end up being?

 

Cope

[jmes35]

I would like to come back to the game :)  but i logged on tonight and see that i still cant gate or dock!!!!

 

the game used to run really smooth for me i could run 3 toons on gobb and never ctd

 

 

isp is verizon 4g

 

 

 

guess my phone is my router

 

 

windows 7 is my os

 

 

like i said i used to have almost no issues!!!    hope to see everyone in game soon

[jmes35]

ok i uninstalled and reinstalled game still have same proplem

[lukesky]

Hello Zackman and all ,

 

just updated and tried the enb-emu again after doing other stuff for like 5/6 months. I tried this process of gating several times last week and this week an i see no real difference in the problems i encounter.

With my main account logged in only i rarely seem to be able to gate (1 in 8/10 gating attempts succeed), i hardly ever had problems with this issue b4 even when using multiple accounts. Since my PC setup / network setup hasn't changed in the last year i'm dumbfounded at what is really causing this problem.

I followed all threads here and tried all options suggested (IPV6 OFF (my default), proposed network card registers, prototype reorder On or OFF = no difference) but the problem is persistent.

 

I decided to sniff the packages with wireshark but can't see where it exactly goes wrong. My internet suite (norton) has firewall & anti-virus & intrusion detection completely disabled for this test.

I share my network (router with NAT, fixed cabling CAT5E) with a couple of other PC's and a network printer, my internal Ip address is 192.168.24.104 .

I have included a snapshot of my filtered packages; i can provide a wireshark .pcapng file if needed since it will provide the actual content of the packages. I just included the snapshot to give an idea of the load of packages in the mentioned timeframe; 3 minutes after attempting to gate i stopped capture. After that i killed the processes.

 

[attachment=2687:Capture-enb1.PNG]

 

Commentary on the provided snapshot:

I started warping to Akeron's Gate in Pluto & Charon system, as far as i could see packet 113 is where the target is reached and packet 159 is produced when i push the gate button.

Netproxy is displaying "stage 1 completed" and it stays that way during those 3 minutes.

 

I appreciate any input that may shed light on the problem i'm facing here.

 

Kind regards,

LukeSky.

[Zackman [LDEV]]

The packet on port 54110 (wsmlb proto) doesnt belong there....is there any security scan or remote access to your PC ongoing?

This packet is def. not ours....