Clients get disconnected And need to change username before they can reconnect

[Andraax]

I got an error and a disconnect. The error was not being able to load "CORERPG_exclude.xml" - sounds like a file from an extension? I don't have the Savage Worlds ruleset to check if it's part of that distro...

[DWeiers]

okay. we didn't have that particular error yet.. If you try a new connect, does it work then?

[DWeiers]

In the campaign chat you said, that the subsquent connections seemed fine. Thats what we observed as well. Did there any further download happe on these connections?

[Moon Wizard]

Does the error they are seeing look something like this?

Ruleset: CoreRPG
Error: Unable to load ruleset file (base.xml)
Do you want to try reloading the data?

Thanks,
JPG

[Moon Wizard]

It's an unusual situation. It looks like the files requested in the client download are not getting saved to the cache file for some reason.

This causes a cascade issue: ruleset fails to load due to missing files, which in turn ends the application abruptly (some really old code, no network notification). And, since we use TCP, when there is no graceful shutdown (i.e. network notification), then the connection stays open for several minutes. This second part is normally not an issue; because if you successfully connected and downloaded files (which is the usual case), then you never see the second issue.

At this point, I am still investigating the first (because it's not obvious why the save is failing), and the second requires the client to be updated to exit gracefully in this scenario.

Regards,
JPG

[Moon Wizard]

Ok, it looks like something is shutting down the HTTP requests coming into your network or machine, before the FG host gets the requests. It appears to be random as to which requests are affected, though the the first file requested is usually affected (but not always) and early files are more likely to be affected (but again not always). FG runs as a hybrid HTTP/game server, so there is one connection for the communication between each host and client, and another connection for each file requested.

I'm going to guess that you have some sort of throttling or QoS features turned on for your router or your machine, which is causing the connections to be dropped automatically once they trigger some threshold.

In the mean time, I'm going to be working on a patch version that will better handle unexpected socket closures before data is received. We don't have plans to release a patch version before the end of the year, but I will likely make it available as a beta (Test update mode) during the next week or so. You can watch the Laboratory forum for more information on beta testing.

Regards,
JPG

[Bidmaron]

Man, MW that was some great detective work!

[DWeiers]

Wow, Moon Wizard!

That’s amazing. Thank so much for your help.

There certainly is some kind of QoS enabled somewhere since almost any digital information runs through this connection (phone, internet, TV and so on). As I wrote before I‘m using a somewhat special internet connection. It‘s a combination of DSL(via cable) and LTE (via mobile network). I don’t know exactly how it works technically though. It’s all done by my ISP and the router they gave me. But since it’s the only possibility for me to get a connection with acceptable speed I‘m stuck with it.

I never had any real issues with it though. Although it could very well be that there actually were some issues that just got covered by the software somehow so that I didn’t realize they existed.

So far we will just work around the problem. There are not that many ruleset updates and having to connect again every now and then absolutely is no dealbreaker.

I‘ll just wait for the next update. Maybe it‘ll solve the problem.

Again many many thanks to you all for the help.

Best wishes
Daniel