Weird connection issue

[kitching]

We have been playing with fgii for a while, but today was the first time I was trying to host the game.

I have port-forwarding on (and passed the connection test), and everyone else has connected to other peoples servers successfully.

But, when each person tries to connect to my server, they say that they are connecting, and get to a character selection screen, however, they all crashed immediately when they clicked create new character.

After "connecting" successfully once, each player is not able to connect to the server again (it comes up with the could not connect to host message). We have all updated to the newest version of fgii.

The campaign is a brand new empty campaign with no modules. I've tried rebooting my machine, but they are still not able to connect.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Griogre]

Make sure you really all *do* have the same version. If some are in one of the test modes and others are in release then you might get this problem and everyone would be "up to date" - just for different versions. :p From you description it sounds like, if you do have a version mismatch, the server is different from all the clients.

If it is not a version problem, it could be a ruleset problem where the "Create new character" is broken. What ruleset are you using?

[kitching]

Thanks for the reply. We tested with client and host using 2.7.5. I'll try again with everyone using 2.7.4 later on Monday. I'm using the 4e ruleset. I'll try using a different ruleset also.


So a slight update from testing... if I uninstall, and reinstall fgii, we seem to reset the problem. What I mean by this is that the client can connect successfully once. During testing, we even had two of the clients successfully 'create a new character'. A character would appear on the dm client in the top left corner. However, both times, the player would be disconnected within about 20 seconds, and would then be unable to re-connect until I reinstalled fgii.

[Griogre]

How long are you taking to see if the players can re-connect? It can take a minute or two (literally) for the server to realize the player is gone and allow the player to reconnect. If the player tries to reconnect before his connection times out the server won't allow it.

What extensions are you running? To narrow down software problems I would suggest you start a new 4E campaign with a different name from any prior campaigns with no extensions and no modules open. Have you players connect. Tell them not to open any modules. Then have them create a new character and just enter the character's names and wait and see if they get booted with nothing open.

If they don't get booted then it probably is something like a bad character in a library module or something is wrong in an extension.

Another question is if you create 2 characters on the server (just do a barebones character with just the name) can they select them and not get booted?

[kitching]

Thanks again for the response.

Probably the longest time we've tried is an hour after being disconnected.

So we also tried a number of different things.

I tried removing everything related to fgii (including from the registry) on my hard drive uninstalling and then reinstalling. After reinstalling, I created a new empty module. Same problem as before.

Our one minor breakthrough was when everyone upgraded to 2.7.5, and two people connected successfully and were able to create characters and play around with the characters a bit (roll dice, chat). However, after about 2 or 3 minutes, they both dropped (at different times), and were not able to reconnect, getting the same "could not connect to host" error.

The guys tried pinging me with a round trip ping averaging 155 ms.

Windows 7, quad core with plenty of memory. Internet connection is dsl. Nothing else running but skype (although we use skype successfully with fgii every week when others are hosting, and it's kind of required for our gaming).

[Griogre]

Another though, make sure you router is not set to open 1802 on trigger. Open the port.

Also are your guys using an alias to connect with? Try using the external IP address. Apparently the alias' are not unique and the last guy to start a game gets the alias if multiple hosts with the same alias are running.