Players keep disconnecting

[VenomousFiligree]

I'm on a Three Mifi 3G mobile broadband. I've played numerous games on FG and Roll20 with this setup.

Today, however players keep disconnecting. It happens on both my laptop and my desktop, so it looks like it's the MiFi.

Not sure why it should suddenly behave like this?

[VenomousFiligree]

'Angelalex242' reconnected
'Weblya' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Michael' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Daenight' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Weblya' reconnected
'Michael' reconnected
'Daenight' reconnected
'Angelalex242' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
Michael (Faustus): well
Michael (Faustus): we'll see
'Michael' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Weblya' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Michael' reconnected
'Daenight' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Weblya' reconnected
'Michael' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Michael' reconnected
'Weblya' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Weblya' reconnected
Michael (Faustus): perhaps it'll calm down
'Daenight' reconnected
'Angelalex242' disconnected
'Musetrigger' connected
Michael (Faustus): .
'Michael' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Daenight' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Weblya' connection lost. Waiting for reconnect
'Daenight' reconnected
'Michael' reconnected
'Weblya' reconnected

[Trenloe]

Is your WAN IP address changing while you are playing? It is common for mobile broadband to change your IP address presented to the Internet on a much more regular basis than a DSL/Cable internet connection.

Do you use any VPN solution to present the same IP address to the "outside world"?

[VenomousFiligree]

Is your WAN IP address changing while you are playing?
How would I check this?


Do you use any VPN solution to present the same IP address to the "outside world"?
No

[VenomousFiligree]

Just tried connecting as a player, no issues, successful loaded a 17 Meg map with constant chat with only about a .5 second delay

[HoloGnome]

In the game I have been hosting, the remote client has crashed multiple times while loading and/or scaling images, resulting in a disconnect. VF - are they disconnecting, or are their clients possibly crashing resulting in a disconnect - maybe there is a bug (at least from what I am seeing) that causes the app to exit to shell/stop working.

[Trenloe]

Just tried connecting as a player, no issues, successful loaded a 17 Meg map with constant chat with only about a .5 second delay
When you are a player you are a client connecting to the GM so changes in IP address etc. don't really come into play.

As all of the clients (assuming you have 3 players connected?) disconnect and then reconnect it is not related to a player crashing or anything like that.

"I'm on a Three Mifi 3G mobile braodband. I've played numerous games on FG and Roll20 with this setup." When you say "I've played numerous game..." were you a player or a GM?

When I was in the UK earlier this year I used a 4G EE MiFi connection for playing and GMing. For GMing I had to use a VPN provider to keep connectivity and remove the need for port forwarding. Info on this here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?20160-Using-a-VPN-Service-Provider-to-get-around-port-forwarding-issues

You should be able to use the MiFi adapter status web page/application that comes with it to see your Internet IP address and check if it is changing. Although I would expect that the IP address changing would completely boot your players out...

One thing you could do is setup a persistent ping to a website such as google.com. Start a command line prompt (press the Windows Key + R and type cmd in the "Run" box) then type the following in the window:


ping -t www.google.com

This will "ping" a small packet of blank information to google every second or so. When your players disconnect look at this window and see if the Replies are still coming through, if they are not or even if only a couple of pings don't reply, then it is showing that your MiFi connection to the internet is losing connectivity every once in a while.

In the end, 3G connections (even 4G connections) are not designed to be run as a server and this will happen occasionally even under the best conditions. Playing should be fine, but GMing relies on a persistent connection.

[VenomousFiligree]

I don't think they're crashing, as can be seen from the chat log excerpt above. It just seems to be continual disconnects.

[VenomousFiligree]

As all of the clients (assuming you have 3 players connected?) disconnect and then reconnect it is not related to a player crashing or anything like that.
A total of 5 players. Started off with two, ramping up to 5 over an hour.


When you say "I've played numerous game..." were you a player or a GM?
Fantasy Grounds GM, three times previous to this on MiFi, about 5 as a player.
Roll20 GM on G+ Hangouts, too many to remember (MiFi)


When I was in the UK earlier this year I used a 4G EE MiFi connection for playing and GMing. For GMing I had to use a VPN provider to keep connectivity and remove the need for port forwarding. Info on this here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums...warding-issues
Thanks, I'll look into it. For info, MiFi port forwards fine. Oh, and no 4G EE in my area at the moment :(

Thanks for the help

[HoloGnome]

When the remote client crashes, the GM chat window just shows that the player disconnected and doesn't say why.

[Trenloe]

A total of 5 players. Started off with two, ramping up to 5 over an hour.
Did the disconnections occur when:

A new player was connecting for the first time?
You were sharing a map/image?

Both of the above will take bandwidth away from the connection and could cause the connected players to lose connection during the data transfer.

Ways to reduce the upload bandwidth are:

Get players to join the game one at a time - the initial campaign/ruleset download will take bandwidth and connected players might still lose connection, but should reconnect once the logging in player has fully connected.
Reduce the size of any image files as much as possible to minimise the bandwidth used when sharing images for the first time. Something around 500KB or lower is a good size to aim for.
If you're using a voice application that is not server based, e.g. Skype, have one of the players setup the group call. If the GM starts the group call then all of the voice bandwidth comes from the GM to all of the other connected users.


Also, run that "ping" process I mention above - this uses minimum bandwidth (32 bytes every second) and might give you an idea when the connection is getting slow or dropping communications.

[HoloGnome]

@Moon Wizard: Do you have an identified cause of the remote client crashing on image sharing/scaling and is there a fix in the works? Thx.

[Moon Wizard]

I have not heard of that being reported, other than your reports in this thread. (or I missed them in other threads.) Given that, I have no way to reproduce the issue.

Is this for a specific image file? Or images above a certain size? Or images of a specific format?

Regards,
JPG

[HoloGnome]

MW: It seemed to be tied to the main map we were using. Format was .png. I will try to gather more data and try other things (no extensions, etc.).