Player Crashes with Maps and Tokens

[FunkamusPrime]

Hi everyone,

I seem to be plagued with this problem. A lot of times when I drag a token from the comat tracker and drop it onto the map, players suddenly crash or lock-up. Then when they do log back in they often do not see any tokens on the map, only red and green colored squares representing where hostile and friendly tokens should be.

Eventually, the tokens reappear... Until I drag another monster from the combat tracker, drop it on the map, and hear all my players cry out in unison as they're booted out again.

What is causing this, and how can I fix it? I'm on Windows 7 (but had this problem back with Vista too), have FG patched to the most recent version, and am using the 4E_JPG ruleset.

Thank you.

[Tenian]

It's some sort of race condition. It only happens to the clients and it's a hard crash. Not something that can be fixed by changing the ruleset.

The solution is simple. Have your players close their CT's whenever you expose them to a new token. This can be by adding it to the map or setting the CT entry to be visible.

Your players get used to it quickly since it's much better than the alternative.


When you crash out of FGII, it seems that certain items in your cache get invalidated. This causes them to be reloaded/resent from the host. In the case of the above bug, the tokens are corrupted and need to be resent from scratch...every single token...which is why it takes a long time for them all to pop back into existence.

[DNH]

I have had this issue too and we have figured out that workaround. What I don't get is why it doesn't happen to *all* my players. Only one or two get booted when it happens. And it doesn't happen all the time either.

[Zeus]

I have had this issue too and we have figured out that workaround. What I don't get is why it doesn't happen to *all* my players. Only one or two get booted when it happens. And it doesn't happen all the time either.

Quote from wikipedia:

"A race condition is described as a flaw in an electronic system or process whereby the output and/or result of the process is unexpectedly and critically dependent on the sequence or timing of other events. "

So, in this case, it explains why only some clients would be affected, its a matter of timing and the sequence of inter-communication/events between the host and clients. As Tenian states it could be down to a flaw in the logic of FGII itself and not necessarily the ruleset, although the ruleset could theoretically still be a root cause particulalry as not all aspects of FGII's inner workings are well documented.

But Tenian's workaround is proven and does work. Since I started asking my players to close their CT's we havn't had one occurence of clients disconnecting.

[Najmir]

We too had a similar problem last night, we did not notice it when initially adding the tokens but we noticed that the players were dropping when the Initiative passed the NPC tokens that I had dropped on the map.

FGII 2.6.4 - 4e_JPG
Host - Win7
Players- 2x WinXP, 1xVista
All players running 2xCharacters.

Conditions of Error:
1. Had loaded a ridiculously large map and shared with users. (My error it delayed the game massively.)
2. Had Fog with small area unmasked.
3. Dropped NPC tokens onto Map and switched to turn based mode. Rolled init and started with two PC's taking turns.
4. As soon as the init passed to an NPC in the fog all players dropped.
5. Players reconnected, shared map answered natures call in the mean time then continued with NPC initiative.
6. The NPCs took no actions so I just click through each for hte first group of NPCs init until we reach a PC.
7. The PC finshed their turn and init moved to next NPC group, all players dropped.
8. Players reconnected, reshared, next PC's took their turns.
9. Init returned to top and the two PC's took their turn. When the init got to the first group of NPCs, palyers dropped except for one. Who i suspect may not have reopened CT yet.
10. Called it a night and realised the map issue.
11. We had discussed the fact that the drops were when the NPCs turns started. However just assumed that this could not be the error because we have played with the same NPCs and tokens over the past 3 weeks.

12. The only difference between this game and our previous games were:
Large Map
Fog - We had used fog in previous games but the fog was always cleared before droping the tokens. this time I dropped them in before being ready to clear the fog.

13. We will be testing some more tonight and will post our findings in case it can be of any help. If not you have just lost a minute or two reading this

[FunkamusPrime]

And it may be worth noting that I am still having this issue. Even when all players have their Combat Trackers closed, we still encounter drops when I mess with a map.

Very, very frustrating.