Player Character Ghosting (after player leaves game)

[trevius]

I know this report is fairly old, but player ghosting is still an issue on Windows servers according to some of the admins I speak with regularly. I don't have any solution, but I just wanted to post some code here which is probably the cause of the problem. I don't understand what is being done at all in this, but this is where the disconnect is supposed to happen that I assume isn't happening when players are ghosted. Maybe someone with more experience can check this out sometime and see if anything stands out as a possible issue.


TCPConnection.cpp

void TCPConnection::FinishDisconnect() {
	MState.lock();
	if (connection_socket != INVALID_SOCKET && connection_socket != 0) {
		if (pState == TCPS_Connected || pState == TCPS_Disconnecting || pState == TCPS_Disconnected) {
			bool sent_something = false;
			SendData(sent_something);
		}
		pState = TCPS_Closing;
		shutdown(connection_socket, 0x01);
		shutdown(connection_socket, 0x00);
#ifdef WIN32
		closesocket(connection_socket);
#else
		close(connection_socket);
#endif
		connection_socket = 0;
		rIP = 0;
		rPort = 0;
		ClearBuffers();
	}
	pState = TCPS_Disconnected;
	MState.unlock();
}

void TCPConnection::Disconnect() {
	MState.lock();
	if(pState == TCPS_Connected || pState == TCPS_Connecting) {
		pState = TCPS_Disconnecting;
	}
	MState.unlock();
}

[Angelox]

Here's some thoughts I have on this, I have a windows server, but not many players to test with.
Could it be related to when they '/q' the game or LD? a lot of players don't '/camp', they '/q'.
Also, could it be related to the client playing on the same server machine? < maybe this creates some sort of lag/missed packets that creates this problem.
One thing would be to temporarily disable the '/q' command in the code, and instead place a message like 'please camp out normally, as we are testing for a PC ghosting bug'.
You could then see if at least this problems diminishes.

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by Angelox

Could it be related to when they '/q' the game or LD? a lot of players don't '/camp', they '/q'.

these guys are strange. I would never use /q comand on a legal char - what if mob spawns right on top of me? Thats a garanteed death

[So_1337]

I do it constantly. Granted, I don't know of any mob spawns in the Nexus =P

[Angelox]

I'm thinking if you are at the same IP of your server, you won't see any ghosting - you'll need people that log in from distant IPs and suddenly drop out.
Maybe some how this remains cached in the system and the server thinks there's someone still there, or maybe the server missed some packets with the sudden drop out.
could be they get LD on zoning, then the character arrives in the next zone, but the PC is gone.
Problem is, it's seems related to other players on your server. At one time, I remember having this problem when I ran a windows server. it was when I first started out. At the time I had a Pentium 3 with little memory and was playing on the server with the client on the same machine.
I remember seeing a lot of the ghosting effect. I figured it was related to lag , and lag created by multiple players zoning and logging in (LD).
I could play alone fine, but this would start when others logged in.
Also, I don't think this happens with multiple players on Minilogin - I think its related to the Public Login server.
Anyway, those were thoughts an ideas I had at the time, Went Linux and the problem for me ended with that. I still use a windows server for testing, but it's Minilogin, and I don't see any ghosting there.
You might want to try getting some friends to try you out on a Minilogin server.
Thing is, you can't have a solution until you can find what makes the problem, these are some things I'd try out, to see if anything were different.

Make observations when you see a ghosted character;
was it static or dynamic zone? was he zoning ? did he log? (you can find the account by the ghosted character name). See if you can find a pattern somewhere.

[paaco]

Seems like on my server I find myself ghosting a lot. Playing from the same machine the server is located on. It is on a static zone and happens if I right click EQ on the taskbar and close it out like that.

All it shows in the logs is:

[09.19. - 23:52:28] Starting Log: logs/eqemu_error_zone_1300.log
[09.19. - 23:52:28] Ghosting client: Account ID:1 Name:paaco Character:Paaca IP:192.168.1.3

[trevius]

The problem happens most commonly if people /quit or /exit, or if they go LD, but I am pretty sure it even has a rare chance to happen if they /camp. On a public server when I was running Windows, I would commonly see up to 15 or more ghosted characters in nexus at any given time of the day if I didn't boot them out manually every few hours or so.

The easiest way to tell 100% if a character is a player ghost is to turn on inspect so you can inspect people "/toggleinspect on" (you can test by inspecting yourself or another player you know isn't a ghost) then try right clicking a suspected ghost player and if the inspect window doesn't pop up, they are sure to be a ghost.

Even after they log off, you will continue to get net error messages from them in the log files. I believe the error that shows up is something like this:

Tried to write a packet beyond the end of the queue!

The error starts with showing incremented packet numbers, but eventually I think it just shows the same packet number over and over and over. And that error will continue to flood server logs even after the player has logged off and I think even after you #kick the ghosted character. So, it is like a connection isn't being brought down for some reason even if there is no connection. I think I have even had a player reboot their PC and it didn't stop the errors or disconnect the ghosted character. So, to me it seems like the issue may be that the server is just hung in some sort of loop.

More info on that log error can be seen in this post:

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/sho...light=flooding