Problems with connecting after zoning

[jbb]

After setting up my server I've found that about 50% or more of the time that I zone the client hangs up. Now I know that 5.5 isn't supported in any way so I'm not asking for support.

What I want to know is :
Is this a known problem that happens on all servers?
Is anyone working on fixing this?
Is there anything I can do to help as I'd like this problem fixed

If this is just a problem with my setup, or it's being fixed already then I don't want to waste my time looking at it, which is why I'm asking about it here - but what can I do to help fix it? I can look at it all myself which will be slow going having to understand how it's supposed to work before figuring out what's going wrong (this is what I'll do if I hear nothing back...) - or I'll offer to help anyone who is working on it by capturing data, looking at code, running test code or anything else that might help.

Or I'll just wait for it to be fixed if that is the best thing

Maybe this should have been posted in development forum.

[RexChaos]

I have the same problems. Random crashes while zoning. I imagine it's problems with code and I'm sure they're working on it or have already fixed it.

[nilar]

Originally Posted by Rexchaos

I imagine it's problems with code and I'm sure they're working on it or have already fixed it.

Heh nope no fix. With the latest RC1 binaries my client still hangs

[jbb]

Ok I decided to take a proper look at this.

My thinking is that there are three main posibilities for what is wrong:

1) The contents, sequence or timing of the packets sent during logon is sometimes wrong.
2) Something is being corrupted while sending or receiving data (maybe some bug at the data queuing level)
3) The protocol implemented is not quite what the client expects. It's close as it often works but maybe it's not quite right.

Number 1) seems the most likely to me or at least the easiest starting point so I've modified my server to dump with timestamps all of the packets being sent and received by both the world and zone servers. I know it already can do some of this but I wanted it in a form I could analyse more easily... My plan is to then to capture a sucessful and a broken zone in and then look for differences in the data, or it's sequence or the timing.. That will be a farily painful process though.... One theory I have is that this involves both the world and zone servers which run as different processes so maybe this is a timing related problem between the two of some kind?

Anyway, I'll analyse the data I've got and see if I can figure it out. If that doesn't work I'll look at my options 2) and 3)


Any suggestions from delevelopers would be welcomed, particularly any information on how the login is supposed to work and what the zone and world servers do in what order?

[RexChaos]

Originally Posted by nilar

Heh nope no fix. With the latest RC1 binaries my client still hangs

Ah but they are on RC2 now. Hehe...I don't care what you say. I'm hoping for a fix and you can't take away my hope. Haha!

[smogo]

sry if i missed something, but i can read here or there about RC1 and RC2 ... What's that ?

[RexChaos]

DR1, DR2, DR3 = Developers Release 1, 2, or 3

RC1, RC2, RC3 = Release Candidate 1, 2, or 3

DR binaries are generally buggy and not very stable. Hence why they are developer binaries. Used for testing and code tweaking. RC binaries are binaries that are close to be stable enough for a general release. The official EQEMu test server is currently running RC2 as far as I know.

[smogo]

k, thanks Rex, but that's not the kind of info i want. :lol: i knew that

just want to know if we can get them, or where, and why ppl discuss this while it's not CVS'ed, or, why it's not CVS'ed.

Well, no code release for a month... Makes trying to help on code kind of a waste of time. :/

[RexChaos]

Ahhhh....I see. Yeah...players tend to not want to come back to a server that crashes all the time and so it's difficult to set something up to try out if it doesn't work. I'm hoping that all this "quiet time" means that something is coming out soon. It's been a couple weeks since Shawn wrote (pardon the paraphrasing) "we should have a release candidate in a few days".