Random Disconnects from game server

Yeah, he was connected to me as we were trying some things out, i was trying to show him and his brother D20pro and some of its features. It seemed to me that when more data was being transmitted like die rolls thats when the disconnects would occur.

 

200 is kinda high for a ping time, do you have the same numbers to the IP you connect to and are the maps and images as large and as detailed when using maptools?

 

Hail and well met Waylorn, bigkilla,

I have seem some difficulty using d20Pro at conventions on a shaky WAN. Will confer with the The Glav to get an official answer. Perhaps the transport layer can be optimized better to support 3G-like network connectivity.

In the meantime you could see how tweaking your transport settings may improve things. In the file d20Pro/res/transport.prp try boosting the values for HeartbeatInterval and HeartbeatIntervalTimeout. That should cut the network some slack.

 

I have been getting a lot of random disconnects lately too. I have been running a game on Thursday for about a year (on a Mac, using At&T), and about the time Thursday Night Football started, we began getting disconnected much more frequently. And the game was nearly unplayable during Lebron's "The Decision," also on a Thursday. This has not been a problem in the past. I don't know if it's caused by the increased internet traffic (I'm not super technical) or not. However, yesterday, the game ran good again with only a couple of disconnects. I am also the one with the audio that drops out after an hour, don't know if they are related though. If there are any tweaks for the Mac, I would be grateful to hear them.

 

Greetings,

Well... there's not much we can do about that given how our communication layer is designed. We use stateful socket connections (for a myriad of reasons) and anything that causes the socket to break will force the client to drop the connection and reconnect. As such, it's not really designed to play well with 3G connections, which can be flaky and drop a lot (as you have noticed). I'd recommend using a true broadband connection if possible.

As to the suggestion to change your Heartbeat properties, that won't help you if you say that you can idle just fine. When "idling", the app only sends small pings back and forth. By changing the Heartbeat properties, you are just slowing that down (what you say already works) and it may actually cause the app to take longer to detect and recover from disconnected sockets.

So, for some reason, when you actually perform an action that sends real messages, your socket is getting disconnected and all we can do at that point is recover via a reconnect.

--Glav

 

Just a follow-up in case someone has a similar problem. I switched from DSL to broadband, and that fixed all our connection problems. We played last Thursday and had zero disconnects in 4 hours.