Good evidence of broken netcode
Myx
Russia Join Date: 2013-12-20 Member: 190356Members
Russia Join Date: 2013-12-20 Member: 190356Members
Hi. I already created topics about that, but let me do it again, since my problem still doesn't solved.
Trust me, problem not on my side, I have good ethernet internet connection, 100mbit/s, white IP, no Wi-Fi and other stuff, direct cable. I have not played NS2 for six months, but played many other online games, and didn't had ANY issues.
Ok, this is an introduction. Now briefly on the case. Just look at this video:
Despite smooth gameplay, I didn't get all meta-information of game, such as kill feed, chat, damage numbers etc. Also i couldn't evolve and from my past exprience, i couldn't buy any stuff from armory etc. Look my previous topics and video.
But here is sweet moment. Switch video to 3:45. ALL meta-info just poped out at one moment. How it possible that game sends me all info about positions of players and whole gameplay without problem, but some other info just stuck? And then released at one moment.
Here is log.txt with net_log 53 command: https://yadi.sk/i/ZFte2tdc3GHTEX (just click download on right side of page)
The "pop out" moment somewhere about [610] line.
PS: but yea, i know what you will tell me: record it on a clean server without mods and give us result.
But I can't! Because 90% of servers have mods, especially servers that not empty 100% of time. Not to mention the fact that this problem is difficult to catch.
Trust me, problem not on my side, I have good ethernet internet connection, 100mbit/s, white IP, no Wi-Fi and other stuff, direct cable. I have not played NS2 for six months, but played many other online games, and didn't had ANY issues.
Ok, this is an introduction. Now briefly on the case. Just look at this video:
Despite smooth gameplay, I didn't get all meta-information of game, such as kill feed, chat, damage numbers etc. Also i couldn't evolve and from my past exprience, i couldn't buy any stuff from armory etc. Look my previous topics and video.
But here is sweet moment. Switch video to 3:45. ALL meta-info just poped out at one moment. How it possible that game sends me all info about positions of players and whole gameplay without problem, but some other info just stuck? And then released at one moment.
Here is log.txt with net_log 53 command: https://yadi.sk/i/ZFte2tdc3GHTEX (just click download on right side of page)
The "pop out" moment somewhere about [610] line.
PS: but yea, i know what you will tell me: record it on a clean server without mods and give us result.
But I can't! Because 90% of servers have mods, especially servers that not empty 100% of time. Not to mention the fact that this problem is difficult to catch.
Comments
You really can't blame the devs for 3rd party bugs.
thanks for the detailed report. I noticed the exact same issue about a month ago while trying to play via a connection with alot (500+/sec) packet CRC failures (ISP's local node malfunction).
Somehow the server keeps sending the same reliable packet again and again never receiving the acknowledge message for giving packet from the client. That stops the server from sending any further reliable packets until a certain timelimit is reached and the server discards the complete message queue for given client and restarts from 0 (which takes up to 5-10 minutes).
While that happens most of the required game data (using reliable packets) is stuck and doesn't update. It is even worse if this happens shortly after connect causing you to end with a black screen in the Ready Room.
I was able to reproduce this issue using Wireshark but wasn't able to locate the source of the issue. But if I have some free time I will have another look.
Meanwhile try to see if this happens on all servers or just specific ones and avoid those. Also using tools like pingplotter may help to track down where in your route the problemetic hop causing the constant packet drops is. Because yes this is certaily an engine bug handling the situation wrongly but it gets triggered by a really unstable connection with constant packet drops. Which will most likely cause you troubles with other applications in the future and should be resolved.
Based on my past experiences with a certain server, I noticed that problem occurs only when route goes through specific hops, which based in Europe. Every time tracert showed me that route is almost same with the exception of few last hops. And when I had problems ingame, every time this last hops was same. And, accordingly, when there were no problems - hops were different. But it experience only from 1 server, which I tested. And I have this issues on many servers with totally different routes.
Also, I have some tests with pingtest.net and got this results:
It shows that I have 0% packet lost with at least some EU servers. So i guess packet losses not on my ISP side, problem in routing?
http://pingplotter.com/products/free.html points to PingPlotter's Free version, but I recommend the featureset of their Standard version, which costs money and does a better job about letting you see into the recent past.
In the context of one's network (not just near your game client, but beyond) being such an important ingredient to your pasttime's success, there's a lot of value in taking the time to properly measure it and knowing exactly what's causing degradation in your user experience. Beware tooling which reports on the health of your network regarding a moment other than that at which your gaming experience suffered -- this stuff can, in certain scenarios, change from second to second. It's best to have tooling that's measuring your network /while/ you're playing, and automatically -- not tooling that requires you to /manually/ measure something /after/ your moment of degradation has passed.
It doesn't seem anyone was able to find the real cause of the problem, but people just know that it happens when there are packet loss and the transfer rate is barely enough at the time for more than 0.5 seconds (the game server accepts between 5000, 15000 and 25000 bytes per second)