Want to come back, but a small issue

[Reyouka]

Soo some of you may remember me from Terra, maybe not. But I've been trying to play on Titan, and having constant desync issues while playing. I've tried basically everything I can think of, but it still has sync issues. Anyone maybe have some insight into this?

I've tried portforwarding, firewall rules, uninstalling and reinstalling the game, nothing works. I've checked the route with ping, tracert, and winMTR, everything comes up clean.

Ingame, I maybe have 5 to 10 minutes of playtime before the game desyncs. This can happen during a loading screen, sitting around, or in combat. I never had this problem on Terra either, so I have no clue what's going on.

[hatmankh]

I have a friend I introduced to Neocron for the first time recently who's been having this problem, its a shame really because he likes the game, the desync thing is turning him off it.

I don't have any info about his PC/connection, I think he gets 350kb/s download speed tops and he lives in the US.

Slightly off topic but I showed another friend Neocron and he doesn't get desync problems but his game crashes sometimes like all of ours though, the weird thing is he claims sometimes his entire PC gets frozen when this happens and he has to do a hard reset. Now he's scared to play because of what might happen to his PC.

I was prepared for them to have the odd fatal and sync issue like all of us do but this is something else, I know I'm not being very helpful here, I guess you'd need more info before you can do anything. That would have to come from them though, I can't tell you anything else except they're both from the US.

[Chuck Norris]

Soo some of you may remember me from Terra, maybe not. But I've been trying to play on Titan, and having constant desync issues while playing. I've tried basically everything I can think of, but it still has sync issues. Anyone maybe have some insight into this?

I've tried portforwarding, firewall rules, uninstalling and reinstalling the game, nothing works. I've checked the route with ping, tracert, and winMTR, everything comes up clean.

Ingame, I maybe have 5 to 10 minutes of playtime before the game desyncs. This can happen during a loading screen, sitting around, or in combat. I never had this problem on Terra either, so I have no clue what's going on.
Try running it compatibility mode as admin

[Ghostface_Speak]

Slightly off topic but I showed another friend Neocron and he doesn't get desync problems but his game crashes sometimes like all of ours though, the weird thing is he claims sometimes his entire PC gets frozen when this happens and he has to do a hard reset. Now he's scared to play because of what might happen to his PC.

Playing in Windowmode prevents at least the total system lockdown,please offer him this "sollution"

[Dribble Joy]

Get him to ping and/or tracert the see if he's having a problem with connectivity to the servers.

Doing a general connection test is always a good idea. 350kb/s is actually pretty shit these days, could be old systems.

[hatmankh]

I'll tell him to do that, I know his connection is slow but we used to play neocron with less than 350kb/s before without these issues he's having, so I don't think NC needs a fast connection to not desync all the time.

[hatmankh]

This is from the first friend who has the desync issues.


C:\Users\Matt>ping 85.214.39.213 -w 5000

Pinging 85.214.39.213 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=206ms TTL=103
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=208ms TTL=103
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=195ms TTL=103

Ping statistics for 85.214.39.213:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 195ms, Maximum = 208ms, Average = 203ms


C:\Users\Matt>tracert 85.214.39.213

Tracing route to h2055767.stratoserver.net [85.214.39.213]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms dslrouter.westell.com [192.168.1.1]
2 72 ms 77 ms 80 ms dr02.clbg.wv.frontiernet.net [hidden for privacy]
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 109 ms 98 ms 110 ms xe--11-2-0---0.car01.mrbg.wv.frontiernet.net [74
.42.150.149]
5 76 ms 91 ms 72 ms ae5--2--ge.cor02.asbn.va.frontiernet.net [74.40.
1.237]
6 69 ms 84 ms 101 ms ae0---0.cbr01.asbn.va.frontiernet.net [74.40.2.1
78]
7 104 ms 106 ms 104 ms ix-7-2-0-0.tcore2.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [206.82
.139.109]
8 107 ms 112 ms 98 ms 216.6.87.6
9 197 ms 206 ms 213 ms b-ea7-i.B.DE.NET.DTAG.DE [62.154.46.102]
10 203 ms 193 ms 208 ms te-0-1-0-6.core-b2.as6724.net [62.157.250.34]
11 215 ms * 203 ms vl706.core-b58.as6724.net [85.214.0.101]
12 203 ms 201 ms 205 ms h2055767.stratoserver.net [85.214.39.213]

C:\Users\Matt>ping -w 5000 85.214.39.213

Pinging 85.214.39.213 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=209ms TTL=103
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=204ms TTL=103
Request timed out.
Reply from 85.214.39.213: bytes=32 time=217ms TTL=103

Ping statistics for 85.214.39.213:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 204ms, Maximum = 217ms, Average = 210ms

I did my own ping and tracert and had 0% packet loss with average 40ms, my tracert also had 14 entries and it said trace complete at the end, I had no requests timed out. I don't know what any of this means except the ms part, anyway does this tell you what's wrong and/or what can be done on his part to fix it?

[Torg]

internet connection speed sould not be a problem. i played NC on ISDN (64 kbps) until 2003 without any problems, so any dsl connection should be fine.

[Nidhogg]

Slightly off topic but I showed another friend Neocron and he doesn't get desync problems but his game crashes sometimes like all of ours though, the weird thing is he claims sometimes his entire PC gets frozen when this happens and he has to do a hard reset. Now he's scared to play because of what might happen to his PC.

This could be a combination of a defect in Neocron and a defect in one of his drivers, since user-mode software should not have the ability to hard crash a machine these days. In the old days I'd receive a slew of "You're blaming your problems on us!" replies, but I hope you see where I'm coming from!

[nEo-1664]

"You're blaming your problems on us!"

For the ol' day Niddy :)

One thing to suggest, as R#176 now needs different dependencies, I would recommend uninstalling them, uninstalling NC, rebooting, and then re-installing them, and rebooting again, then re-install NC and try again :)

[Alduin]

I hope you see where I'm coming from!

From hell! (Sorry could not resist Nidhogg ;)

Concerning those "desync" problems: gather as much intel as possible. I am not encountering them therefore it is very hard for my to trace the source of the problem. It could very well be that it is in principle a codewise problem, but without further intel i can not tell anything about the exact cause of the problem. Interesting to know would be:

does it happen when starting NC in admin mode?
does it happen when compatibility mode is enabled?
is it a wireless connection?
are all unneccessary processes/programs in the background closed?
is the connection firewalled? Does turning the firewall off completely help?
is the connection NATed?
where are you located?
any clues inside the error.log?


as long as I can not reproduce this problem, I can not fix it, so please try to think of everything which might be of interest and tell me, so I can hunt that bugger down :)

Slauncha
Alduin

[phunqe]

Both your ping sessions have packets lost, this is usually not a good thing since it can affect networked programs if they have issues re-establishing connections and sessions. Now the ping packet loss doesn't necessarily mean that connections are dropped, but if they are I would bet on that is one of the contributing factors with synch issues.

EDIT: Try pinging other things, start with for example pages/sites that you know are close to you and then move farther away. However you should never get packet losses, even overseas unless the site you are pinging has a known crappy route/connection.
I would bugger my ISP about it no doubt.

EDIT 2: I tried pinging the closest host in your trace route 74.42.150.149 and I let it run for a while. No packet losses. Granted, this was from Sweden, but I don't think the problem is with the route to Germany. Again, I would check pings with other sites and contact the ISP.

EDIT 3: Obviously firewalls and routers can and will affect this if they have some issues. So maybe try bypassing all that you possibly can to start with and then try doing the pinging again.

[Kame]

I used to have the same de-synch issue when i came back to NC a few months ago. Couldnt play for more than 10 mins without being synched out.

I used to have a cheap dlink dir-615 router, and since i changed it my de-synch issue is gone.

[phunqe]

Yeah some of those cheap routers are crap. D-link sems to be at the forefront of crappy routers in general.

[RogerRamjet]

I just admit after the most recent patch I experience a lot more long synchs as well as desynchs.

[Dribble Joy]

And yet here I'm syncing out far less, don't zone-crash or get kicked to login when GR/zoning.

[Ivan Eres]

[..]
as long as I can not reproduce this problem, I can not fix it, so please try to think of everything which might be of interest and tell me, so I can hunt that bugger down :)

Slauncha
Alduin

Alduin, may I ask if could be possible to implement a more detailed debug log in the client to gather more of the intel that you mentioned in your post?

A memory dump of the problematic memory pages could also help "to hunt the bugger down". This way we won't have to rely on the quality of the user reports.

The gathered information could also be transferred automatically by the client to the Neocron service for evaluation by the Developer.

Since the synching issues and fatals have been around for ages these measures could maybe be a big help to hunt down the 3 or 4 main reasons for them. Eliminating them could result in getting rid off of 80% of the syncs and fatals, in the best case.

Regards & Thank you for all what you are doing. You people are the best.

[Doc Holliday]

If it helps or not i dont know BUT i have had several synch issues. All came within the woc labs. i was the ppu and in the middle of normal operations i.e healing buffing etc i synched out maybe 5 times.

im running windows 7 on WiFi. I'm currently located in Sydney Australia and have nver noticed these issues with normal operation. not even in the woc labs.

Ps i love this game.