mobs teleporting / channel mistakes

[fken]

Two or three days ago a rogue cant stop teleporting itself on my position :

1) I was walking or running and suddently the rogue appeared on my position.
2) the rogue first was turning searching for target
3) I runned away because I wasnt able to fight against him
4) something like 30secondes or 1minute max after the first steps described upside happened again
(5) I finally died thanks to that bug after 4 or 5 mobs teleportation)

I spoke to a gm and I said he wasnt aware of that

Once I died the problem never happened again.


---

Today Althrough i wasnt a member of any group, I saw one line of another group into my group channel.

---
It looks like a PSserver bug but :
client : 0.3.011
OS : XP familial edition
GC : Geforce 6600 256mb (SLI desactivated)
Motherboard arch k8N amd64 s939 3200+
SC : SB live 7.1 24bits
1024mb (2x512mb dual)
RAID desactivated
SATA 200Gb / UATA 133 80Gb
->options
keeps mas loaded
1280*1024 pixels display
full screen
sound software
---

Cordially,
fken

[Neryam]

It may be lag, I get that sometimes too.  ?(

As for the line of groupchat, Apparently our guild chat was being broadcasted all over Planeshift.
May be the same thing, apparently Noxide can still hear some of it.

[fken]

it wasnt a lag :
first i had 166.7frames per secondes and then i saw the mob searching for target. if it was a lag issue the rogue would have hit me without searching for me.

[Seytra]

The message misrouting bug has been there ever since. Yesterday at one point it got extremely bad. So bad, in fact, that conversation was close to impossible, because about every second message would get misrouted, at least for some players, so that everything had to be posted at least twice to avoid the constant \"Did you get the message where I said...\" -no, I didn\'t. I have, over my time in PS, received literally all sorts of misrouted messages, starting from /says, past guildchat to loot windows, and lost all sorts of messages as well, though never close to as bad as yesterday.

[Nilrem]

While it\'s true that this problem has been around since the beginning, it\'s fair to say that, recently, it seems that it\'s happening with more frequency than before.

[fken]

I thought it has been fixed before ... isnt it ?

[Nilrem]

It\'s pretty hard to state a _complete_ fix for this, unless they change the protocol to TCP.
For this kind of application, and seeing that people complains about inet lag, clearly, they have to use UDP.
But, yes, lately this is happening more often, so something has to be wrong in the server, perhaps it gets flooded with petitions and starts failing its sends... I really don\'t know what causes it, but yes, that effect is more common than before.

[DaveG]

UDP guarantees some of the odd things that happen occasionally, like \"teleporting\" characters and message ordering problems.  But even with UDP, misdirected messages should be fixable.

[Nilrem]

Yes, that\'s why I say that it has to be some problem serverside.
An udp datagram has the reciever IP address, it\'s very rare that an error in that camp, causes another valid address, and  oh! casuality it happens that it\'s another IP address of someone that\'s playing planeshift too.
My point is that, under certain circumstances, the server doesn\'t send the packets to the correct destinataries; not that the packet is sent and due to error in transmition the packet ends arriving to the wrong person. The problem is at the origin, where the packet is built, the server doesn\'t add the correct Ip address there.
When I said _complete_ I was referring to what Seytra stated of \"Did you recieve my last message saying...\" by the use of UDP there\'s always the risk of either lost/corrupted data or reliable data but with wrong order.

[Khaki]

Ok I had a eureka! moment this evening and made a hotfix to the public server which should temporarily fix the problem of missent messages/packets/whatever, e.g. mistells, random GUI windows popping open and all sorts of other unexplainable (or imaginary) oddities. So please post here if you notice any of the above from NOW onwards, then we\'ll be able to determine if the problem is what we think it is. If it isn\'t, I might be forced to believe our netcode is cursed and then tear the thing to shreds and enter random stanzas of poetry in its stead.

Thanks.

[Neryam]

Yay!!! Hurray Khaki!

So was the random teleporting to DR and random windows popping up part of all that?

[Carpe Noctem]

I don\'t know what all is happening, but I do know that the random windows, and such are still going on. About a week ago, everything was working as usual, then it all started getting laggy, with random windows, and rogues that weren\'t there all of a sudden on top of you, that were hitting you but you were \'too far away to attack\'. I know that thanks to the server problems, that my wife lost out on a dagger and sword that she was selling to another player, but when they clicked \'Accept Trade\' the tria came to her, but the weapons that she was selling to the other player just vanished. She gave the player his tria back, but now is out of the weapons. I understand and accept the version of the game and all, but there has got to be a way to fix it.
Just my thoughts.

[Seytra]

1) You need a new name. Not on the forums but ingame.

2) I have not lost a single message since this hotfix, not even in laggy times, which would usually have been almost a guarantee, so I suspect the random windows are due to packet reordering and retransmission, not due to the misrouting bug that indeed seems to be fixed.

Edit:
The performance issues seem to have been (mostly) corrected, but: In the last week or so, I have noticed that several messages, both /say and /tell, completely disappeared again. This was not the case before that since the hotfix was applied, even in times of extreme lag (messages would take several minutes to arrive, but they always did arrive eventually. This has changed: messages got both delayed quite a while while others vanished).
I have not received any erroneous message, but that may or may not have been coincidence.
Now that the major lag seems to be mostly gone, this hasn\'t happened, but it still is likely a problem that may randomly occur under heavy load at least. Maybe the hotfix was accidently removed during one of the recent server downtimes?

Another, probably related, issue is that now, even without big lag, movement packets seem to get lost. I had several incidents of players just vanishing. What happened was that they walked off but my client would still show them to be standing where they were standing before. Then eventually, a timeout occured or a movement packet arrived and the client \"teleported\" them away. This has been very annoying due to the resulting confusion.