Disconnection issues

Moderators: Uros, Tom, OXO

Stormrider
Posts: 40
Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:01 am
Contact:

Disconnection issues

Post by Stormrider » Wed Apr 22, 2020 10:57 pm

In our multiplayer games, we have someone who gets disconnected from the server pretty consistently a couple of seconds after the join time limit expires. This was someone who, when playing before the latest patch was released, showed a pattern of the Satan's Sink bug appearing. He has a valid licence, and was suffering from the well-documented bug with the sink showing up when it shouldn't.

The fact that this bug was fixed, but replaced with a new one with suspcisously consistent timing, makes us suspect that either a new bug has been created when fixing the previous one, or Condor have replaced the 'Satan's Sink' with just a forced disconnection, still invalidly.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Uros
Condor Team
Posts: 1569
Joined: Sat Apr 02, 2005 8:39 pm
Location: Slovenia
Contact:

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by Uros » Thu Apr 23, 2020 8:29 am

Did you get the "Aerotow launching procedure started." message before the host disconnected?
Uros Bergant,
Condor Team

Alexglide
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2012 3:03 pm

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by Alexglide » Thu Apr 23, 2020 11:33 am

In all cases the whole grid has been launched as normal, but reliably we have one user who disconnects a few seconds after the join time limit has expired.
2A G-DEAJ

Stormrider
Posts: 40
Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:01 am
Contact:

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by Stormrider » Thu Apr 23, 2020 12:39 pm

Yes, as Alex says - there's no problem with aerotowing, and ping times for everyone looks normal too, including this particular user who always gets disconnected. It's once everyone has launched and the join time for the server is over that the disconnection happens. It doesn't seem to matter what type of start we use either (it happened with Airborne start last time), though we haven't fully tested this to look for a pattern.

Stormrider
Posts: 40
Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:01 am
Contact:

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by Stormrider » Sun Apr 26, 2020 8:20 pm

We tried with this user hosting, and this time other pilots disconnected one by one. When someone else hosted, he disconnected just fater the join time stopped as usual. There is definitely an issue here.

User avatar
wickid
Posts: 2429
Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2006 7:32 pm
Location: Venlo, NL
Contact:

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by wickid » Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:01 pm

Sounds like his internet connection is unstable.
PH-1504, KOE

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Sat May 09, 2020 1:00 pm

We have the same problem. One particular person always disconnects just after the stopjoin expires. We can have the server open with a stopjoin of an hour and he will happily soar for that time but once the stopjoin expires he's on borrowed time and will disconnect after a few seconds.
Image

Stormrider
Posts: 40
Joined: Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:01 am
Contact:

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by Stormrider » Sat May 09, 2020 8:34 pm

wickid wrote:
Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:01 pm
Sounds like his internet connection is unstable.
Nope - ping times are fine and it always happens after the join time expires regularly

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Sat May 09, 2020 11:46 pm

Same here, I increased the max ping to 1000ms which is the max allowable. The user in question has stable pings of around 50ms with no lagging and no glitching happening.
Image

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Mon May 18, 2020 2:58 pm

This is obviously some kind of networking issue. Either the router or the firewall are blocking bits.

Lets compare some infrastructure details to see if we can find some commonality to narrow this down:

Our user:
ISP: EE
Router: EE smarthub router
Anti-Virus/Firewall: McAfee

I have pushed Condor support now several times to get some details about communication protocols (TCP/UDP) and ports (is it just the port on which you connect or are there static ports which we are not aware off).

The thing that changes after the stopjoin is that scoring starts, as in you can start to accumulate penalties (e.g. cloud flying). So my guess is that there is some separate scoring traffic which gets blocked and which in return causes the server to kick the player (but that is just a guess).
Image

janjansen
Posts: 1089
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 9:26 pm

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by janjansen » Mon May 18, 2020 3:12 pm

mumblecake wrote:
Mon May 18, 2020 2:58 pm
I have pushed Condor support now several times to get some details about communication protocols (TCP/UDP) and ports (is it just the port on which you connect or are there static ports which we are not aware off).
AFAIK, Condor uses DirectPlay for the networking layer:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previo ... 3(v=vs.85)

That is pretty much a closed box and IIRC even things like time-outs are hardcoded. As for ports, this is what google says:
Table of ports used by DirectPlay
(taken from the DirectX SDK)
The following chart shows which ports an administrator needs to open for a given desired style of play for applications using the dynamic range of DirectPlay.

Connection Client configuration Host configuration
Initial TCP Connection 47624 Outbound 47624 Inbound
Subsequent Inbound TCP Connections 2300-2400 2300-2400
Subsequent Outbound TCP Connections 2300-2400 2300-2400
Subsequent Inbound UDP Connections 2300-2400 2300-2400
Subsequent Outbound UDP Connections 2300-2400 2300-2400
Though clearly in condor the initial TCP port has been changed, I cant rule out anything else was changed.

BTW, do yourself a favor, get rid of McAfee. If you can, as its harder to uninstall than most viruses.

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Mon May 18, 2020 3:33 pm

janjansen wrote:
Mon May 18, 2020 3:12 pm
BTW, do yourself a favor, get rid of McAfee. If you can, as its harder to uninstall than most viruses.
I agree but not my call. It's not me having the issue. But all technical issues of our club seem to end up on my desk ;)
Image

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Mon May 18, 2020 3:37 pm

You sure about DirectPlay? It has been deprecated since Windows Vista and support removed. It seems odd that they should decide to recode Condor from scratch and keep such an outdated abstraction layer which could potentially get removed in future Win10 feature updates (we almost saw the death of MS paint)
Image

janjansen
Posts: 1089
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 9:26 pm

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by janjansen » Mon May 18, 2020 5:42 pm

Yes Im pretty sure. Go ahead and disable directplay, and try running condor again.
I think its also fair to say condor 2 wasnt developed from scratch, afaict close to nothing was changed to the UI, or server and Im willing to bet, networking. The graphics engine may have been done from scratch, but not the entire game. The fact its based on old code also explains why its still only a 32 bit app.

But, I also have to say despite directplay being really old and depreciated, the networking IMO works pretty darn well. Its extremely resource light and has no problem supporting 64+ clients while using next to no memory and cpu and surprisingly few network resources. Condor Dedicated server uses like 6MB. A DCS server realistically needs 32+GB and you'd be lucky to support 20 players without horrible lag.

mumblecake
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 9:45 am

Re: Disconnection issues

Post by mumblecake » Tue May 19, 2020 10:46 am

Ok, that makes sense. It also confirms that it is not that one static port which needs to let get through but a whole range which is what I suspected anyway (well, logic dictated it as only one person would be able to connect otherwise, once a port is in use, it is in use). Would be great to get an official reply what port ranges are being used by Condor so that we can try tp solve that problem. This could then lead to some kind of guide for other people that might have those difficulties.
Image

Post Reply