I think something is badly broken in 2.00

So I've been seeing this really strange problem that others also see.

Here's what I observe:

On the client side, you miss a critical replication of some kind, after-which you usually cant see your ammo fire.

Next, your weapons start to disappear, and are sometimes replaced with the raw RPG weapon.

Next, you cant see players join and sometimes cant see them walking around.

Next, you cant see monsters.

I believe this was introduced with 2.00. Fro doesn't see it, but I do. (Fro's a WM, I'm an AM)

Sparky also sees the behavior.

The problem is there's a lot of new variables, but somehow I think it's something in my RPG that's busting stuff.

The other changes were: new co-location facility, new server, new server OS, new firewall software on the server.

However, I really think it's something that changed between 1.9x and 2.00. My current instincts point to poison or the Monster Master abilities. I may disable them and play for a while to see if this happens.

If anyone has any ideas, please share them.

Dru

FWIW, I'm WM and I have not seen it. I'm afraid I can't offer much more than that.

I don't have any suggestions on this, but I can tell you that I have experienced this a few times as a WM in that exact order, bullets, then weapons, then monsters disappearing.

Dru, Sparky, and Pyra, but not Moof or Fro.

Abilities concurrent between the 3 affected:
Code:

 Dru(LA)			Sparky USA			Pyramid
 Resupply	3		Resupply	2		Resupply	4
 Ghost		3		Ghost		3		Ghost		3
 Denial		3		Denial		2		Denial		2
 Quickfoot	3		Quickfoot	3		Quickfoot	4
 Speed Switcher	1		Speed Switcher	1		Speed Switcher	1

The only ability on that list above NOT held by Moof or ANY of Fro's characters is Denial.

So, based on that, I'd put my money in Denial.

Shan just pointed out that she's experienced it with her medic {DC}SironaShan, and she doesn't have denial.

I am however seeing a large number of errors on my modem as well, so this may be related to line quality.

Rats. I was hoping I was on to something. Perhaps a next step would be contacting those who have posted in the DruidsRPG forum at one time or another asking about the mutator and see if they've experiences this on their own servers?

I usually have a pretty solid connection, but I've also experienced the rare period of Time Warner/Bright House/whoever they are now completely freaking out (like the other day where I was getting 50% packet loss pinging a machine on our campus - and we have a dedicated 100 MB connection between USF and RR).

Considering that I've only experienced "something" once, and it cleared up after a death, I'd point at line burps. Fro: I've seen you drop off and come back on quite a bit some days - aren't you having connectivity issues? Not that you can reply here - this is a Developer's only forum.

It'd be interesting to get some information regarding Sparky's connection and experience "rate".

I hate to even suggest this, as I know it will cause pain, but I don't recall *anyone* encountering this kind of behavior when 200 was on the old server.

I'm not sure where Poison would cause this problem. The "math issue" strictly results in ... erroneous ... values for one part of the equation. I don't recall any additional replication being required for it ...

Monster Master *might* be the culprit since we're talking about something that requires a bit of additional replication when compared to other classes. However, I'd also expect that only M/MMs would be impacted by the bugs. The one time I got it, I was my WM.

I don't so much know if it could be something specific in 200 - the issue is hard to replicate. You'd think that if it was something in 200, we might be able to somewhat regularly replicate the problem ...

But then we might just be talking about replication being the problem (ha, ha) and from what I understand there can be a fair amount of voodoo involved in replication ...

I'm actually seeing a non-trivial amount of errors on my modem that I'm trying to diagnose.

It's not related to my connection. I just had it happen, but no connection errors. Also, it didn't happen to Shan at the same time.

Therefore, we know a couple of things I think...

1) We both come from the same IP, so it's not the firewall on the server.
2) I'd be surprised if it was the firewall on our side, as we both route though it.

I think it's somebody's skin.

Either that or maybe so many skins it runs ut2004 out of memory.

I'm also wondering if perhaps we've just got too many things marked as replication reliable. Maybe if more less important things were marked as unreliable.... hrm...

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

I'm also wondering if perhaps we've just got too many things marked as replication reliable. Maybe if more less important things were marked as unreliable.... hrm...

According to the wiki, variables are always reliable.

Only functions can be declared unreliable.

Once my brain is ready to dig through the code and examine what functions run "regularly" that could safely be marked as "unreliable", I'll do so.

However, replication still seems a bit like voodoo to me.

Well I have an idea.

The way I exacerbate the problem is I turn my netspeed up to a larger setting, therefore the server starts sending me more data than usual.

If Shan and I do this at the same time, we get a lot of data. Not more than our 1.5m dsl should be able to handle though.

It turns out, that while my modem is trained at 1.5m down that I'm only getting about 100kbps down, and I've seen it get as low as 7kbps (That's sweeeeet) for short durations.

Based on that, I wouldn't

Needless to say, the local telco company is sending out a tec.

So I currently believe that we actually dont have something broken, and when this happens to people that their line is flaking out. We'll know for sure in not too long.