Terrene Session Log

Tell us how you are using our gaming tools and how your sessions are going.

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DrAwkward
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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:I doubt MT can do anything about that. That delay is probably all thanks to your ISP.
Perhaps, though I've not had similar issues with other internet apps. Perhaps none of the rest do much uploading.
Phergus wrote:Are you shutting down MT and restarting it when that happens or just trying to carry on?
Just carrying on this time. Went as far as rebooting last time. Don't recall if it made a difference. If its relevant, it seems the players connected in turns. It was like it it took 10 minutes *per player*, but they could only connect one at a time.
Phergus wrote:Once you know about the IP change the session is already lost.
I find that hard to swallow. Dynamic IPs are common enough that this sort of stuff must have aleady been figured out.

1. The server starts timing out the session with the clients. It goes -- "what? oh, my IP changed."
2. The server sends a message to the clients. "I'm over here now" and relaxes the session timeout.
3. The clients see the change, and relax thier own session timeout. They start sending to the new IP.

Likewise, if the client's IP changes it can send a "I'm over here now" message to the server.

I'd actually be rather suprised if this wasn't already built in to MapTool. I'm thinking that it just might be my ISP getting in between all the handshaking.
Phergus wrote:As the customer paying for the service I would think you letting your ISP know just how unacceptable this resetting of your IP address is to you would also be a good step to take.
Well, yeah. I'll be sure to mention that while I'm asking (again) why my bandwidth is a third of what its supposed to be.
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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by Phergus »

DrAwkward wrote:
Phergus wrote:I doubt MT can do anything about that. That delay is probably all thanks to your ISP.
Perhaps, though I've not had similar issues with other internet apps.
How many other server apps are you running? They would be the only apps that provide an even remotely valid comparison.
DrAwkward wrote:
Phergus wrote:Are you shutting down MT and restarting it when that happens or just trying to carry on?
Just carrying on this time. Went as far as rebooting last time. Don't recall if it made a difference. If its relevant, it seems the players connected in turns. It was like it it took 10 minutes *per player*, but they could only connect one at a time.
To me that says that either MT has become unstable or perhaps some piece of the Java networking layer has become unstable as a result of the address change. Why an external IP address change would have that big of an effect on MT I have no idea.
DrAwkward wrote:
Phergus wrote:Once you know about the IP change the session is already lost.
I find that hard to swallow. Dynamic IPs are common enough that this sort of stuff must have aleady been figured out.
Not really. Dynamic IP addresses are used in situations where the PCs aren't expected to be running servers and in your ISPs case I suspect that they have intentionally made the lease time so short so as to make it a difficult to run a server.
DrAwkward wrote:1. The server starts timing out the session with the clients. It goes -- "what? oh, my IP changed."
2. The server sends a message to the clients. "I'm over here now" and relaxes the session timeout.
Nnnnnt. Game over. The server can't send a message to the clients. That would require an outside computer (your server) to initiate contact with their computers through their firewalls and routers from an IP address they haven't been talking to. Not gonna happen in most cases.

What MT could do in this case is update the info at RPTools and the clients would pull the updated server IP from there once they noticed the original one wasn't valid any longer.
DrAwkward wrote:I'd actually be rather suprised if this wasn't already built in to MapTool.
This day must have just been full of surprises then. :o

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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:How many other server apps are you running?
Good point. I think Neverwinter may be a server app if you host multiplayer.
Phergus wrote:Dynamic IP addresses are used in situations where the PCs aren't expected to be running servers and in your ISPs case I suspect that they have intentionally made the lease time so short so as to make it a difficult to run a server.
I'll add that to the list of things I bug them about. Does Maptool recognise DNS names, or only IP addresses? There's a site called no-ip.com that gives you a DNS and automatically keeps it pointing to your dynamic IP. If I could tell my players "connect to something.foo.com port 9090" then this might take care of it.
Phergus wrote:What MT could do in this case is update the info at RPTools and the clients would pull the updated server IP from there once they noticed the original one wasn't valid any longer.
Yeah, cooler if MapTool did it and I wouldn't have to use third-party IP tracking stuff.

Let me fix this...
DrAwkward wrote:I'd actually be rather suprised if this wasn't already built in to Java to be used transparently by MapTool.
... is what I meant. Been a while since I've coded (can ya tell?:oops:) and I'd had thought all the nitty-gritty networking stuff would have already evolved to a point where it wasn't a big pain in the butt anymore.
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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by Phergus »

DrAwkward wrote:Does Maptool recognise DNS names, or only IP addresses? There's a site called no-ip.com that gives you a DNS and automatically keeps it pointing to your dynamic IP. If I could tell my players "connect to something.foo.com port 9090" then this might take care of it.
MT doesn't currently resolve names to addresses but it could.

The problem with using Dynamic DNS is that the clients are only going to lookup the IP address once and then it is going to be cached by the OS. When your server gets its IP address jerked out from underneath it the DynDNS server might get updated fairly quickly but the clients are going to take longer to figure out that it has changed.
DrAwkward wrote:I'd actually be rather suprised if this wasn't already built in to Java to be used transparently by MapTool. ...and I'd had thought all the nitty-gritty networking stuff would have already evolved to a point where it wasn't a big pain in the butt anymore.
What is there to fix? Your computers IP address hasn't changed. It's the IP address of a router out there on the internet.

This situation of yours is a way-out-on-the-freaking-edge, edge case. Designing in automatic handling of it into network stacks or even applications isn't going to have a lot of ROI.

While I'm sure Trevor could come up with a method to help ameliorate the situation it would have to be at the cost of some additional overhead.

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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:This situation of yours is a way-out-on-the-freaking-edge, edge case. Designing in automatic handling of it into network stacks or even applications isn't going to have a lot of ROI.
Dynamic IPs are that rare? If I'm the only wheel that squeaks about this, then yes - certainly not worth opening code that works well otherwise.

A dropped connection here or there doesn't bother me so much. The part that makes it a hassle is the long connect time. Just under an hour for 6 players to connect seems to be not particularly usable. MapTool may be in a funny state because of the disconnect, but I suspect it may be something else. Players connecting at all lately hasn't been speedy for us.

Usually I open up the campaign early, and they connect as they happen to be available; after they start connecting they go do something else (like eat dinner, or go practice the violin) because they know its going to take a really long time. I think it may be approximately 10 minutes per player, but we only get frustrated about it when we were in the middle of a session. Especially since it seems like its 10 minutes each, but one at a time.

Could the size of the campaign be a factor? It'd be counterintuitive -- we are just 'connecting' not 'loading' yet, but I thought I'd ask.
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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by Phergus »

DrAwkward wrote:Dynamic IPs are that rare?
Dynamic IPs aren't rare at all. Dynamic IPs that are pulled out from under you while using them after only an hour or two are.

The majority of people on broadband are using DHCP to get the IP address for their connection. Mine hasn't changed in months however.

Something you could do is, before you start your server, reset your broadband router and force it to get a new IP. Perhaps it will then hang on to it long enough for you to get a full session in.
DrAwkward wrote:A dropped connection here or there doesn't bother me so much. The part that makes it a hassle is the long connect time. Just under an hour for 6 players to connect seems to be not particularly usable.
That is not the expected behavior.
DrAwkward wrote:Usually I open up the campaign early, and they connect as they happen to be available; after they start connecting they go do something else (like eat dinner, or go practice the violin) because they know its going to take a really long time. I think it may be approximately 10 minutes per player...
Sounds like an outgoing bottleneck on your end.
DrAwkward wrote:Could the size of the campaign be a factor? It'd be counterintuitive -- we are just 'connecting' not 'loading' yet, but I thought I'd ask.
Of course it could. Upload speeds on most broadband is considerably less of the download speed. If you have a mediocre 128 kilobits/sec upload speed it could take long time to send even a small map.

500 kbyte map to 4 players = 2000 kbytes
128 kbits/sec ~= 12.8kbytes/sec
2000/12.8 = 2min 36secs

But what if you built your map out of a dozen textures with several objects stamps and have a bunch of monster tokens hidden here and there. Now the total asset load for the map is probably closer to 2MB.

Factor in several maps and maybe you are sending 10MB out to each player. Now the total transfer time is the better part of an hour.

If you are using MT 1.3, you could use the remote web cache functionality and offload the bandwidth sucking uploads to a web server.

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Re: Session on 11/10/07

Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:Dynamic IPs aren't rare at all. Dynamic IPs that are pulled out from under you while using them after only an hour or two are.
Ah, I can see now how getting it changed during prime-time would be unusual (and rude on the ISP's part).
Phergus wrote:Something you could do is, before you start your server, reset your broadband router and force it to get a new IP. Perhaps it will then hang on to it long enough for you to get a full session in.
Current plan is to upload the campaign to my webpage and let the player with the better ISP host. Should he not be able to make next session, then I'll go with your suggestion as plan B.
Phergus wrote:Sounds like an outgoing bottleneck on your end.
Indeed it does.
Phergus wrote:Of course it could. Upload speeds on most broadband is considerably less of the download speed. If you have a mediocre 128 kilobits/sec upload speed it could take long time to send even a small map.
Ah. I guess then the problem would be my assumption that "connecting" meant you were just establishing the session and "loading" meant you were transferring the campaign. I was expecting to see a long load time for the campaign.

I think perhaps that the terminology is not intuitive, and the interface is a little unresponsive at this point. I expected that the order of operation would be:

1. Connect the server and clients. Establish the session with the chat window so that they get positive feedback that there is a connection. The chat enables them to get some pre-game nonsense out of the way while waiting for the campaign to transfer.
2. Load the campaign data. At this point they get a status bar to track progress, and can tell if its locked up or not. Hopefully this does not interfere with the chat GUI.

As it stands now, we have a lot of "Should I restart? Is it doing anything? Is anyone connected yet?"
Phergus wrote:If you are using MT 1.3, you could use the remote web cache functionality and offload the bandwidth sucking uploads to a web server.
Sounds groovy. Are you guys investigating doing any Torrent-like connections to reduce the initial upload strain? By this I mean let one client feed other clients, so the server only has to send it out once or so.
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Post by Phergus »

Connections should be near instantaneous. You get notice in the chat window when this happens.

Then the images and other data for the campaign is transferred to the clients. The transfer LEDs down in the lower right part of the MT window should show if you are sending and/or receiving data.

When you start your server, and the players connect, do you have a map up that isn't hidden from the players? If FoW is enabled is there a section cleared that they can see?

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Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:Connections should be near instantaneous. You get notice in the chat window when this happens.
Yes, the players and I get those notices, but then they still see "connecting" for a very long time after that. Usually one or two of them will get disconnected and have to start over during this wait.

Are we sending campaign data at this point?
Should they be able to send and receive chat messages?
Phergus wrote:The transfer LEDs down in the lower right part of the MT window should show if you are sending and/or receiving data.
Those LEDs have never worked well for me. They were both dark while the players were connecting. I do see them flash when chat goes back and forth, though.
Phergus wrote:When you start your server, and the players connect, do you have a map up that isn't hidden from the players? If FoW is enabled is there a section cleared that they can see?
Yes, we have a "home base" map thats always available to the players.
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Post by Phergus »

DrAwkward wrote:Yes, the players and I get those notices, but then they still see "connecting" for a very long time after that. Usually one or two of them will get disconnected and have to start over during this wait.

Are we sending campaign data at this point?
Should they be able to send and receive chat messages?
Yes to both.

The long connect times though aren't right. You may have to connect up with Trevor some night and have him look beneath the hood to see what is going on when connecting to your server.
DrAwkward wrote:Those LEDs have never worked well for me. They were both dark while the players were connecting. I do see them flash when chat goes back and forth, though.
Most of my connections and transfers happen fast enough that I rarely pay attention to them but I'm wondering if they are actually working for graphic asset transfers.

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Post by Phergus »

Does the first player to connect do so quickly?

I just did a connect to a server running at my house and the connect happened instantly with a short delay for loading the maps. During the load times, it said loading (not connecting) and the red led did light up.

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Post by DrAwkward »

Phergus wrote:Does the first player to connect do so quickly?

I just did a connect to a server running at my house and the connect happened instantly with a short delay for loading the maps. During the load times, it said loading (not connecting) and the red led did light up.
The "So-and-so is connected" goes quick, but its a good long time for the first player to go from 'connecting' to 'loading', same as the rest. They don't seem to have chat access during this time.

I'll see if I can get some of them to try connecting up to one of the earlier campaign saves (when it was much smaller) and time it.

Would it be a good idea for me to make any new maps in a seperate campaign file? Is there anything I need to beware when switching from one campaign to another during a game session?
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Post by Phergus »

DrAwkward wrote:The "So-and-so is connected" goes quick, but its a good long time for the first player to go from 'connecting' to 'loading', same as the rest. They don't seem to have chat access during this time.
So much for that idea then.
DrAwkward wrote:Would it be a good idea for me to make any new maps in a seperate campaign file?
Map images are only transferred once to a client so, in theory, a player connecting to a server would only be sent the new maps.

Myself, I make a new campaign file for each adventure I run though each one might have several maps. Each campaign may have one or more of the same maps as the previous one as well.

I use a base campaign file that has the player tokens sitting on an empty default grass map that I use as a starting point for new ones.
DrAwkward wrote:Is there anything I need to beware when switching from one campaign to another during a game session?
Shouldn't be but then I never do that.

A good test for you to try is to start a server with nothing more than the default grass map and a couple tokens. See how quickly your players connect. If they have problems with that, then there is just something wrong with your networking setup somewhere.

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Session of July 05, 2008

Post by DrAwkward »

This time we used 1.3b34.

Plan was to use 1.3b32 but I suck at configuration management.

This was a shopping/roleplaying session so we didn't exercise the map all that much. It was mostly chat box stuff.

Bugs we found:

Can't get the token macros to recognize token property references. Was this broken since 1.3b32?

Zooming out far enough locks you right up.

A player loaded his own saved token, and was a "?" all night.

I have one of my players host. I upload my campaign to my web site, and he downloads it and runs it. This worked fine in 1.2b32, but in 1.3b34 the campaign gets confused with a zip file and the internet browsers bugger it up. Loading it gives a crazy java error. We got around it by dropping the campaign into a zip file (saved a whole byte, woohoo!) and uploading that.
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trevor
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Re: Session of July 05, 2008

Post by trevor »

DrAwkward wrote: Can't get the token macros to recognize token property references. Was this broken since 1.3b32?
Do you have an example I can try ?
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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