Information on conflict: Now my knowledge of what technically happens is not clear, but when specific people are in a game together they generate lag, when one, or the other person leaves, the lag is resolved.

By asking people to leave one-at-a-time during private games we can (and have) isolated who is conflicting in our games.

However some people don’t leave when told, in a timely fashion, or AFK inconveniently; so in that case we ban the player instead.

In my map I have implemented Desync-banner for stay-alive hackers and immediate removal of laggers.

My Desync Banners



The trouble I am having is that when a conflict is occurring and we use the desync banner, everyone is dropped rather than just the indended player.

Important Information

When banning without the presence of lag (the warning sign of conflicts), the banners work flawlessly.

All eight players are split into their own game, some wait in drop screens, others are immediate.

Only the intended player is getting the “BANNED” message that desyncs players.

Not all players are necessarily savvy enough/have the inclination too to open ports/unblock stuff on firewall, so if possible I would like a map-side solution.

Main Questions

Why is conflict correlated with this desync malfunction?

If possible, how could this be fixed map-side (without removing the intended desync)?


Observations:


My gibberish theories, take them with huge grains of salt


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 16 2011, 10:03 pm by jjf28.

Conventional wisdom is that this is an "ip address conflict".

I've done some packet captures during a couple of games when I've experienced this, and it does look like some kind of IP conflict where two players have IP addresses from the same class C subrange, eg they're using the same ISP. Why this should cause an issue I'm not sure, though - routing should either work or not work, there shouldn't be the repeated grinding delay that causes the stuttering lag we see.

However I have not investigated this enough to be sure what the exact cause is - for example I wasn't 100% sure which IP addresses corresponded to which players, so I couldn't observe what happened when one of the offending players left and the lag was resolved.

Also I have not observed 'normal' games; it's quite possible that in some normal games we have a similar distribution of IP addresses and yet no lag occurs, indicating that just having close IP addresses isn't sufficient to cause the problem. It may actually be an ISP-level problem that is not directly observable just from plain packet captures (if they're doing some sort of ISP-level NAT and it screws up, but corrects itself, leading to massive lag).

If I were able to reproduce the lag on demand, eg if I knew there was a specific player or pair of players who caused this issue when they were in a game with me and I had their co-operation, then I might be able to get some decent packet captures to at least resolve the first two investigation points. However I've never been in a position to do that. In fact I haven't had this sort of grinding stutter-lag for quite a few months now.

Perhaps Heinnerman could spread some light on this?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 17 2011, 1:07 am by Lanthanide.

I'm not sure why all players drop from your EUD setup, but it could definitely be cleaned up in the following regards:

1) The defeat action itself is a global action, and if you run it from a local EUD (i.e. Display Text detection) trigger, it will desync the player as well as defeat them.
2) I don't believe a player's triggers keep running once the player is defeated. I'm surprised that your setup does any desynchronization at all.

Now, to expand on #2, triggers in the same cycle may run before a defeated player's triggers stop executing (I'm not sure). Maybe the desynchronization in combination with the player the trigger runs for moving the unit back is causing the issue.

Anyway, I would simplify your ban system and see if it resolves or improves the issue. Something like:

defeating prior to dropping aids in banning non-windows players as my map is mostly cross-platform (EUD conditioned global actions only have a chance of running)

Though I will separate defeat into a separate trigger after the supposid desync occurs as a test.