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 Possible High Priority Bug 
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Unread post Possible High Priority Bug
John,

Recently while connected on a certain server if I have prolonged periods of inactivity (No text sent to server) I will just drop. There is no 3 minute warning, no text update showing that I am about to drop and therefore I cannot prevent it from happening. I simply get

"Connection failure"

which is a TWX statement about the connection itself and not text passed from the server to the client. I have been trying to hone in on it and get a better time frame to assist with When it is happening. However since TWX is mostly a text-based scripting engine it has been hard to nail down.

Traditionally there is a warning system which will kick off keep alive scripts and other methods of staying active. This aforementioned system is not activated and honestly if I was not having this issue across the United States (VA,TX,CA) I would think its my internet connection. But I have not had this problem at home and traveling across multiple connections on other non-beta servers.

Image

In the above Screen-cap the Connection Failure is in white because its a system message from the TWX client itself. Normally there will be nothing in the client except for Command=TL and a Connection Failure message.

Everything else is related to the practice and the script I was creating to capture the time away before this event happens. Unfortunately there really isn't allot of good TWX commands that will accurately both sync with last time used (Bot or Human) and when that message appears.

What happen's after this message is I press enter and no command line so then I reconnect which is the very bottom of the message. This is done manually and is cause for concern for the upcoming FIRE tournament. Any insight you can shed into possible reason's this would happen for me to follow up with would be appreciated.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:09 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
I have seen this on several servers, I did actually get the samething on the last toruney a few times on 1.03. I wonder since it is a TWX message if EP could add a reset on it. I never saw this until I started using the newest 2.05. I know if I hit <enter> or $c it will reset and connect back up. But I can't seem to key off the message it sends, unless someone else has an idea how to get it to reconnect while AFK.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:14 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
T0yman wrote:
I have seen this on several servers, I did actually get the samething on the last toruney a few times on 1.03. I wonder since it is a TWX message if EP could add a reset on it. I know if I hit <enter> or $c it will reset and connect back up. But I can't seem to key off the message it sends, unless someone else has an idea how to get it to reconnect while AFK.


Been doing some research and it appear's to be a issue cross platform. It certainly could be TWX mishandling the data. I could run swath only and see if it happens again tonight. On the off-chance there is something happening under the hood I figured I would put this here for JP.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=32249&p=228026&hilit=connection+failure#p228026

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:19 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
I would venture to guess that a cn setting turning off your comms.
and an invisible keep alive might be in order ...

:top
setdelaytrigger ping :ping 4000
pause
:ping
send #27
goto :top

and you will probably never time out again.

Vid

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:32 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
I will fire up 2.04 / WinXp tonight and log in another game and see what happens in the next day or 2. Guess we need to start collecting data.

TWGS = 2.16
OS = Win7 Pro
TWX = 2.05 (Latest)

I thought for a while it could just me my ISP, but when I check it is not all games I am in, and no Auto-Relog messages.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:36 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
Vid Kid wrote:
I would venture to guess that a cn setting turning off your comms.
and an invisible keep alive might be in order ...

:top
setdelaytrigger ping :ping 4000
pause
:ping
send #27
goto :top

and you will probably never time out again.

Vid


Well no, that couldn't be right since in the screen shoot provided there is text chatter. The point of this thread is the lack of disconnect notice and subsequent connection failure. I'm sure I could over come it but that wasn't the point of my post.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:00 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
I've had this happen before, if I turn off messages.
I don't get the idle warning and get the boot.
That's why I run keepalive.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:08 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
As far as I know, there has always been a possibility of a connection dropping without either the client or TWGS closing the connection. I'm not aware of this being new to TWGS v2, and in fact, very little has changed in how TWGS v2 handles sockets.

What I've struggled with for years is the fact that after awhile, a connection will just go dead in a way that is impossible for TWGS to detect. TWGS doesn't get a graceful close message on the socket, so it has no way to know the difference between an inactive open socket or a closed socket. When this happens, the only way TWGS can clean up is either a) the player reconnects, kicking the original player offline, or b) inactivity forces the player offline. I think over the years the typical response to this situation has been to auto-relog, which forces the abandoned player session offline and cleans things up. But I don't think this is a new issue.

I've tried to use sockets keep-alives to keep this from happening. I've even experimented with having TWGS send a periodic telnet command to the client just to probe the connection and make sure it's still alive. That works pretty well, but not every client deals properly with telnet commands, so on some clients or helpers you end up getting these extra characters showing up on the screen. That's currently turned off.

I guess I'd be curious to know if there's evidence that this problem is greater on TWGSv2 than on v1.03. If it is, I will have a look to see if there's anything new that's going on. But last time I took a serious look at this, it worked the same on v1.03 as it did on v2.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:59 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
To follow up on this, here's what's going on when TWGS drops connection:

"This leads to a scenario known as a "half-open connection". At any given point in most protocols, one side is expected to send a message and the other side is expecting to receive it. Consider what happens if an intermediate router is suddenly rebooted at that point: the receiving side will continue waiting for the message to arrive; the sending side will send its data, and receive an error indicating the connection was lost. Since broken connections can only be detected by sending data, the receiving side will wait forever. This scenario is called a "half-open connection" because one side realizes the connection was lost but the other side believes it is still active."

So somehow the connection gets dropped between the client and TWGS. When the client attempts to send, it finds out the connection is closed and should trigger a relog or whatever. TWGS rarely attempts to send anything unless it's told to, so it's usually awhile before TWGS detects that a connection has been dropped this way. Only when TW needs to send a message to the client does it detect the drop and clean up. So if a player moves into the sector of another player in this state, TW will attempt to show the sector message, fail, and close down. Or there could be a "you recovered X turns" message, or an inactivity timeout. But even with these things, it's often the case that a dropped connection can leave a TW game stranded for a long time. Like I said before, it's usually the attempt to reconnect that clears out an abandoned session like that.

None of this addresses what's happening on your end. All I'm saying is I think this has always been happening, but the client normally handles it better. Even if TWGS figured out a way to more quickly detect a dropped connection and clean up, it wouldn't effect how the client handles it. TW could never send a message to the client to let it know it's closing, because the connection has already been closed. So I would like to improve how TW handles this condition, but there isn't anything I can do to improve how the client handles it.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 3:03 pm
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
John Pritchett wrote:
As far as I know, there has always been a possibility of a connection dropping without either the client or TWGS closing the connection. I'm not aware of this being new to TWGS v2, and in fact, very little has changed in how TWGS v2 handles sockets.

What I've struggled with for years is the fact that after awhile, a connection will just go dead in a way that is impossible for TWGS to detect. TWGS doesn't get a graceful close message on the socket, so it has no way to know the difference between an inactive open socket or a closed socket. When this happens, the only way TWGS can clean up is either a) the player reconnects, kicking the original player offline, or b) inactivity forces the player offline. I think over the years the typical response to this situation has been to auto-relog, which forces the abandoned player session offline and cleans things up. But I don't think this is a new issue.

I've tried to use sockets keep-alives to keep this from happening. I've even experimented with having TWGS send a periodic telnet command to the client just to probe the connection and make sure it's still alive. That works pretty well, but not every client deals properly with telnet commands, so on some clients or helpers you end up getting these extra characters showing up on the screen. That's currently turned off.

I guess I'd be curious to know if there's evidence that this problem is greater on TWGSv2 than on v1.03. If it is, I will have a look to see if there's anything new that's going on. But last time I took a serious look at this, it worked the same on v1.03 as it did on v2.


John,

The only evidence is anecdotal, whereas I've never had this issue before now and my exposure to TWGS 2* has been limited to two servers. That said I feel better knowing that it's not likely a new bug as you haven't touched the Sockets since original.

I will keep pressing to see if I can find more evidence and direct consequences of this specific issue. My secondary thought is that it's possible the server could be having instabilities which may result it dropped connection. Since the server is no longer sending data twx would not register anything except the dropped connection. It's possible that the newer version of TWX doesn't handle the information the way 2.04 does and therefor could be the client.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 10:40 pm
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
Kaus ;
I had to copy your photo to enlarge it so I could read it.
I did see that before you lost connection you were receiving SS messages from Toyman.

So , I was wrong from that.

The next thing I see wrong , unrelated to the disconnect but will have bad
effects on your scripts .. like mombot and such :
I have been cleaning up troubles from a handful of players .. seems someone
is teaching how to install twx proxy (blind leading the blind).
To properly install software , let its installer choose the path or it must go into the Root directory structure :
C:/ directory style , not on the desktop , the desktop is for short cuts.
That leads to bigger problems.

I suggest C:/DownLoads for anything you download
and C:/UnZipped for anything you unzip.
So TWX would probably end up in C:/UnZipped/TWX_Proxy

The problem you mention here will probably not be corrected
, but you may find it will fix something else.

I hope this helps someone ...

Vid

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:18 pm
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
I think two interesting tests would be to see if the problem exists with an earlier version of TWX running with TWGS v2, and if the current TWX has the same problem running on v1.03.

I know that there may be some compatibility issues with TWX on different TWGS versions, but I don't think the scripts need to be doing much to see how it reacts to a dropped connection.

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Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:33 pm
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
Vid Kid wrote:
Kaus ;
The problem you mention here will probably not be corrected
, but you may find it will fix something else.

I hope this helps someone ...

Vid


Vid,

Thank you for the kind concern.

Please be aware that TWX does not require specifically named directories outside the base directories presented upon installation, scripts do. Nor does TWX require to be at the root directory of a OS. I have specific reasons for not installing at root which go beyond the scope of this thread.

You're making rather broad assumptions with very little basis to fact.

I respectfully request that you cease further posting in this thread and contact me directly if you have further suggestions about subject's not related to this threads purpose.

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Last edited by Kaus on Tue Jan 31, 2012 9:56 am, edited 1 time in total.



Tue Jan 31, 2012 9:42 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
John Pritchett wrote:
I think two interesting tests would be to see if the problem exists with an earlier version of TWX running with TWGS v2, and if the current TWX has the same problem running on v1.03.

I know that there may be some compatibility issues with TWX on different TWGS versions, but I don't think the scripts need to be doing much to see how it reacts to a dropped connection.



John,

I bumped into this thread (viewtopic.php?f=52&t=32819) today. It got me thinking about the issue somemore, outside less possible socket's issue there is a new issue that I think may be causing this problem.

Lack of proper shutdown, as the above event's unfurled I found that the previous server I had issues with had a outside influence that was resetting the server at random hours for no real reason. Children are fun arn't they?

But more to the point, in the above thread Crosby talk's about being dropped to the game prompt. It is assumed that RP may have banged or edited the game while Crosby was in it AFK at dock.

It is possible that the issue stems from a less gracious shutdown than anticipated by our client's. Which bring's me to my question, does the server shutdown the same way it did in 1.x? Are the shutdown sequences the same for active (Server still up, but game down) rebangs vs complete server restart?

Obviously there is nothing you as a developer can do about power loss, outside influences. However if the server now has extra verbiage or less it could allow us to adapt to the issue.

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Tue Jan 31, 2012 9:49 am
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Unread post Re: Possible High Priority Bug
Since my last battle in testing for the release of TWGS 2.17 .. my conclusion for
the dropping issues stem from the use of Win 7 and twx proxy 2.05 ..

If any of the above is true .. then we just excluded the TWGS from the fault.
Testing in 2.04 and Win XP have not shown this issue ..

Please list OS , TWX Proxy version , and all helpers and possible scripts/bots running during this loss.

I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this if we have not already.

Thank you for playing tradewars ;)

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Tue Jan 31, 2012 10:37 am
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