[ENDED GAME] Bridgewater-Brunel no. 1 - Great Britain sized map (no. 2)

[jamespetts]

[Archived post - this server has been re-started with a new saved game]

Please do not post bug reports in this thread - please post bug reports in their own thread (i.e., one thread per reported bug) in the Simutrans-Extended development forum. Thank you.
The Bridgewater-Brunel no. 1 server (port 13353 on the Bridgewater-Brunel server) is now live and waiting for players. It is running the latest version of Simutrans-Extended (at the time of writing, 13.0) and Pak128.Britain-Ex (at the time of writing, 0.9.3). This game has been reset from the original game to correct the bug relating to the distance between industries and consumers.

To join the game in case of a problem with the listing server, either type bridgewater-brunel.me.uk into the network game dialogue, or type net:bridgewater-brunel.me.uk into the load game dialogue.

Here is a screenshot of the map, which is 7736 x 3496 tiles (equating to 967 x 437km, or the size of Great Britain turned sideways):



Some other statistics follow.

Starting year: 1750
Towns: 757
Starting population: 1,433,237
Starting industries: 4,497

There is some interesting terrain, and plenty of scope for both land and sea based transportation. There are islands, mountain ranges, forests, rivers, valleys, lakes and large swathes of sea. This is a very large map - I believe the largest that has ever been played online on a public server, so I should be interested in whether players find the performance to be acceptable, or whether players would prefer to try a smaller map, perhaps one the size of England.

Some useful notes follow.

   
• Remember to set a password: do this by going to the "players" dialogue and clicking the little green box
• The game will be paused when no players are connected.
• Bridges over public rights of way, including navigable rivers, need to be at least two tiles high.
• Please set a meaningful and realistic company name (e.g. Bricknell & Quintborough Canal Company or the Frostingpike and South-Eastern Railway)
• Please do not run more than 1 company simultaneously, to allow others to join in (players may start new companies if their old ones become bankrupt, even before the bankrupt companies are deleted completely).
• The road network at the start of the game is not comprehensive, but these roads are public rights of way: players may upgrade them, but everyone will be able to use them and they may not be deleted. A few roads between towns are owned by the public player ("The Board of Trade"): these have been built manually. More may be added in time.
• Players are encouraged to build their own inter-city roads for all to use where these roads are lacking - tolls will be payable for using other players' roads.
• Towns start either not connected at all or connected only with roads that wheeled vehicles cannot traverse (bridleways).
• Anyone whose company is unused after 10 years will have their password automatically reset.
• Anyone whose company has never built anything will have their password automatically reset after 2 years.
• Pak128.Britain-Ex is not yet fully balanced, especially as to costs.
• The game contains some new features (passenger and mail classes and logistics, discussed more fully here, that have not been fully tested in an online game or in live play before, so there may be some balance issues relating to this, too
• Please report any bugs with the game or pakset or balance issues (other than balance issues relating only to costs, work on which has not even started) on the appropriate boards (one thread per bug, please), not in this thread.
• As the game develops, it will become more demanding on computational resources. Slower computers might not be able to keep up.
• Players may compete or co-operate as they please, but any action taken purely maliciously (i.e., for no other reason than to harm another player, rather than directly to advance the transport network of the player taking the action) is prohibited, and offending players may be banned.

Enjoy the game - I shall very much look forward to seeing what sort of transport networks emerge.

[Ves]

Great, will chime right in!
One question though: Would it be possible to set the "spacing shift devisor" to a value so the "shift" value resembles minutes or some other nice round number? for 6 hours and 24 minutes, the value would have to be 384 (6 x 60 minutes + 24 minutes) for the shift value to represent minutes.
It is much easier with spacing in this way...

[fam621]

For some reason I cant join the server

[jamespetts]

For some reason I cant join the server

As explained before, if somebody else is in the process of joining, you will not be able to join until that person has finished joining. I expect that many people are in the process of joining at present.

[Ves]

Now I got disconnected..

[jamespetts]

Now I got disconnected..

The server crashed, which might be connected with me testing whether I can run two games simultaneously on the server at present.

[Ves]

aha ok! have been trying to connect since but without success. Is it up and running again?
Incidentally, could you change the shifting value as described above? perhaps even make it the default for the pakset 

[jamespetts]

aha ok! have been trying to connect since but without success. Is it up and running again?
Incidentally, could you change the shifting value as described above? perhaps even make it the default for the pakset 

I am not aware of any way of changing the simuconf.tab settings of an existing game when using the command line server (without loading the game in a graphical client, changing it there using the advanced settings dialogue, saving it and then transferring the file back to the server).

I am currently investigating why starting one instance seems to crash the other, so there may be some intermittency for a few minutes.

Edit: The issue seems to be that having one instance running causes the other instance to be sent a kill signal. I am not sure why this is at present.

Edit 2: I am not able to find a way of reliably running two servers at once, so I am aborting the attempt to do so for testing for the time being. I was hoping to be able to use the no. 2 game to profile the performance to find why loading is taking so long. I will post a separate thread about that presently. In the meantime, the no. 1 game should be resuming shortly. Sorry about the disruption.

[asaphxiix]

At the moment I am unable to connect. The transfer proceeds very slowly, until it quits, saying 'too few bytes transferred'. This has happened several times now.

From seeing 0 connected players at this hour, I suspect that nobody else is able to connect, either.

I should note that I have seen this phenomenon occur on the Canterbury server as well, last night, but it resolved somehow.

[jamespetts]

That is odd - trying now to connect, I was able to join without difficulty (other than the usual delay after loading), so I am not able to reproduce this. Given your experience on your own server, this appears to be an intermittent issue. If anyone can describe a means (preferably with accompanying saved game) by which this can be reproduced reliably, I should be grateful if that person could post a separate bug report thread containing those details.

[DrSuperGood]

Check if you can ping the server reliably. Sounds as if the connection between you are the server is not 100% reliable.

[jamespetts]

Check if you can ping the server reliably. Sounds as if the connection between you are the server is not 100% reliable.

For reference, I get 0% packet loss pinging the server.

[DrSuperGood]

For reference, I get 0% packet loss pinging the server.

Any reliable connection should have as good as 0 packet loss. Hard to play games without it.

[jamespetts]

Any reliable connection should have as good as 0 packet loss. Hard to play games without it.

Indeed - any client with any packet loss to the server is likely to lose synchronisation and disconnect.

[asaphxiix]

So no-one else had any problems connecting to either server this evening? Perhaps it is on my side indeed.

[jamespetts]

So no-one else had any problems connecting to either server this evening? Perhaps it is on my side indeed.

With so little data, it is difficult to draw any conclusions at present. I suggest that we all monitor any issues to see whether any pattern can be discerned and consider what to do in the light of that.

[DrSuperGood]

Server just crashed with vector index out of bounds. Expected in range 0...5 but got 6. Possibly related to convoy replacement, as the change price button there seems buggy and recently I ordered some ships to be replaced however this is entirely speculation and not an actual bug report.

[jamespetts]

I cannot reproduce this locally - if anyone is able to find a means of reliably reproducing this, I should be grateful for a bug report. Without that, it is not feasible for me to find and fix the issue. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, however.

[DrSuperGood]

I will try to get the server into a self destructive state so you can test this. Unless save cycling fixes it.

EDIT:
Server will now crash showing this problem ~30 seconds after it resumes. Fully repeatable and even produces same index out of bounds error.

[jamespetts]

Dr. Supergood - thank you for that report. I have now fixed this problem and am in the process of restarting the server with the latest update containing that fix. The server should be running reliably again in a minute or two. Players will need the new version (both code and pakset, since the pakset has changed since yesterday) to play.

[Ves]

I think the game is much more stable now, until a certain point:

I have been online now for a while together with one other player. Suddently the game saves and what appears to be another player connecting to the game. After the very long time of pause, I get a disconnect. I dont know who connected or if the other guy stayed connected.

This same pattern happened yesterday. I was all alone on the server (I think I was), then someone connected and i dissynced. Then I tried to connect again, but only kept connection for a while until another desync. My theory is that whoever connected that made my disconnect, got disconnected when I connected again. And so on and so on....

For information, I run the nightly builds on a windows 10 machine.

edit:
Now same thing happened again. I got disconnected while another joined (or so I believe that another joined).

[DrSuperGood]

You will need to use the logs to determine the cause of the disconnect. If it is due to command execution in past then that means something is wrong with my sync fix. If it is due to checksum mismatch after a save/load cycle then either it is saving on the wrong sync step (unlikely?) or it is a problem with Extended not being deterministic between machines.

I also got a similar disconnect from autosave but I wrote it off due to out of sync from trying to modify a convoy schedule while it was route searching, something that often (or used to) cause out of sync in Simutrans standard.

I remained connected with another player for over and hour earlier today, and survived multiple save/load cycles without being disconnected.

[fam621]

Idk if its my internet of something to do with the server but, I cant connect to it for some reason.

[asaphxiix]

Me neither. Are you getting 'not enough bytes transferred'?

[fam621]

I am really not sure ATM. I am testing to see if it will show that you said.

[Ves]

Desynced again in the same way as earlier.

Thos logs you talk about, where to find those?

edit:

Im back in, but now something happened which I havent seen before: The time stopped, but without it going into pause.

edit2:
Hmm.. closing the game and starting it again, the game became unresponsive when it had loaded the autosave, so maybe it has to be restarted manually now?

[nuhgl]

Hi Ves It could be me who was online with you for a momment.
kaurna on the server.

I also got save games and app crashed for me.

I think the game is much more stable now, until a certain point:

I have been online now for a while together with one other player. Suddently the game saves and what appears to be another player connecting to the game. After the very long time of pause, I get a disconnect. I dont know who connected or if the other guy stayed connected.

This same pattern happened yesterday. I was all alone on the server (I think I was), then someone connected and i dissynced. Then I tried to connect again, but only kept connection for a while until another desync. My theory is that whoever connected that made my disconnect, got disconnected when I connected again. And so on and so on....

For information, I run the nightly builds on a windows 10 machine.

edit:
Now same thing happened again. I got disconnected while another joined (or so I believe that another joined).

[jamespetts]

Thank you all for your feedback and apologies for not having had a chance to look into this to-day: I am afraid that my time has been taken up with having a tea party. There was much tea and cake, but not so much work on Simutrans.

I suspect that all of these symptoms are caused by a crash on the server, the cause of which I will have to investigate when I have a moment. Apologies that you have been having trouble.

Edit: I discovered that the server had frozen in what appeared to be an infinite loop. I have now restarted it, and I can no longer reproduce any of these crashes. It currently appears to be working correctly. Can anyone identify what he/she was doing immediately before a crash in any case? I will need to be able to reproduce the conditions in which this occurred in order to narrow down the issue.

[AP]

I'm getting a mismatch on the game version. Did the new (v2) map get started or updated with a different game or pakset version than the original (v1) ?  Or is it using the nightly version(s)?

[DrSuperGood]

Or is it using the nightly version(s)?

It uses nightly versions, so one has to DL about 350 MB per day to play on it.

[AP]

It uses nightly versions, so one has to DL about 350 MB per day to play on it.

Thanks. The original post at the top of the thread should probably be updated to reflect that. I'll get downloading...

[jamespetts]

Note that there are two types of mismatch: a mismatch of the executable and a mismatch of the pakset. If you only get a mismatch of the executable, you need only download the executable afresh, and not the entire pakset.

[AP]

Note that there are two types of mismatch: a mismatch of the executable and a mismatch of the pakset. If you only get a mismatch of the executable, you need only download the executable afresh, and not the entire pakset.

How do I tell which type of mismatch I'm dealing with?

[jamespetts]

If you are dealing with an executable mismatch, the server will not show in the play online browser window unless  you tick the "show mismatched" button. When you select the server in question, the number after "revision" will be in red.

If you are dealing with a pakset mismatch, when you select the server in the play online browser window, the name of the pakset will appear in red.

If both appear in red, then both pakset and executable are mismatched.

[AP]

So my game is now up to date.

The server won't let me connect, however; I've been trying for half an hour.

As explained before, if somebody else is in the process of joining, you will not be able to join until that person has finished joining.

Whilst I can understand that it seems possible that two clients will try and join simultaneously, that situation shouldn't last for more than a few minutes at worst, surely?

The Experimental Server Listing says "currently 0 clients are connected"
The Play Online window shows the game name in blue but "server does not respond" if I click on it.

What is the problem?