Clients see the game paused when joining the server (Windows, pak128 2.8.1, 121)

[BiFSXFan99]

So, my friend and I have been playing on a server I've hosted for about a week. I can't exactly say when the problem arose, but I think when I was trying to see if I could load different maps with -load command. Recently, the port I had the server running on doesn't work anymore (my friend can't connect, nor do I see it on the server list anymore, but I guess the latter doesn't necessarily mean it's down), and when I choose a port my friend can connect to, he gets the state of the game where the server's game is paused for him and the building's tiles are the construction lot tiles. Can someone kindly inform as to why this pausing is happening or how to remedy it?

[Vladki]

Normally the game should pause when new player is connecting. Pause, Save, send the save to new player, and unpause. Is that what you see?

[BiFSXFan99]

I think the game did that for me last time my friend connected. It's on my friend's end that the game is paused, not mine. He was able to buy a new vehicle and send it out, and I could see it moving, but nothing was for him. His game was just paused and every building was a set of construction tiles.

[makie]

This behave i have too when the announcement to the serverlist failed.
I can build road, but the time stand still on client side. But at the server-side time is running. But the roads appear at server side.

This happen only if the announcement fail.
I do not know why the client connect to the to the server-list, but if this time out, this would happen, but not each time.

[BiFSXFan99]

So this could be a result of the connection timing out? As in the client's connection timing out, then?

[Vladki]

This looks like a very bad lag. I had a few clients trying to connect to stephenson-siemens complaining that they cannot build anything. But they had built some nonsense pieces of road and track. So they clearly did not have the feedback that they did so...

[Mariculous]

Generally TCP take care that packets arrive, but in this case it seems like the "continue" packet did not arrive or was not properly processed by your friends device.
Might be a network thing or might be a bug...

Will be very hard to finally track this down without being able to reproduce it.
If you are technical affine, you could  watch the network traffic of your simutrans server to determine if that packet is sent out to your friend or not.

[BiFSXFan99]

Hmmm, interesting stuff. I hope it is just lag or network stuff then, because we can just keep trying it, hoping that the connection finally "takes," lol. Thanks for the information.