Server Issues? Questions? Tips for 4.33.1?

[Sinu]

Update: DPRK aircraft have completely massacred Seosan airbase and most likely will be putting Osan out of action momentarily.

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

We'll try that again...
This time, Seosan is the only human airbase with no HQ fragging - one can still fly out of Osan or Kunsan with a different F-16 or whatever, but we need those airbases fragged by the AI for now to see how the campaign will level out.

Difficulty is ACE, but with Aircraft and Air Defense slightly more balanced. Ground forces are still heavily weighted to DPRK.

Will check back Saturday morning (it's friday night here).

Good luck - kick some Kim Jong Ass!!
!cp

[CobaltUK]

Day 1 two flights made starting 1030. Excellent sam activity. Dodged 3 sa4 and 7 sa2 before being hit by an eighth because I did not get low soon enough. 2nd package 3 migs and a bomber downed plus 2 sam radar.
No issues with wingmen.

Considering day 1 there was no wall of migs so yet to think challenge too high. Its to be expected that there will be most AA and SA activity in 1st 2 days. More relaxed strike missions later on in the war. Reinstating HQ to more bases likely to be essential but Osan could provide one human squadron of block 40 for weapon variety and base location.

The danger of a harder challenge is running out of aircraft if only 1 non HQ

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

(also got a private message from a pilot, here is my reply:)

I definitely had no intention of making the game unplayable and too hard - I had thought ACE was what the server had been at for years, but based on what you said, this is likely not the case.

Really, my entire goal has been to make this 4.33 campaign indistinguishable from the 4.32 game we ran for years, except for the improvements and updates.

I understand little about this, and for me, it is a learning process.

I promise, I will be online in a few hours and I will ramp down the difficulty significantly, and we will work UP from there as you suggest.

I honestly didn't expect the enemy to get so much better, now we know. I must leave for an appointment right now, but I will be home in a few hours and I will ease up the difficulty then.


The last thing I want is our patrons jumping ship to play offline/private servers. Thank you for your information - I will act on it.

Thank you for your patience!

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

**Server restarted with what should be a much more manageable difficulty level. Osan also has one squadron of Block 40's available. Let me know how it works out.

[Sinu]

Server appears to have crashed - just prior to the crash I observed two players running their own campaign on the VG server. I had no way to contact them as their campaign screen was a blue Korea lookin' thing (I'm assuming they were running another theater).

Additionally: I personally didn't mind the ACE ADA and AI difficulty - what I did mind was the "wall of migs" that meant we were getting jumped at takeoff from Osan and Seosan - I think the increased Allied AI generation would help tide that down.

If you're interested I'd be happy to make up a sample campaign starting at 05:00 that includes an American Block 52 squadron at Seosan so that we could keep Osan HQ only. It would take a matter of minutes.

[Derk]

Server is still down at the time of my post.

@Sinu - I'm very appreciative of Semlers efforts in tweaking things to give us a stable and challenging campaign with the 4.33 upgrade. Though I have to support smaller steps in what is changed, and adequate time to test the change. To make a second change in HQ AI to affect the change made in difficulty level may tide the "wall of migs", but will also add more objects that could eat into bandwidth of the server and clients. This could result in more AI warping/spinning issues, which we still seem to be aggravated with. (even more so for me last night)

This past week was very interesting as the campaign was left to runout and see how long it lasted. I was happy with how long it lasted even though it did result in a stale air war, and limited ground forces on the red side. I still had fun learning to buddy lase with a friend, and taking out radar units from atop the solid cloud ceiling since I got toasted by the AAA when flying under the weather on AGM65 runs. So there was still action to be found.

From my experiences in the VG 4.32 campaign over the past year, I thought the Cadet difficulty level in the 4.33 campaign was close to what it was before. Sometimes I wished that it was more difficult, but I could also find a fun and challenging mission even if there weren't any AI bandits around, or SAMs firing at me. I'm hopeful that the shared interest of increasing the difficulty level can be balanced to take into account the typical users that will be logging into the server.

I would also prefer stability over difficulty, especially since it seems that the server has been down again all evening. I wish Semler and the VG admin well in working through what has been a very challenging upgrade to BMS.

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

Server restarted......

**For the record, the server was down until now as I was unable to check it, out with family for xmas things, bells, xmas ships in port, etc. and woke up very late this morning.

Was unable to respond sooner, all apologies. I will be checking in on the server every few hours today and tomorrow, and I will keep an eye out for concurrent campaigns - it is sad that my only response (as I cannot talk to someone on the server running a passworded campaign) is to restart the server and try to get a message to them before they "restart" their own server. It's happened before, and language barriers abound!!

Please post up here today if you see another campaign running so I can try to deal with them and tell them they can't do that.
!hi

[Preacher]

I get the following message: Kevin sending message

[Brain]

I just contacted Archer at FO, briefly describing the two major problems we have:
- crashing server
- erratic AI
All we have to work with are observations. No log files, no server specs ... I felt pretty dumb asking for help with these technical issues and having the equivalent of a crayon drawing in terms of solid information, but it's better than running in circles for another month. Cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Then I thought "how about banning people hosting their own campaign?" I want to bet part of the response I get will be that this and maybe even TEs are one probable cause. In the end there has to be a reason why it is forbidden at FO, don't you think?!
Figuring out how to set up and play BMS requires some knowledge of the English language so I can't imagine how anybody could not understand something as simple as "Do not create a campaign". It's usually the same few people and if they care that little and never even join the VG campaign they are adding nothing to our little BMS community.

Oh, and we may want to scrap this topic and divide it into 3: Technical issues, gameplay questions, "server just crashed"

[Derk]

Brain makes a good point about the "no secondary campaign" issue, which has existed well before the 4.33 update. Policing this will be an interesting issue the VG admin will have to figure out since the server is available to anyone that receives the IP addy, and may not be part of the VG community. This would make for a good threat by itself.

Semler, would it also be helpful to have a separate thread just for server outage posts as Brain suggested? This would help keep this one tech related and maybe help you with monitoring outages.

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

A second thread will just make it more work for me, having to check more than one place for info. Regardless of how many separate threads about separate topics, I am the ONE guy here working on it. I'd prefer this one thread. Names would help, if you see the name of individuals running campaigns, get them to me.

Monitoring outages comes down to one thing: communication. Posting up here that it is down is the first step, next step is me checking quite often each day in this thread and remote looking into the server itself. I do it every few hours, but I also get busy with life now and then.

Hoping crashes become less frequent, and they should. When people run concurrent campaigns and the server crashes, logs for it are redundant - we know the server overloaded the CPU and caused a CTD. Also, FO is not the only other community running BMS campaigns, and is not my first route for information. I usually find people I know at the BMS forums. Wouldn't have made it this far without that reading.



EDIT:
*Lastly, if you are experiencing "erratic AI planes", perhaps you should try to connect with a higher bandwidth than others, maybe 2000? Would be nice to troubleshoot that issue in that way, not sure how far you are from Kansas where the server is...

[CobaltUK]

For me, ctd at mission exit has returned after being absent a good while.
A 2nd campaign has just started. Made a note of 5 names 2 of which are registered at bms forum. Will send by pm as more appropriate.

[Brain]

More bandwidth will not solve anything. We had these AI issues with 300 and we still have them with 1024. I reported it to be fixed after server restarts (more than once i believe) and Cobalt's post from Saturday seems to confirm this, as he had no issues only 5 hours into the campaign.
At this point I'd like to know if this was an issue with the 4.32 VG server as well.

Anyways, I just got a reply and it made things very clear: As long as people are dicking around the server will never be stable. At least that's the short version.
No matter what we do, in the end we need to be confident everybody plays by the rules. We either reach out to the 'black sheep' (which has proven difficult so far) or we start banning IPs. Until then we'll get the same problems over and over again.

[Preacher]

Still getting that message: Kevin pending message. Any idea what that causes?

[Brain]

"Kevin pending message" means you successfully contacted the server but you're not getting the expected response in time. Usually this indicates a hung server but could probably be a sign of a bad connection.
Have you set up port forwarding for BMS?

EDIT:
After a nice chat with Cobalt it seems like it doesn't matter what we actually observe. No matter how long it has been since restart, how many players are on, how many TEs are going on ... :-\

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

Preacher LAN_WROTE ...

Still getting that message: Kevin pending message. Any idea what that causes?

Server is not hung - you'll need to keep trying different things:

SemlerPDX =VG= LAN_WROTE ...

Server has been updated with the following changes:

-Client Bandwidth Requirement raised to 1024 BW

-Server will now only accept P2P connections, if you can no longer connect, read about port forwarding for Falcon BMS here: http://www.krauselabs.net/dump/Hosting-Falcon-4-BMS.html (and here is a link about routers and forwarding: http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm )

-Server will now enforce Same Tile Set and Same Aircraft Data

[Minrah]

hey guys I thought i should report that while i was playing a few days ago everytime i got in and got into 3D the server would randomly pause while i was in ramp or flying in the sky. I took a photo of the message that i got from the server, but im sure you had received the same message. I really hope i wasnt the one messing things up, though i knew better on not making my own campaign on the VG server. anyway if u need more info let me know and thank you guys for hosting! I really enjoy flying.

[Sinu]

There's another campaign up on VG's server being run by two players. It's password protected so I can't join.

I've PM'd Semler the player's names.

[Minrah]

ok so I checked my ports and I have ports UDP 2934-2935 and udp 9987-9989 opened, I found out since i changed out my motherboard it gave me a new IP address so I had to clear my network on my router to have devices reconnect with the correct IP address. I found my new IP and added the ports and still no joy on connecting, is it possible that the people that have another campaign are holding the VG server hostage?

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

I need to find a way to log the IP addresses of everyone who connects to the BMS server, and then I can begin banning IP addresses - one of two things would happen: they'd never be seen again, or they'd come here to the website (or bms forums, or bms facebook) to report connection problems, giving me a chance to tell them not to run concurrent campaigns.

Until I have teeth, all I can do is bark.


Restarted the campaign, but they were no where to be found, couldn't get a shout out.

[Minrah]

yeah im still not able to connect, not sure what to think =(

[Minrah]

so Brain and I found out why im not able to connect, im on a connection running at 20mb down and 1mb up. so with the bandwidth set 1024 im guessing im no longer able to join =/

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

Minrah LAN_WROTE ...

so Brain and I found out why im not able to connect, im on a connection running at 20mb down and 1mb up. so with the bandwidth set 1024 im guessing im no longer able to join =/

If the bandwidth minimum was set lower, thus allowing you to join, you'd experience tons of issues like that pausing above - and as the server needs to sync all clients to the server, it would begin to effect other players eventually. I've seen the connection demand going up for years the the 2000's, always favoring a higher and more stable up-speed for more and more complex (or poorly coded) games - and here we are marching towards 2020 where games just think everyone has at least 5-10Mbps up and down when it's not yet the case for all of us.

I feel for you, bro. Wish we could help more.

[Brain]

CS is what people mean when they talk about "dubious" connections in the F4 BMS world. The code has tried to make a direct connection between a player with a "CS" label on their connection and for some reason been unable to do so. Thus, it has fallen back to sending everything via the server to all other client sessions; i.e. every position update will take two hops to reach other players instead of only one (well, with the exception of a player who's session _is_ the host that is ). The fallback _may_ work much of the time.

There were rumors about "(P2P)" being a bad thing and by accident I stumbled across this. It's a quote from a BMS dev and I just wanted to share it to finally clear things up. Also found some few hints on how to set up a BMS server but we've done everything suggested there already. So, sorry, nothing really new or helpful.

Minrah and I just had a long session trying to figure out why he is unable to connect. In the end it turns out his connection is deemed "dubious" by BMS and thus refused after the initial handshake (tested by hosting my own server). He appears to have a proper P2P connection so the issue is somewhere else. It seemingly started after replacing the motherboard with an identical one so this might have caused something to break. Some faulty server along the route may be another cause but it would be a strange coincidence.
I usually know how to fix things, but when it comes to networking issues I reach my limits.

But that's just for the record because...

...conducting some speed test showed both of us getting less than 1024kbps up stream. I hover around 960. Playing by the books I will not be joining any more flights on VG, at least until I can get this changed by my ISP. It's really pissing me off but I'm not going to be one of those guys who doesn't give a ... and breaks things.
I'm sorry if I caused issues, but with an 120mbps connection I assumed to have far more BW available. However, the problems we are currently facing have been consistent, regardless of BW settings (I stayed at 500 while the rest already changed to 1024). Not that it matters since we established observations are mostly meaningless. *shrug*

After talking to some people it seems I'm pretty lucky with the availability of high speed internet in Germany and it makes me wonder how many people actually get the required 1mbps if I don't (remember: 120mbps). Everybody should do a speedtest and see if they can still fly with VG. Then there is obviously the problem of reaching out to certain players and the fact that we have to rely mostly on trust.
Well, I don't feel like trusting at least half the people I've seen on the server since my registration. The more observant regulars among you might understand why.

Until the server is more reliable, progress is being saved and all the black sheep are under control, flying BMS on VG isn't an option for me. Being forced to take a break combined with this aggravating crash today was the final straw. I'll still be checking in here regularly and offering support where possible though.

You guys are awesome and I'm looking forward to the next (hopefully successful) 4-ship ;)