What is it I'm doing wrong?

(Abnix) #1

Many of you are familiar with the server I run at chigc.com—64 player chaos with large map pack downloads.

Last night I changed the format over to individual map files as they’re downloaded off of distrobution sites like that rtcw place.

problem is, at every map change most if not all clients are disconnected. I’ve checked the server logs and all I see are tons of “ClientDisconnect…” and nothing depicting an error. Client side all I’m seeing is “WARNING: CM_GridPlane unresolvable” repeated many times before the clients get “Server disconnected for unknown reason”

I’ve googled the error and have not come up with anything, and this forum doesn’t seem to have a search feature… So if anyone has any input on this matter I’d hugely appreciate it.

(MadMaximus) #2

im not shure of the error u have, but there is a search field here at SD, check near the top next to FAQ.

(Abnix) #3

Ahh yes, thank you, but guess what? searching for ‘CM_GridPlane’ returns this thread only.

(MadMaximus) #4

hmmmzz…
well, using altavista i found this here,

Error messages

Level designers should not worry too much about the following messages and/or warnings. The things reported are non fatal and won’t cause any major problems. Some of the messages are just debug left overs.

"WARNING: CM_GridPlane unresolvable
"

i know that doesnt help if your having a problem, but i can’t find any other reference besides that. sounds like it’s an individual map that’s causing problems. if you don’t have to many custom maps on the server, u can try moving one by one to a temp folder somewhere and restart the server until you find which map is causing you grief. just an idea maybe worth a try.

(Drakir) #5

Seems there are tons of posts regarding disconnect for unknown reason.

The only thing ive seen sofar that has solved this for a guy is that he used odd things in his name.

Ok… I nailed it down to the colors I was using in my name… SHEESH!

Previously, I was ^/[NDA]^\Beren, which gave a nice green and tan look, but had the unfortunate side effect of not allowing me to play. Now however, I’m just [NDA]Beren, which means no cool look, but I do get to play now.

(OMFG, I can’t believe I just re-installed XP just to play this game!!! I am a sad bastard…)

(MrLego) #6

I don’t have an answer for the gridplane question but I may be able to shed some light on the client disconnecting problem.

We are running custom maps on our public server as well. If the client has his downloads turned off and he does not have the map on his computer that will generate the error message “Client Disconnectiing”.

We also decreased the amount of custom maps in the campaigns so people would not get impatient and quit before finishing their downloads.

We also moved the custom map downloads to another server so when players are downloading them there is not a bandwidth impact on our game.

The following server.cfg settings work for our particular setup.

Note: If you set the “sv_wwwDlDisconnected” to “1” then the client quits the game and loads their web browser to handle the downloads.

// global toggle for both legacy download and web download
set sv_allowDownload “0”

// toggle to enable web download
set sv_wwwDownload “1”

// tell clients to perform their downloads while disconnected from the server
set sv_wwwDlDisconnected “0”

// base URL for redirection
set sv_wwwBaseURL “http://your.offsite.download.location.url”

// URL to send to if an http/ftp fails or is refused client side
set sv_wwwFallbackURL “http://your.offsite.download.location.url”

Some of these settings seem to be contradictive to each other, but it has eliminated most of our disconnected client errors.

I hope this is helpful.

(Abnix) #7

well lets just say that band width is not an issue so much.

the machine is plugged into a 100Mbps direct connection one of Chicago’s major backbones.

i’ve had the server full of people before and someone on the network local to the server downloading at 4megs per second and no one on the server noticed any kind of lag.

So it’s not the backbone, and it’s not the NIC.

Additionally, when i lump all the maps together into big map packs, there’s no problem at all.

(Chruker) #8

I’ve been connected to abnix’s server while he was trying to use individual pk3 instead of the big files. I got disconnected between maps, and my name was simply ‘Chruker’ without any special tags for colors.

(Chruker) #9

But Abnix, I can’t remember, does everybody get disconnected or is it just the majority?

Does people also get disconnected when the campaign changes - ie. when ET is changing to another of the big pk3 files?

Have you talked to shrub about this bug?

(Abnix) #10

Ok, here’s the details.

64 player server.
when I run map packs where typically there are 6 maps in each one there are no problems.
when I run individual maps with my custom campaign pk3, players at map change load the map three times and then get disconnected.
All I see in the console log are things like:
203:34 Forcing disconnect on active client: 19
Looking at the log file, it appears that even the server loads the map twice.
Client side the errors are variable. usually saying some thing like ‘Server disconnected for unknown reason’ or other less descriptive errors.
is there some sort of sanity limit to the number of pk3’s a person can have in the working directory? (etmain)

I tried recreating the problems here at home running the etded on one of my linux boxes and then connecting from another machine. It seems that because I don’t have 30+ connections to my home test server that the problem doesn’t occur.

(bloodwire) #11

I am not 100%, but I am 99% sure that the problems you are having is because the players doesn’t have the map localy on their computer, and when you change the map, they have to download it.

Personally I have put all my maps on an external web-server and their clients are disconnecting when the map is loading. Anyway I run shrubmod on the server so, if they have a fast line and are able to download the new map fast enough, they also keep their XP.

(Drakir) #12

Seems kinda obvious that is a campaign trouble.

All official ET maps are in a single pk3 file, so they load without any problems.

When u use a single pk3 it works…so it seems like a single pk3 campaign bug too me!

(Chruker) #13

I’m having this problem right now. When trying to load my own map it keeps reloading it self. Having read this thread and others recently I immediately started removing pk3 files until it would start working again. After removing just one pk3 file it started working again, there was now 66 pk3 files in my etmain. I was happy that I had worked it out, but after adding a different pk3 file I had it continued to work. So now it didn’t seem that it was the number of pk3 files that was causing it. I then started systematically moving pk3 files in and out of my etmain directory, but sadly I could remove a couple of pk3 files without making any difference. I get the feeling that the bug is somewhere in the code that handles the duplicate files in pk3s.

Another twist of the story. All this was tested with the command line +sv_pure 0 +g_gametype 2 +devmap border_crossing to load my own map. When loading fueldump with nearly the same command line, it simply refuses to start - it stops at the screen where it is connecting to server localhost. After I exits ET I can see it has tried to download one of the other pk3 files I have. After I removed one of the pk3 files fueldump would show its loading screen (the one with the levelshot), but now it just keeps reloading like my own map did.

I have tried to see if I could get a list of the duplicate files, but I haven’t been able to find a suitable utility.

With regards to campaign files. The two maps I could remove without making any difference was chavo’s venice and v1_drakir the latter one contains a single campaign file.
Also when I removed etmapcycle.pk3 which just contains two campaign files then the maps load correctly. This pk3 contains a map called cmpgn_centraleurope which is the same as one of the original campaigns. I have tried renaming that campaign, and then added the pk3 again, but it again went from working to not working.

The last twist is if I change the command line to use +map instead of +devmap then it all load correctly.

This is indeed a strange problem. I have also looked at the SDK for ET that they have released. But have been unable to locate anything related to this.