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#1
01-02-2011, 12:28 PM
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Can't play the game for more than some minutes and MP issues [Steam ver.]
Hi,
I've bought Altitude during the Steam daily sale and was pretty satisfied by my purchase, until I realized that it's impossible for me to enjoy the game. First, I can't play the game for more than five minutes (or even less). I'm usually stopped by the message "Disconnected Your connection to the login server has been lost. Please log in again." (also in the attachment). I think I've forwarded my ports correctly (I read the sticky post and I'm not a newbie; I've also never had network problems with any other online game I've played before Altitude with this router) and it's not an OS issue (both Wine+Steam under Linux and Windows XP give me the same problem). I think it has to do with Altitude keeping its connection to the login server to update XP counts and the such, however I also have another kind of problem concerning multiplayer. When I try to browse the server list, after a couple of seconds of normality, all server start having 999 as ping and become impossible to connect to, making me not able to play MP. Additionally, I've noticed some weird behaviors related to port forwarding. Following the sticky thread (which feels really messy anyway, and also lacking of official statements by the developers), I've forwarded some of the ports indicated there and that only made thing worse. For example, forwarding port TCP 31373 gets the game stuck on the "Waiting for response..." section of the login, while forwarding any of the other ports did nothing to solve either of my problems. I hope you can at least find a way to solve these problems, I really want to play Altitude and it's very frustrating that I can't, not even during the holidays. Sorry if I maybe sounded demanding at times but that's only because Altitude is a great game and I was already planning to buy it before I knew of the Steam sale, it would be less frustrating if it didn't let me play for those 5 minutes at all because it's such fun and I ended up playing it for two hours, even if only in Training mode and crashing constantly! Since we're here, I hope someday Steam users will be able to play the standalone version of the game as well, so that Linux users can play it natively. Running the game through Wine really defeats the purpose and only advantage of writing a game in Java  (nonetheless, the performance is excellent even through Wine and that's great  )
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#2
01-03-2011, 08:19 AM
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Weird -- sounds like a router issue. A few things to try:
1) Update router firmware. 2) Disable UPnP on your router (but keep the forwarding rules). 3) Enable UPnP on your router (and get rid of the forwarding rules). 4) For the server list issue: Edit C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\altitude\config\optio ns.xml and change maxServerInfoRequestsPerSecond="40" to maxServerInfoRequestsPerSecond="10"
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#3
01-05-2011, 03:40 PM
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It did nothing - changing maxServerInfoRequestsPerSecond actually made the pings show up correctly for a while but aside from that, no changes.
My router's firmware is up-to-date and I'm afraid I can't disable UPnP since I'm not the only person using the router and they need it. The forwarding rules apparently do nothing. I'm starting to think it's less of a problem I have with my router than a problem I have with your login server, since I keep losing connection to it. Could it be my location (Italy)? I don't know where your servers are but in the past I had bad latency problems with North American servers, maybe it's a timeout problem? But I highly doubt it, either. I'll keep trying and I'll post updates, I hope I get to play the game this week.
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#4
01-05-2011, 04:35 PM
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Are you using wireless? I've had wireless packet drop issues which often result in such things but are not very noticeable with TCP (because TCP is a connection-oriented protocol). I saw UDP handshakes, but I don't think Altitude uses UDP for keep-alives? (Karl/Lam can probably verify this).
But you've mentioned you don't have any networking issues with any other game. If all else fails, you might have to do some good old fashioned packet snooping with wire shark/tcpdump/snoop. Good luck.
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#5
01-06-2011, 03:38 PM
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Quote:
When I said that other games work fine, I was referring to the ability of play online and even host servers. Actually, I do have packet dropping issues occasionally (due to my mediocre WiFi connection), but other games can handle that and keep me connected. One example I could mention is how TF2 does it: it freezes the client for a couple of seconds and warns me that it'll auto-disconnect me if it doesn't restore proper connection in 30 seconds. That's a very occasional problem and more of annoyance than a real problem, as it rarely occurs and when it does it's over in a couple of seconds. I actually thought it could have been a problem a couple of days ago but then I quickly forgot about it since I have other issues with Altitude as well; I might reconsider. I know it's not a port forwarding issue because I received the error I just attached. If Altitude found the port closed for some reason, it would have never let me play in the first place. I'll run some tcpdump and report back. I'm also interested in what the devs have to say about how their network code works in this regard, I'm sure I'm not the only one with (albeit minor) packet loss issues and maybe this post will turn out to be useful for someone.
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#6
01-06-2011, 07:03 PM
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If you are experiencing consistent, severe UDP packet loss to our login server (located in a data center in Chicago, US) you may be disconnected from the login server. I haven't heard of this happening with a usable internet connection before (I forget the figures offhand but I think this requires something like 24 dropped packets in a row over 3 minutes).
That said, if your ISP experiences periodic blackouts to certain regions (e.g. all UDP traffic to the US is dropped for 5 minutes) but remains stable for local connections (e.g. no loss to the German server you're playing on) then this might occur on an otherwise usable connection. We will consider adding a TF2-style "priority keep-alive" interval but I'm guessing it won't help given the severity of loss that's already occurring (with the current drops, it may well be your ISP is totally freezing out our region for an extended period). One thing you could try to help verify this diagnosis is to keep a ping running to our master server while you play: 1) Start -> run -> cmd 2) ping -t altitudegame.com 3) Next time you're disconnected, close Altitude and check whether the ping window shows a bunch of dropped packets in a row
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#7
01-07-2011, 01:25 PM
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These are the results of the ping I executed (on my Linux system, not that it matters):
Quote:
I'm getting back to the port issue, because if that's not the problem it's at least part of it. I tried opening all ports but it wouldn't allow me to do so, since forwarding port TCP 31373 freezes the game on "Waiting for response...". So there's definitely a problem with the ports, also because I can't host chats because it says I'm behind a firewall (which is true, but why isn't port forwarding working this time)? I'll do some more attempts and see what happens. If you have any ideas regarding my problem, please tell me.
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#8
01-07-2011, 06:19 PM
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If you can log in (doesn't matter if you get dropped from the login server later) then TCP is definitely not the problem, so don't bother setting up any TCP rules.
What you should be focused on are UDP ports. In particular, whichever port Altitude is told to run on in options.xml (default is 27272). UPnP can sometimes interfere with manual port forwarding. To prevent this possibility you can edit ~Altitude/config/options.xml and change upnpEnabled="true" to upnpEnabled="false". You should then set up a port forwarding rule for the appropriate port (UDP) on your router.
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#9
01-08-2011, 10:51 AM
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Quote:
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#10
01-08-2011, 05:29 PM
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Perhaps you could try rebooting (power cycling) your router -- it may have some old/interfering UPnP mappings in place for Altitude (and make sure that upnpEnabled="false" is set in ~Altitude/config/otptions.xml before you relaunch).
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#11
01-10-2011, 04:13 PM
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Quote:
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#12
01-12-2011, 08:53 PM
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OK, posting because I have reached some conclusions.
1)It's not the Wifi signal. My signal is usually on 70% but I've tried playing at 100% and it changed nothing. However, I yet have to try ethernet. But even if it worked, what could I do? I can't move my PC, that would be a one-shot thing. 2)It's not the router - or better, the router's port forwarding. I've tried several programs and they all worked correctly, with the ports being open when necessary. My router has a UPnP portmap table that shows all the active ports opened by the connected devices. Altitude never appears in that table, despite its port having been forwarded correctly. I also did what I never would do and forwarded all UDP ports at once but it did nothing. 3)Disabled UPnP first on the router, then on Altitude and then on both and nothing changed, so I guess this utterly confirms my beliefs about port forwarding not being the problem. 4)As I already said, the OS is out of question, both Wine+Linux and Windows have the same problem. Recap of all the problems: 1)Can't play Training mode for more than 2 minutes (more or less. Actually, it's never less. Kind of weird, isn't it?) 2)Can't play any online game at all, they all have 999 ping and even when they don't (after changing maxServerInfoRequestsPerSecond, some of them started showing realistic pings), it wouldn't let me join the game. Ever. 3)My profile right now is level 17 and has over 4 hours of play. That means that, at least partially, the game works and can submit the results to the login server. Can you imagine playing a game for 4 hours after being disconnected every 2 minutes? And that was just me testing some configurations! I never played the game properly. I can't even finish the last three tutorials before being disconnected. Look, I am not one of those loud a**h***s and I'm trying to be as civil as possible, but I'm really stressed. And I'm aware you guys are also stressed by these requests and you are not some big evil corporation like Activision and you can't just hire hundreds of Indian tech support guys to do your job, I understand that and I appreciate what you are doing for gaming, but I want to play the game. Some people would have asked for a refund, some would spam the forums. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to play the game. I hope you find something in your network code that could solve my issue, as I'm pretty positive the problem is not mine. I'll keep watching this thread and you tell me if you do anything, is that okay? I was pretty excited for buying Altitude and it would be a shame if I never got to play it.
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#13
01-13-2011, 01:27 AM
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Wayne,
I'm sorry for your trouble, and I know how frustrating a situation like this can be (and it frustrates us too). Unfortunately I've looked into this problem and don't have any further ideas for resolution. My best guesses as to what could cause the problem are A) network card problem B) region and type-specific filtering by your internet service provider (e.g. UDP packets to servers in the US are limited to 200 per 5 minute interval [TCP and ping packets, which are usually not associated with file-sharing or games, are not filtered] -- a policy like this could be implemented to prevent a few users from congesting intercontinental connections with bittorrent traffic). If you submit a bug report (launch Altitude, F1 to open console, reportBug, submit) I'll take a look through your configuration to see if anything stands out. Otherwise, your best options are to play in single-player mode (press Escape immediately as you launch Altitude, then click the "Offline Mode" button when it appears) or to request a refund (you'd need to contact Steam in this case). While it's possible that there is some adjustment we could make in our code to fix the problem I can't imagine what it might be. To date several hundred thousand players have tried Altitude and this is the first time we've heard of an issue quite like this.
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#14
01-13-2011, 11:19 AM
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Thank you for your answer. I wouldn't be surprised if my ISP filtered some traffic, they did much worse in the past. Troubles with my network card are also possible, although as I said it's the first time ever that an application gives me such a problem, game or not. I'll fill a bug report and we'll see. I don't want to abuse your time and patience and I'll just wait for some answer. I know it's the first report of this issue but there's always a first time for everything, right? Life would be too easy if we could find all solutions to our problems on Google
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#15
01-14-2011, 03:57 PM
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I'd like to give two more things you could try:
1. Try it on a another computer in the network to see if it really is your internet connection or something retarded on your computer (you never know!) 2. Try to connect to your modem directly and then play to REALLY rule out the router. Sorry if you already tried one of those and I missed it, I had a few beers. *burp* BTW Lamster A) is highly unlikely since he is having no problems with other games. I'd bet money that it's the UPNP stuff in the router, I have had a ****load of problems with that too on my previous router. You can do all logical things you know (forwarding all ports) and the router would still manage to **** it all up. I just bought a new one ;D. Last edited by Boko; 01-14-2011 at 04:01 PM.
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#16
01-15-2011, 01:42 PM
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Quote:
Unfortunately, I'm not able to try the game on other computers. I could connect the router directly and I'm planning to try that but moving my computer around at the moment would be a bit inconvenient, although I'm certain I'll do it in the future. The problem is, I absolutely need WiFi exactly because I can't move around and my computer is more than a desktop. My router is kind of crappy and I recognize that but I'm afraid I won't be able to change it for a while. I'm a regular gamer (some would say hardcore I guess) and I would have changed it in a second if it gave me problems with more than one game, but right now it's more expensive (both economically and in terms of time). Just yesterday I started playing Bad Company 2, which requires a heavy-ass permanent connection to its login server. And it works fine! I suppose Altitude requires less hassle than BC2 (network-wise), also because EA products are notoriously slow and ridden with superfluous code. Yet, BC2 allows me to play indefinitely. I know, comparing two games isn't very smart to say but you get what I mean. Steam also requires a permanent connection (at least to stay in Online mode) and stays connected to its login server, to which communicates data such as playtime, stats (in Valve games like DoD:S, CSS and TF2), achievements and so on. If I had a problem with UPnP, I would have been affected by it long ago. Also, disabling UPnP also did nothing. Your bet could still win, though, as UPnP can be irrational at times 
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#17
01-15-2011, 11:50 PM
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To add to this discussion, I've suffered from the same exact symptoms that are described by Wayne. In my case I can usually play just fine, but sometimes for a few days I am unable to play due to the same symptoms. I remember especially the cases where we had multiple people at my place with their computers and these issues were present. Correct port forwarding did not help at all. The problem however is not 100% related to many players trying to play at the same time. We've been able to play with a group and I've also had these problems alone. It just seems that bringing a new computer to the system makes this problem more likely, but this could also be just random luck. Any measures to find a cause have been in vain.
The only reasonable explanation I can think of is some kind of a problem with the ISP. It's just that I'm on the University campus network which is VERY top notch, very rarely has any problems at all, and is under no arbitrary limitations. Here's a page describing the network setup in case that might be of use: http://verkko.ayy.fi/
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#18
01-18-2011, 05:44 PM
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Quote:
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#19
01-24-2011, 03:40 PM
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I have the game on Steam as well. Just started playing over the weekend. I am suffering from the same unfortunate disconnections/freeze.
When I start a tutorial level/multiplayer game, it will work fine for a few minute and then the game freezes. When this happens, I will alt-tab immediately, usually the alt-tabbing solves the freezing problem and I can continue playing. (I find the freezing happen only when I respawn, so I am guessing it has something to do with the connection to login server updating the experience gained?)
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#21
03-24-2011, 01:44 PM
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It's almost April and nothing changed. I waited, wrote accurate reports, I did more than I had to just to make things easier for you but nothing changed. You could have offered an account for the native Linux version, I don't know, apologized in some way. Now, I know bug-fixing is not as easy as it sounds but you just forgot about me, a client that bought a copy of your product. And if you can forget about me, you can forget about my money as well, I won't be buying anything from you again.
And don't say "you could asked Valve for a refund" now, I didn't because I trusted you. But guess what, "indie", big companies, it's all the same. Do you think I'm angry for the money I lost? Not at all. I'm not even angry at the developers, I know how tough it can be to fix a bug you never encountered. I'm angry at how you treat your users, you pretend to help them and then, when they wait a bit for things to be fixed up, you think they ceased to exist and forget about them. I hope you'll have the decency not to delete this post...I don't have much to say but all I said I've been very polite and patient through the whole thing, it's not like I spammed you with requests and went bad-mouthing you on Internet forums. Why do you even act like that? Your problem is not with programming or software engineering or whatever, your problem is way beyond the realms of computers, it's communication. Last edited by Wayne; 03-24-2011 at 08:32 PM. Reason: I personally edited something that was preposterous and in a tone that didn't fit my original intentions
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#22
03-24-2011, 04:50 PM
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Wayne,
I appreciate your patience and accurate reports. I have carefully reviewed everything you've submitted and found no solution to your problem. My best guess is that there's a network issue related to your Netgear DGN1000 router or your Italian internet service provider. I would be happy to provide you with a free key for the native Linux version for your trouble. Please email support@nimblygames.com and I'll send the key. If I thought the native version would help I would have suggested it much earlier -- unfortunately you've stated that the problem occurs both under Windows and Linux and that you don't have problems with other Steam games, so the possibility that the non-Steam version will help you is low (you can test the native version with the free demo from http://altitudegame.com). I sincerely appreciate your effort to resolve this problem, and I'm sorry that we cannot find a way to make Altitude work on your machine. If you need help with a refund please email me at support@nimblygames.com.
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#23
03-24-2011, 08:31 PM
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I thank you personally for your offer but I'll have to refuse it, because I like to consider myself a coherent person. I was offended at the suggestion that I could be looking for a refund because, as I said, money were never what I cared about. I bought the game for a misery during a Steam sale, I never even thought about the idea of asking for a refund. It was being not notified of the status of my report that bugged me, not the impossibility to play the game or the money I spent on it.
After a month of being patient, I would have expected at least a reply saying that my problem is impossible to solve, I would gladly have accepted that just like I accepted all your previous replies. It isn't a bad response that bothers me, it's rather the lack of a response. Another users would have spammed you with posts saying "HALP ITZ NOT WORKIN!!!" all over the place, I just wrote lengthy and polite requests. At this point I already lost my hopes to ever play Altitude, I'm not doing it for me anymore - I'm doing it so that it won't happen to you in the future. So thank you but no, I'm afraid I'll have to politely refuse your offer. If you feel bad for accepting money for a product that didn't work, just donate part of it to charity and you can consider me satisfied. But next time you can't fix a bug and there's some poor user waiting to play the game, just tell him or her a definitive answer, or at least have some kind of bug trackers where users can follow the status of their reports. I hope I've been helpful and no hard feelings, it was never my intention to sound menacing or arrogant and I just wanted to bring some light on something that other users would probably be afraid to say.
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#24
03-24-2011, 10:40 PM
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Wayne,
Props to not yelling all over the place on the tech support forum but it seems like you missed lamster's post above from three months ago. Sounds to me like he already pretty clearly said "there is no solution for this", which is the answer you wanted. In the more than 2+ years that I've followed this game, lamster's technical support has always been the best, super timely and thorough. This doesn't seem to me like an exception. Quote:
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Linear Mode
