Rant/Plea to fix Wing Beacon issues present since 2.1

bennysheen

B
BluStar said:
we dont have to anything, we are players not beta testers, if someone submits bug its from their own good will
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I've reported similar issues here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/306159-Wing-bugs-still-prevail-since-2-1

This has a full verbose netlog from all 3 commanders in the wing, including video footage of the bugs as they occurred during the session.

Not to preach or repeatedly state the obvious, but any Wing related issues really need the verbose netlogs from all involved parties otherwise, as Malic quite correctly states:-

"For wing issues, it is dealing with peer-to-peer data transfer."

There's not much for FD to go on unless they've got the whole story, not just the net traffic on one particular machine.

Appreciate it's a lot of work to setup and collate all this, whilst trying to enjoy the game at the same time! :)

Cheers o7
 
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Von Shadow

Von Shadow
I posted a support request 2 months ago but got ignored....
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/285921-Crashy-Laggy-network-wing-gameplay

Same 3 players as 'bennysheen' above.

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With wings gameplay in its current state i cannot see how 2.3's proposed 'multicrew' patch is going to be anything but unusable features.... we need a major netcode bug smash patch

There are clearly a lot of commanders going to a lot of trouble to provide data for these issues.... Would be nice to get a developer comment to say whether they have a handle on the problems yet (first step to resolution)

If not ... what do FDev want or need urgently from us to make this problem go away!
 
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ElectricZ

ElectricZ
Thanks to everybody who's replied and especially put in a bug report, with an extra gold star for Benny who supplied netlogs and videos from everybody in his wing. It's important for anybody who's run into this issue to at least put in a "me too" on the threads where it's been reported. The more people who do, the more attention it's likely to get.

I've added a new issue, #5 on the list, about wingmates not showing up on the scanner, only the square wing beacon icon which jumps around the screen instead of updating smoothly. It sure seems to me that this is a root cause of many problems, that this hopping wing beacon doesn't sync with the wingmate's current position, so when locked on it you drop wherever it happens to be rather than your wingmate's position.

I also think from observations in the game that when nav-locked onto a wingmate's beacon, your ship's motion becomes locked to it. In open space you don't notice it as much because you have no frame of reference. But while docked, it means you get dragged along with it as it spins around the station which makes it seem like rotational correction is off. But once the bug manifests itself, you can't shut it off. The glitched out graphics are just a bonus, but always happen around the same time.

Please, anybody who's encountered this problem, speak up about it. To reiterate, it's been around since at least May with the release of 2.1.0.3 and has not been fixed for seven months. If it doesn't get fixed with the next hotfix release, it probably won't get fixed until 2.3 in 2017.
 

bennysheen

B
ElectricZ said:
Thanks to everybody who's replied and especially put in a bug report, with an extra gold star for Benny who supplied netlogs and videos from everybody in his wing. It's important for anybody who's run into this issue to at least put in a "me too" on the threads where it's been reported. The more people who do, the more attention it's likely to get.

I've added a new issue, #5 on the list, about wingmates not showing up on the scanner, only the square wing beacon icon which jumps around the screen instead of updating smoothly. It sure seems to me that this is a root cause of many problems, that this hopping wing beacon doesn't sync with the wingmate's current position, so when locked on it you drop wherever it happens to be rather than your wingmate's position.

I also think from observations in the game that when nav-locked onto a wingmate's beacon, your ship's motion becomes locked to it. In open space you don't notice it as much because you have no frame of reference. But while docked, it means you get dragged along with it as it spins around the station which makes it seem like rotational correction is off. But once the bug manifests itself, you can't shut it off. The glitched out graphics are just a bonus, but always happen around the same time.

Please, anybody who's encountered this problem, speak up about it. To reiterate, it's been around since at least May with the release of 2.1.0.3 and has not been fixed for seven months. If it doesn't get fixed with the next hotfix release, it probably won't get fixed until 2.3 in 2017.
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Thanks for the Gold star ElectricZ :)

I think your subsequent analysis is bang on, to the point where FD should release the source code to you and you can fix it :D

Seriously, the wing beacon jumping around all over the place explains a great deal (at least to my tiny brain).

How can the netcode sync your ship with your wingmate's beacon when the beacon's position can't be determined? (Manifests itself by the beacon jumping all over the place and your ship dropping out at its last known position - according to the peer-to-peer net conversation).

I guess you also see this in Supercruise (assuming one successfully manages to get into SC in the first place!) - I've very rarely been able to follow the wake of anyone in my wing as they stutter from one random location to the next.

(I'll try and get some netlogs and footage of that too).

I also think you've nailed it with the rotational correction issue. It manifests itself as a rotational correction bug, but its your ship trying to adjust its position based on your docked wingmate's nav beacon (without releasing it or something?).

It'll have to get fixed before the release of 2.3. I don't fancy having someone piloting my ship one second, and then being transported into the heart of a nearby white dwarf the next! Mind you, reckon they'd be worse off :)

o7
 

DOCa Cola

DOCa Cola
Yes. I experienced with wing landing bug today every single time i was in a 3 player wing. We were doing a single hop trading run and every and each single time the second or third wing member entering a 'station instance' got the rotational drift in a station. It was very annoying and we had to log out often to be even be able to land at a station at all.

It was to the point where it was barely playable. Two ships also had docking computer which seemed to try to to correct for the rotation but did more harm than good by ramming the ships into the station buildings multiple times.
 
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Karunamon

Karunamon
Eodemos said:
There is an interesting post here stating various scenarios of what could go wrong when not all players have port forwarding setup correctly.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...DRASTICALLY!?p=4267284&viewfull=1#post4267284

There should really be some check in the game, may be at start-up, that verifies that port forwarding is working and gives players a heads-up if it is not.
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Or we can go full nuclear, and force those players to solo if it is not. Testing if ports are open is very easy from a programming standpoint. Throw in a packet loss check while we're at it.

Said it before, and I'll say it again: A player should not be forced to bear the consequences of another player's poor infrastructure or configuration.
 

ElectricZ

ElectricZ
Eodemos said:
There is an interesting post here stating various scenarios of what could go wrong when not all players have port forwarding setup correctly.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...DRASTICALLY!?p=4267284&viewfull=1#post4267284

There should really be some check in the game, may be at start-up, that verifies that port forwarding is working and gives players a heads-up if it is not.
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This is not a port forwarding issue. I said it in the OP and I'll say it again.

There was a distinct line between 2.0 and 2.1 when these problems started occurring for me and my wingmates. There was a before period, when the wing functions mostly worked (outside of some instancing issues) to when they STOPPED working right after 2.1 was launched. That is to say, I used to be able to play for hours on end while in a wing without dropping connection, when I could lock my nav beacon on a wingmate and reliably drop in on their beacon, and I could dock while winged up without the station going gray and slamming me into the walls.

This changed immediately after one of the 2.1 hotfixes.

Bug reports filed by other players support this. Right around 2.1.02/.03 something changed in the software to cause the wing beacon functionality to go on the fritz.

FD changed something in the client or on the back end at that that broke some of the wing functionality. I'd really like them to fix it.
 

kofeyh

kofeyh
It's worth noting that most of the issues raised by the OP actually need to be solved for when the update arrives with multi-crew. Because it will almost certainly be the method used by frontier. It's possible frontier will rewrite a whole new wing/ multiplayer function. But I doubt it.

As someone who's previously had to use a VPN link to "fool" the matchmaking system in to linking me with other players, can only echo the OP's sentiments.

One of the more compelling aspects of ED, is wings and co-op play. It needs some long overdue work. I can't help but think other topics are getting far more focus and a bit of a push for "muh immersion" from PVE and PVP folk, in virtually everything, is just chewing too much of the developers' time.
 
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Kaocraft

Kaocraft
ElectricZ said:
1. Dropping connections/crash to main menu from wings during high/low wakes
2. Dropping to wing beacons in current position rather than the beacon position, often millions of meters away.
3. Rubber-band snapping back to the beacon location if the nav lock is not turned off and you low-wake away
4. Positional drifting caused by a wingmate's location changing, most evident when trying to dock at a station in an instance where a wingmate has already docked, resulting in a pilot's ship moving like rotational correction is off, making docking nearly impossible without relogging.
5. Wingmate does not appear on scanner, only the wing beacon, which skips around the scanner as the wingmate's position updates every few seconds.
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Can confirm I frequently experience all of these and I want it fixed. Would much rather see these problems fixed than yet another PVP-centric weapons/module tweak or another round of fiddling with Engineer recipes.
 

Deleted member 38366

D
Just to chime in...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ding-and-Departure-from-Station-while-in-Wing
(my own Bug Report of the "Wing Landing/Rotational Correction" issue, 06th Nov 2016)

When it comes to the Wing/Wing Beacon issue, this is what I've observed myself :
V2.0 and earlier : Wing Beacon (non-instanced) issue I could always fix by having Wingmates hopping out and back in, or follow me into the Instance (i.e. RES or CZ); me joining them however never seemed to work or help

Around mid-V2.0 and later, I experienced increasing amounts of lag spikes and connectivity-related issues. It seemed to get worse every week with nothing I could do about it.
Eventualy it got so bad that I found myself playing Solo Mode as a last-ditch fallback - which worked quite well. Still undesirable.
(Open Play : frequent timeouts, 1min Hyperjumps, 10-20sec to get a Docking Request granted, upto and including Docking Request timeouts, almost permanent Mission Board timeouts, severe instancing issues, Wingmen shooting invisible Targets etc.... basically close to becoming absolutely unplayable, most Wing Operations either resulting in "doesn't work", Client crashes [notably always my Wingmen, never my Client] or other anomalies)

Eventually and out of pure desperation, I followed the Frontier FAQ about disabling UPnP and using manual Port Forwarding (https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=33).
I had read that it improved instancing and general connectivity for alot of Players (Z4.Mafia made a post about it as well, stating it basically was a game-changer when it comes to instancing for his PvP gameplay)

Doing that massively improved my lag issues and seems to have helped Wing/General Instancing alot. Can't recall seeing a persistent "Wing Beacon only" issue after that (always resolved within ~5 sec).
Even my Wingmen don't get their "mandatory initial Client Crash after joining Wing" anymore.
Compared to what I experienced before, basically a difference like Day & Night. "Unplayable" vs. "about as good as it gets" as it stands now.

Still a few issues there (as that weird Station/Wing Bug mentioned) of course.
So if you haven't tried that out yet and have similar issues... I can only highly recommend trying it.
It is known, however, that it doesn't help every Player, a few reported "no changes" after testing it.
 
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stooger

S
Never trust UPnP. I know for a fact that I see much more people around compared to my "upnp" times. Game (or launcher) should really have some connectivity testing tool. Upnp doesn't work that great and turning it off means you have to manually edit a file... which is not hard or smt but still... This should be included in game options menu.
Also game is really sensitive to connection quality between players. I played with my friend and sometimes our ships were vanishing just like that (he's on my right few meters away and the next second he's gone). I filled a ticket because we have pretty good connection, ping 15-20 BUT from time to time we had 1-2 lost packets (in an hour of game time) and a ping jumping to ~100 from time to time. It was enough to cause dissapearing in an instance).
 

dynamicbob

Banned
D
stooger said:
Never trust UPnP. I know for a fact that I see much more people around compared to my "upnp" times. Game (or launcher) should really have some connectivity testing tool. Upnp doesn't work that great and turning it off means you have to manually edit a file... which is not hard or smt but still... This should be included in game options menu.
Also game is really sensitive to connection quality between players. I played with my friend and sometimes our ships were vanishing just like that (he's on my right few meters away and the next second he's gone). I filled a ticket because we have pretty good connection, ping 15-20 BUT from time to time we had 1-2 lost packets (in an hour of game time) and a ping jumping to ~100 from time to time. It was enough to cause dissapearing in an instance).
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UPnP has never been trustworthy, so many people think its half best at best, Port forwarding does help with sensitive connections, and frontier recently made networking matchmaking more aggressive, im seeing more commanders in open in key systems.

THe disappearing wing instances are well known, all i can suggest is not relying on it for good gameplay, but if u can get a match thats good
 

KING5TON

KING5TON
I've been playing again recently since a large number of the people I regularly play with have bought the game in the sale. Wings have been a bit shoddy overall. We have experienced similar issues to OP and I just think wings overall are a bit clunky and could do with a little bit of love from FD. It shouldn't be an oblique science to do things in wings, why not make things intuitive and easy to use.
 

EightRoundsRapid

EightRoundsRapid
kofeyh said:
I can't help but think other topics are getting far more focus and a bit of a push for "muh immersion" from PVE and PVP folk, in virtually everything, is just chewing too much of the developers' time.
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Agreed. The focus should be on actually being able to get into a game with others before getting into the finer details like how chaff should work, gimbals are too easy etc.
 

aliensporebomb

A
Hello all - bug #4 happened to me just yesterday during the closing hours of the Tchernobog Community Goal.

I believe I have a way it can be duplicated predictably.

-Fly in a wing
-I was not the one who originated the wing, my friend Cmdr Marith originated the wing.
-I was flying into the station and he started taking screenshots of me coming through the "mail slot" on his end
-When he started doing this the problem started.
-When he stopped taking pictures, the behavior stopped - mostly.
-I have a .MOV file of the behavior ceasing for a few moments.
-At a certain point he took another few shots and the behavior would not stop.
-At that point I saw my own ship flying ahead of me from my cockpit as if I was observing it from behind - very odd.
-Control of my ship then became super erratic and I was actually fined 200 cr for colliding with the inside of the station.
-I was unable to land due to control instability.
-I did manage to turn around and fly out of the station, cancel docking request then quit the app and rebooted and relaunched and all was ok.


I have some screenshots and movies I took with my phone while this was happening.

I'll put the videos up on youtube when I have time to upload them.
 
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AreZee

AreZee
aliensporebomb said:
Hello all - bug #4 happened to me just yesterday during the closing hours of the Tchernobog Community Goal.

I believe I have a way it can be duplicated predictably.

-Fly in a wing
-I was not the one who originated the wing, my friend Cmdr Marith originated the wing.
-I was flying into the station and he started taking screenshots of me coming through the "mail slot" on his end
-When he started doing this the problem started.
-When he stopped taking pictures, the behavior stopped - mostly.
-I have a .MOV file of the behavior ceasing for a few moments.
-At a certain point he took another few shots and the behavior would not stop.
-At that point I saw my own ship flying ahead of me from my cockpit as if I was observing it from behind - very odd.
-Control of my ship then became super erratic and I was actually fined 200 cr for colliding with the inside of the station.
-I was unable to land due to control instability.
-I did manage to turn around and fly out of the station then quit the app and rebooted and relaunched and all was ok.


I have some screenshots and movies I took with my phone while this was happening.

I'll put the videos up on youtube when I have time to upload them.
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there are already several threads about this docking problem in the bug report forum. Here's one of them: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/283463-Docking-area-transition-appears-to-shift-frame-of-reference-(drifting-into-station-walls-at-0-speed)
 
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