Frontier-hosted "Proxy Client" as a Handover/Catch-all for disconnecting players

[CaptainKremmen]

Hi FD.

Is it technically possible for you to implement the following:


Develop "Proxy Clients", to be hosted alongside existing servers

These would be capable of doing the same job as the regular player clients. As there is no "player" behind them, though, they just sit there...

...until an actual player in an instance fully disconnects from its N peer-to-peer environment.

At that point, the remaining clients would arrange handover of the various objects being controlled by the "lost" player client (as they presumably do now), but also handover of the "lost" player ship to an FD Proxy Client.

The Proxy Client would step in as a short-term owner of the disconnected player's ship. From the remaining players' perspectives, it would allow that ship to...

• Take evasive action w.r.t. incoming fire.
• Correctly receive and represent hits to shields and hull.
• Close any open hardpoints.
• Manage energy pips.
• Move asap beyond mass-lock or mass disruption range.
• Immediately spool up hyperspace to the nearest star (or, if range-limited, local frameshift), and make a jump out to safety.
• If docking permission was open at time of client loss, run the AI docking sequence... and bring the ship in to the pad.

On successful FSD departure or ship destruction, close off any peer-to-peer instancing involvement, log the final state of the "recovered" player ship with the central servers, and go back to being dormant.


Client-side logic to manage handover

Clients would need changes to know where to find the Proxies, should they need them. They would need thresholds for non-responsive peers that avoid "hair-trigger" handover.


Anti-Script-Kiddie Stuff

Build a useful mechanism to help people, and the donkey squad will obviously try to break it. A Proxy Client handover system would obviously want to record client sources of such handovers, to make sure smart alecs don't bump people out of instances as "funny jokes". Client interaction is presumably trackable on an account basis, so it's not like we're all anonymous in FD's eyes... so it should be quite manageable.


Awesomely clever Hand-Back Recovery?

Say my internet link dies and I get a "you have been disconnected from server" message... while I was sitting in an instance with three other players.

I log in again, hit Open Play, watch the spinny orange ship... and come back into the game in the same instance, with those three same players... who didn't even notice my disconnection. If the Proxy Client could simply hand BACK control to my real client once it came back, how cool would that be? My ship would have been run by AI for 30 seconds... then given back.



Anyway, just a few brain dump ideas.

 

[Mephane]

This would only shift the problem from manually disconnecting the internet connection towards blocking the IP addresses of other players in the instance, with the same effect (i.e. combat logging).
Their clients couldn't connect to you any more, would all report to the ED server that you were disconnected, while your client at the same time is still happily connected to the ED server, and reports all the other guys as disconnected from you. Since the server would have no way to determine whether it was one player blocking everyone else, or a bunch of players collectively blocking the same player, or a technical problem entirely outside of each player's domain, it could in that case do exactly nothing but accept that these players are now in diverging instances.

In other words, a lot of work for ED to generate only little one-time hassle for notorious combat loggers (find a software utility to rapidly block a specific IP, then use that instead whatever method of combat logging was employed before).