[16.7] Player stalls out while first connecting

[Raist_]

So, this may or may not be a bug. I'll admit that right off. I run a private, dedicated physical server for several friends of mine. Server has been running fine, no issues, no other changes (Other than Factorio version files over the last week) or other games running at the same time. Server has been running the experimental release 16 using the Windows zip package. No mods are in use.

One player, and only one player, was unable to connect after we upgraded our game to 16.6. No problems in 16.0, 16.1, or 16.2. We were all too busy playing, and skipped versions .3-.5. Also granted, his Internet connection has been known to be a bit iffy, but this has been a recurring problem for several days now and we've never seen his connection have problems to this extent. One of the other players attempted to host a private game from his house to let him connect to; same symptoms. Player did a full Steam verification of his game files; all was in order. Player can play his own single player game fine. We upgraded to 16.7 today; same player cannot connect. The rest of us ("rest" being 5 other people) can.

The symptom, is that upon connecting, the player begins to download the map, and immediately stalls out with the "Waiting for.." error message that everyone else gets to see. Eventually this times out. Every time. He did report that the map download rate was slower than he was expecting, but he's also a brand new player, so this could be immaterial. His ISP bandwidth is ~10M.

Now, the other part, which is frankly weird, is that while this is happening, the player is also completely unable to hear/talk through Discord. He can't hear us; he can't talk to us. It still shows him connected, but doesn't work. Once the connection has failed out and he's been booted from the Factorio server, Discord magically begins to function again.

Server log-current and current map file have been attached. Client IP and Handle have been changed to "***REDACTED***" to protect the [more or less] innocent. I updated to 16.7 today, restarted the physical server just in case, and had him try again. The log-current is the result of that.

[TruePikachu]

Discord's voice chat uses UDP for communication, as does Factorio's netcode. I think these might be related to each other; either network saturation or bad infrastructure.

[AreYouScared]

Does this player happen to live in Australia? And how far is the server from this player.

[Raist_]

Both player and server are in the Midwest US, one state apart.

I'd also note that some of the other players (including the one who tried to host a test game from his house for troubleshooting) live in the same general area (within a county or two of each other).

Player with problem also has no desync reports in his archive folder. Problem has not corrected itself in the several days since, either.

[chrisgbk]

I'd recommend running wireshark and capturing a log of network activity when the player attempts to connect, both on the server side and the player side, and providing for the devs to analyze. However, it's possible this is an ISP, router, or firewall related issue, so it might be outside of the devs control.

[Twinsen]

Sounds like a very poor internet connection, especially over UDP.

Also I would say that the game version has no influence since we didn't change anything network wise in 16.2 - 16.6. Until you can test repeatedly that a specific version works while another does not, I will blame it on coincidence.

Not much we can do, but you can:
- Limit the upload speed of the map when creating the server. Use the speed he's getting minus 20%, or less.
- He can slightly reduce the UDP traffic by exiting discord during the map download.

[Raist_]

Legit. Thank you for the reply.

Are there any likely ramifications I should be aware of with the following test case:

Update to 16.14, check.
Then downgrade to 16.2, check.
Then incrementally go up until it breaks. Downgrade one lower, recheck.

My hope was to keep the map the same, in order to preserve variable consistency.

[Twinsen]

Sounds good.