Summary:
I have bad internet, so sometimes my network latency is very high. But my bandwidth is always high enough to do normal things like streaming videos, for example.This makes it very very difficult for me to join a multiplayer game, but if I am able to successfully download the map and join the game, then I have no further problems playing the game at all. So my bad internet is only a problem during joining, not during playing.
The main problem is that the server and client software are too eager to abort the connection while downloading the map. If they just held onto the connection for longer, then I would be able to join and play and enjoy the game.
Also, for some reason the client UI periodically freezes while trying to download the map.
Log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwygGX ... WNneGU0eUU
Details:
1. (What did you do?):I tried to join a multiplayer game listed on the public games list.
2. (What happened?):
A progress bar appears saying "Downloading map ([...] MB. [...] kB/s. ETA [...])" and the progress bar begins to fill up. Then another progress bar appears saying "Server is not responding" and it begins to fill up. Both progress bars continue to fill up at the same time.
After a few seconds (usually about 2 to 20 seconds), both progress bars stop filling up and the text stops changing. The whole UI of the game is totally frozen: If I drag another window (operating system: Windows 7) so that it overlaps the Factorio window and then I drag it away again, then the Factorio window will not be redrawn.
After a few more seconds (usually about 2 to 20 seconds), the game will unfreeze and the progress bars will continue to fill up.
After a few more seconds, the game will freeze again. These freezes and unfreezes will continue to happen over and over until either the game is successfully joined or the server drops me from the game.
If I do successfully join the game, then I am able to enjoy playing the game fully and I do not encounter any more network connectivity problems at all.
3. (What did you expect to happen instead?):
I expected that the game UI would not freeze ever.
I expected that I would not be dropped from the server, because clearly I am successfully downloading data from the server despite my high latency of connection.
I expected that the "Server is not responding" progress bar should always be reset back to zero whenever the "Downloading map (...)" progress bar is going up.
I am especially displeased when the "Server is not responding" progress bar fills up while the "Downloading map (...)" progress bar is still filling up, because that means that my client software aborted the connection before the server aborted the connection, which is not what I want my client software to do.
Other details:
The steps to reproduce the bug are: Come over to my house with my bad internet connection and then try to join a multiplayer game.It happens almost every time, but occasionally (when my internet is not so bad, I guess) I do not have any problems joining a multiplayer game.
This has been a problem for a long time, starting sometime in 0.14
I have experienced this problem on two different computers (both with Windows 7 installed). Also, I have not experienced this problem when I am at the university instead of at my house. So that's why I think that the problem is related to my bad internet connection at my house.
Log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwygGX ... WNneGU0eUU
It looks like the contents of the log file will be useful to you. In this specific instance, I tried to join a multiplayer game and then I was dropped from the game before I could finish downloading the map. I think I tried two or three times before quitting the game.
