SEQ not decoding at times

[RavenCT]

Now I've had enough experience with it to know that you have to wait at times for a zone to decode, but it seems lately that since the last build, there are times when a zone won't decode at all. As a matter of fact, some times when that happens I get the "dot running across" the screen again.

I've made sure that I've pulled the latest CSV tree, did a:
make -f Makefile.dist
.configure
make
make install

so I should have a clean build. One thing to note with this is that it was happening to me last night trying to zone from DL into Karnors... It wouldn't decode, zone out and back, no decode, zone out and back... Poof, decoded almost as soon as I landed in the zone.

Stranger and stranger... I'll see if I can get the message it puts to the console when it doesn't decode (there's something there, but stupid me forgot to write it down or anything...)

Anyone else had this happening?

[cbreaker]

Yea, this has happened to me a bunch of times. However, I'd never had a time when I was not able to decode the zone after some time (sometimes up to 30 minutes)

Some notable zones are WL, Swamp of no hope, Kithicor Woods, Oasis. There's a few more but I forget what they are. These zones tend to take a long time to decode; sometimes they decode right away.

I'm thinking that the keys are sometimes more difficult to find. Perhaps this was a slight modification on Verants part, nothing to break SEQ, but causes longer decode times occationally..

But, I dunno, could be wrong. Probably. Most likely.

[RavenCT]

Strange thing about it finding the keys is that if I remeber correctly, the SEQ console would say that it found a key, found a key, found a key, found a key, or something like that...

Stranger still...

[STiLE]

Fear Plane has never once decoded for me. Ive zoned in Lord only knows how many times and sat there for who knows how many hours waiting for it. Even tried camping and coming back a few times and nothing. That sux considering it would be nice to know when my fookin epic mob is up. Oh well. Guess I get to do it the hard way

[S_B_R]

If you guys would have used the search function you'd have your answers already... Raven, shame on you. You should know better

It usually takes something to spawn to get a zone to decode. So for the Vast majority of times (like 99%) zoning and re-zoning won't help, and in some cases it could make your problem worse. You'll see this happen in less busy zones more often than the busy ones. The other 1% of the time you likely missed a zone packet and the zone might not ever decode.

So. Anyway. The Moral of this story is Don't zone back and forth over and over agian, just wait a while, or spawn a pet, or kill something and when it respawns you should get a decode. Or even get a friend to zone in after you that will work too.

Oh and use the search function in the future please...

[RavenCT]

Your correct, I know that SEARCH should be our first line of attack... but what I was talking about here was not a zone that was sparsly populated either with mobs or without them. I've had it happen in Karnors and Dreadlands... each time with more that 30 people in each zone... both of which I know that there are lots of spawns/deaths/etc...

It was just some strangeness with SEQ and I was curious about it...

Ah well, SEQ compiles on

[RSB]

I sometimes have to shut down SEQ, Log off my character, start SEQ, log back in and BAM everything works. But for me I'm starting to think that it may have been due to my Hub going bad....my new hub to GRRRR

RavenCT - it doesn't say it has found a key, it says it has found a POSSIBLE key if I'm not mistaken.

Could it be because SEQ just misses a packet on the network somehow?

RSB

[Dok]

On a semi-related issue, many times when I do zone in, I'm only getting some of the mobs to decode. The rest that dont, stay as unknown. This doesn't happen all the time, but definatly more often then not. Its just been recently since its started doing this (last 3 months probably). And yes, since I know someone is going to ask, I am using the lastest CVS.

Anyone experience anything like this?

On a side note, I am running VMWare to run linux, so it may be just vmware dropping packets once in a while, or maybe even my hub doing it, but I'd like to see if anyone else has any ideas as I'm out.

[Cryonic]

Yes. My fix was to use a better system with a PCI nic, rather than my P150 laptop with a pcmcia nic. The problem showed up because I was downloading stuff in the background, so the tcp/ip stack gives priority to traffic needing to go to the machine (rather than processing traffic going to other machines like my EQ box). So, built SEQ on a Quad PPro 200 with a 10/100 3Com Server NIC and it doesn't happen anymore.

[RSB]

The more I think about it the more it seems that it is due to packets being dropped as a possible cause.

My hub seems to be having a hard time transferring data that might have a larger packet size.

I can send 64k files and it is a bit slow but 128k normally times out. EQ is encredibly laggy and web pages don't fully load but MSN and IRC don't seem to be effected much.

I put a crossover cable between my windows machine and all works fine but going thru the hub with a number of different new cables and testing different combinations of ports show they all suffer from this lag. The hub shows no collisions.

My hub might have been going bad for a while can SEQ is just showing the end result of that.

RSB

[Ratt]

Oddly enough, I've experienced this.

Couple weekends ago, I took one of my SEQ laptops over to a friends house. My SEQ laptop works flawlessly on my home and work networks... but at my friends house, it had trouble decoding and was generally being a pain in the ass... just like he kept complaining about to me (which I blew him off) ...

But it seems the quality of your network does infact play a big part in how SEQ operates... which makes a bit of sense, but I wouldn't have believed it would have that large of an impact if I didn't see it for myself.

[cbreaker]

Yea, I concur =)

As the machine running EQ can simply get retransmits of the data it needs due to lost packets, SEQ has no such luxery since it's just watching and can't ask for retransmits. If a packet was missed the first time, I don't know if SEQ will look for it a second time.

Perhaps if SEQ was designed with this in mind, it could watch out for this, but it would probably involve a lot of extra coding that would probably not be worth it in the long run.

-cb

ps. I could always be wrong, in fact I probably am.

[high_jeeves]

I have noticed in the past, while doing other high activity transfers on my network, that while there is lots of traffic on the network, SEQ has problems. I would guess that in high traffic situations, a network card in promisc. mode (or atleast some network cards) drop lots of packets. This could also be the reason that on machines with a high datarate setting, data gets lost.

--Jeeves

[Virusmaster]

This has been an issue with me too at times. I agree with all of you EXCEPT S_B_R, with his "use the search function, your answer is in there" attitude, because he is simply WRONG. This is not the "spawn a pet" problem. I know this because I play a mage. I spawn a pet all the time, sometimes just to get a look at an empty zone to see what mobs are out there. What I've found almost always works is shutting SEQ down, restarting it and re-logging. That seems to work every time. And yes, some zones have this problem much more than others, and it's not due to the player or mob count. I'm thinking it may be a dropped packet problem, but I am no expert. Could be something else. Whatever it is, when "V" finds out I hope they exploit the problem and break SEQ, because then the problem will get fixed Until it's fixed I can live with it. It's really only a problem on raids when I don't have the luxury of logging for a few, and even then I can fake a LD if I have to.

BTW, you guys are the best. All of you, even the impatient ones that say "Use the search feature moron".

[high_jeeves]

I don think there is anything here for "V" to exploit.. the packet gets sent.. the EQ box receives it and ack's. The SEQ box drops it... its a freak of the network and has nothing to do with anything that could be exploited.

--Jeeves