** Major Master Server Issues **

I believe it was around a year ago that Unity's official master server began experiencing major issues that caused it to randomly drop servers and be practically unusable.

To resolve this problem, a new master server was set up - and it has been working great!

A month ago, this beta server was taken down because it was causing too much load and crashing Unity's web server - and I switched my game to running off my own hosted master server, version 0.1.0, which is still listed as current on Unity's master server download page.

Since then, everything has been terrible.
My game went from around 70 players online at a time average to around 20 - with new players appearing and disappearing all time - just like Unity's main server was doing a year ago.

I just released a beta version of my game pointing to Unity's current, official master server - and it seems to be doing the same thing.


First of all, was the fixed master server code on the beta server ever applied to Unity's main master server - or is it the same server that didn't work at all a year ago?

Second of all, where can I download the working beta code so I can get my master server operational again?


Thanks very much,

-Aubrey

 

I never saw any of the beta code being released. We run our own masterserver&connection tester too..but we have a cronjob running to restart the services every few hours...

 

Restart every couple hours?
Ouch

Thanks for your reply though - the more voices, the better!

 

Pardon my brevity, but someone representing Unity really needs to take a look at this!

• The beta master server has been offline for a month, yet it's thread is still stickied as if nothing had happened.

• The official Unity hosted master server is practically unusable.

• Custom hosted implementations of the current official master server release are highly unstable.


Thanks!

-Aubrey

 

Many thanks Larus!

I will be running some more extensive tests in the near future (including installing the beta on my server), but after pointing my game to the latest Unity hosted beta master server, everything appears to be working great.

The beta NAT Facilitator always returns "ConnectionTesterStatus.Error" whenever I run Network.TestConnection(). Perhaps it isn't online at the moment?

All the best,

-Aubrey

 

Larus;

I am now hosting my own beta Master Server and Connection Tester, and they are working great!

Thanks for resolving this issue. Looking forward to the final master server release, so all the community can benefit from the latest version!

-Aubrey

 

Unfortunately, a new issue has appeared - and it's just as strange as the one that has been fixed.

As time progressed after deploying and utilizing a private beta master server, I began to receive reports with greater and greater frequency that players occasionally couldn't connect to it. Recently, I have begun to experience this first hand.

Instead of receiving a list of games from the master server, Unity calls OnFailedToConnectToMasterServer() inside my game.

The issue always resolves itself within a couple minutes - often within seconds, and generally occurs at different time to different players. It's not like the server is down during this period - it is just inaccessible to certain players and working fine for others.

I just pointed my game to Unity's beta server, and am experiencing the same problem as on my own server - with roughly the same frequency of occurrence.

Is anyone else suffering from this? Where should I begin attempting to isolate the problem?

In case of any problems reproducing this, I have plenty of players who experience this on a regular basis - and who would love to help sort it out.

Thanks,

-Aubrey

 

robur - that is exactly the same problem we are encountering. We are hosting our own master server and connection tester/nat facilitator and about once every hour I have troubles connecting to it for about five minutes while others can connect to it just fine.

When this happens, both the connection tester AND the master server are failing on the client! In other words when the error happens neither master server, nor connection tester requests are going through from the client's point of view. The log on the server says this:

19-04-2010 22:57:39     Facilitator: New connection established to xxx:56705
19-04-2010 22:57:41     New connection established to xxx:56705
19-04-2010 22:57:41     xxx:56705 has diconnected
19-04-2010 22:57:41     Facilitator: xxx:56705 has diconnected
19-04-2010 22:57:42     MasterServer: New connection established to xxx:56139
19-04-2010 22:57:42     Query request from xxx:56139
19-04-2010 22:57:42     Version 0.1.0 connected
19-04-2010 22:57:42     Fetching existing table Game name
19-04-2010 22:57:51     Query request from xxx:56139
19-04-2010 22:57:51     Version 0.1.0 connected
19-04-2010 22:57:51     Fetching existing table Game name

Note that the server says/thinks that the client is disconnecting, which is totally false. Even a restart of the client during this 'down period' will not remedy the situation as the server still thinks that the client disconnects after the reboot. Once about 5 minutes has passed then all is fine and dandy again.

Also note that the server thinks that the client fetched the games successfully after a few attempts but this is also false, as the client gets an error connecting both to nat facilitator/connection tester and master server.

Can we please get an official word on what is going on?
Also, can my team get the sources to the latest Master Server build (along with the newest connection tester)?

Thanks,
Tommi

 

Also, sometimes I get this lone line in the log on the client:

Timeout during connection test

No stack trace, no extra info, no nothing. The scary part is that once that happens the connection tester (Network.TestConnection()) is still reporting it's status as undetermined (instead of returning an error), so there is NO way to react to this! In essence the client just sits in the menu with a "Determining network capabilities" dialog indefinitely, as no error is reported!

Well, I'll file a bug report but word from the devs on this and the other issues I've had would be nice.

 

Thank you very much for your reply!

We will give the new build a spin and see how it goes. About the master server and connection tester issues - they always happen in tandem so if one of them fails the other will also fail. Not once has the master server failed without the connection tester failing and vice versa.

About using a timer - yes naturally but an arbitrary timer would not be as robust as a correct error code, but that was more of an academic issue than a real show stopper. In any case the bugs are filed and I will mail you the bug report numbers.

Thanks again for your reply! Greatly appreciated.
Tommi

 

Hi friends, I am first time here and really found ti good by all means, Infact the topic is good to read and and sending this page to my other firends because they are always asking me for the good resources to read out

 

Strange i missed this thread i think

Everything already said here, my own masterserver contester do have the same problems, what really bugs my players.

Any chance i could betatest this masterserver beta too?

Cheers
Ethan

 

I hate to throw in a stupid question into this mix, but is the 'new' beta based on 'new' version of RakNet or still beta 3.0 of RakNet? As in the v4.0 that Jenkins is working on because if it is something totally different than beta 3.0, you will have issues. I have been waiting on the next version of Unity presuming that either "a" Unity will have an updated RakNet in the client and new master code or "b" a way for us to download the "client" code for RakNet used in the newest Unity so that we can see how it is setup internally.

 

So does that mean they will be able to rectify the Server issues ?????? this time.
It would be nice for the server browser to actually work, favourites to actually save yada yada yada.
Funnily enough i found the Beta to be more stable even before they did the patch for the server browser.
So far I have experienced almost all of the issue at least once as I am sure many others have..........Oh and by the way what happened to our day 1 unlocks for pre purchase and battlefields.
Still having a blast, daughter was on most of yesterday and thought it was great but it could be so much better..