False Alarm
it was nothing more than a network gateway or router down somewhere between me and the server

he was back several minutes after, with packets dropping and lag, but not crashed: the campaign stand still

SORRY for the Noise!!!!

definitvely dropping packets between my and the server.
too laggy to play correctly (exploded two times with my hellfires cauz of that)

Good luck anyway for Mars and eric trying to take out with me this damned base of chiang rai.

hope 'ure successful!
i'll be back when the "droppings" stops.

Good luck all!

Well we would have had better luck, but our missiles stoppws registering any hits. So we couldnt do any damage. Also most of the AI is frozen up not proceeding with their missions. Looks like the server might need a restart.

EDIT: Good news, after all pilots left the server. Upon re-connection everything appears to be functioning properly again.

Just connected successfully- so count me on the blue side for tomorrow!

another side effect of the "packet dropping" phenomena
directplay 4 doesn't like this kind of inet network problem,. and infortunately, hamachi (even a professional vpn equipement )doesn't handle this .

Is there a solution? maybe rewrite the code entirely, or/and even separating the server and the client code (two exes differents for example) It is very easy to say... and im not asking for this! (not the place)

yea me and Eric got Dp error and CDT'd..Spectre ur server was fine untill u started to host TS..didn't have any prob's before that..I doubt thats the problem,but i thought i'd post about it anyhow.

But it does mean less bandwidth for the EECH server if it's being shared for the TS server.

I guess there's not much we can do besides testing with and without TS.

Predator, I'll sign you up for the blue side. It looks like spectre's the only pilot gunning for red!

Is anyone using the TS server at this point? If not I'll temporarily disable it to see if connections improve. Right now for some bizarre reason I can't "see" the server even though the server list shows it running. I really need to get a good VPN remote access program that runs under W2K so I can monitor the server remotely again...

Unfortunately it looks like the server is still down even though the server list shows it up. I am guessing we just cant connect since spectre isn't connected into Hamachi.

By the way I have created a Teamspeak server to cover while testing to see if Spectre's TS server was having a negative effect.
IP: 68.104.207.63

Our network administrator informed me that he is upgrading some hardware, so the network will be up and down for a bit - probably until tomorrow. I'll post a message as soon as everything is stable again.

well that might be the problem then,because yesterday it took me an age to conn,where-as before i would conn real quick to ur server Spectre..hope this works

Well for now the server is back up again, although our net admin says our connection may go up and down a few times today while he tests a new firewall. I also had to restart the campaign from yesterday's save file as today's appears to be corrupt (crashes EECH on load). I had heard rumours of problems with saving games under W4T2 - possibly this is related? I've also shut down the TS server for the time being to see if performance goes up. It's possible that the problems folks were having yesterday were all related to our network going up and down. Once everything is running smoothly again I'll restart the TS server and see if it effects performance.

Was flying with Eric, Martino and Predator earlier. Eric reckons he was fine flying on his lonesome until everyone else jumped in, then the problems started. Pilots not able to join squadrons locked by other pilots, false targets and directplay errors etc.

Eric has since setup a server of his own. Martino and I joined and everything ran pretty smoothly.

So my guess is that either your network is still having problems or configured incorrectly. That, or Hamachi is at fault. I suspect it has more to do with the former, since conditions weren't this poor at the start of the campaign.

Out of curiosity, what are your server's system specs and what's the speed of your connection?

The connection today has been very sporatic - my internet connection has been up, down, slow, fast, you name it. Normally everything operates smoothly, the net admin is still breaking in his new firewalls.

The PC I use is a 1.4 GHz P4 with 1GB RAM; the net connection speed is 3-Megabit.

My concern is that save files are being corrupted somehow. I first noticed some of the anomolies (strike missions against a friendly base) after I restored from a save file. I also had a problem with today's save file crashing EECH.

Once everything is back to normal here networkwise, I'll check the saved campaign again to see if the problem persists. If all else fails I'll start over with a fresh campaign.

Well I think we can safely assume that TS isn't a source of the problems we're experiencing so i guess that'll remain an option for future use.

If you're going to start a new campaign, which did you have in mind?

What "aren't that important"?

Perhaps we'd be better off running a series of skirmishes in a sinlge theater to constitute a campaign? We could tally up the total wins for each faction to determine the overall winner of the 'campaign'? We wouldnt have to rely so much on savegames and we'd probably cut down navigation time by a significant ammount.

What do you think?

Damn savegame bug...

While the skirmish idea might work, it would still require the entire skirmish to be completed over the course of several days (unless folks are connecting and playing consistently). In the even of any crash of the server, we're forced to go back to square one if the save games option doesn't work. I'll continue to make mutiple saves on my server as a possible recovery method; it seems that not all save game files are corrupted.

On a more positive note, I finally got a UPS for the server, so it should remain operational during the occasional power outages we've been experiencing brought on by occasional summer thunderstorms.

The server is back online, running the most recent save game that wasn't corrupted. Let me know if anyone has any connection or in-game problems.

For the record, my vision for my server was to create an ongoing campaign environment where folks could jump in and contribute towards accomplishing the team goals. In particular I chose campaigns over skirmishes because I wanted an ongoing campaign that would last days if not weeks. Folks could jump in to see the updated campaign status, check for hot spots and help their team push towards victory. Mars really helped with my vision when he created the signup thread - now we had humans joining teams to compete against each other, as opposed to flying together against the enemy AI. As most already know, the greatest enjoyment of MP play is competing (and winning!) against human opponents.

If the campaign crashes half-way through and we have to start from scratch, then everyone's efforts are basicly wasted - hence the importance of the same game files.

Since we can't reliably count on save game files to work consistently, I will try to make campaign save games more frequently. From my experience not all save games get corrupted, so the more I create the better our chances for recovery from a server crash with minimal loss of campaign progress.

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution, but it's probably the best we can do if we want the campaign to have more meaning than just an opportunity to fly online.