[Solved] Guest Always Gets Disconnected

[gerowen]

My wife and I tried playing this evening and were never able to get more than 2 or 3 minutes into a game before whoever was the guest would get disconnected.  I tried opening the ports on the firewall and disabling the firewall altogether on both machines.  I tried playing over the LAN and hosting the game thru the "Game Lobby" instead of going direct peer to peer over the LAN (With the STUN option enabled).  I tried both the version that ships from the Debian repo and the AppImage.  I tried disabling WiFi on both machines and tethering our phones to use those instead of our built-in WiFi cards on both machines.  Without fail, within 5 minutes at most whoever was the guest would get disconnected.  If I was hosting, she would get disconnected.  If we switched around and she hosted, I would get disconnected.

I understand that the game is alpha and there's gonna be bugs, but I see people playing so I'm assuming that this issue is unique to us or else nobody would be playing online, so I would like to get to the bottom of it.

Also, just to verify our router wasn't introducing some latency or that there were issues with our internet, I ran a few speed tests over the WiFi, since we're using WiFi to play, and this is about what my WiFi averaged in terms of speed and latency.

[gerowen]

Just tried using a VPN to route myself thru somewhere else, that didn't work.  Tried enabling "Full Cone NAT" on my router, that didn't work.  Still the guest gets kicked a few minutes after the game starts.

[Gurken Khan]

Hi @gerowen, welcome to the forums.

I'm afraid I can't really help, but did you look at the FAQ?

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/FAQ

[gerowen]

8 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

Hi @gerowen, welcome to the forums.

I'm afraid I can't really help, but did you look at the FAQ?

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/FAQ

Thanks for the welcome. And yes I had looked thru the FAQ already; it seems to cover more basic stuff about how the game works, but the multilayer portion didn't mention resolving network problems.

[Norse_Harold]

13 hours ago, gerowen said:

My wife and I tried playing this evening and were never able to get more than 2 or 3 minutes into a game before whoever was the guest would get disconnected.

I would like to help with this, but there isn't enough information here to know what the cause of the problem is. I would say that it's rare, but I can think of some possible causes. like wireless interference, router misconfiguration (for example use of port triggering instead of port forwarding or port mapping), use of a VPN protocol like wireguard that doesn't handle large packet sizes, malware protection that monitors and blocks network activity, etc.

I can help you interactively via IRC.

Otherwise, please post mainlog.html and userreport_hwdetect.txt from each computer. I would suggest that you try connecting both computers with ethernet cables and try connecting to someone else's hosted game, but the problem may not even be at the network at all. Maybe it's caused by competing or disrupting software on one of the computers. I also suggest testing other networked applications, specifically peer-to-peer UDP games like ioquake3.

[gerowen]

4 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:

I would like to help with this, but there isn't enough information here to know what the cause of the problem is. I would say that it's rare, but I can think of some possible causes. like wireless interference, router misconfiguration (for example use of port triggering instead of port forwarding or port mapping), use of a VPN protocol like wireguard that doesn't handle large packet sizes, malware protection that monitors and blocks network activity, etc.

I can help you interactively via IRC.

Otherwise, please post mainlog.html and userreport_hwdetect.txt from each computer. I would suggest that you try connecting both computers with ethernet cables and try connecting to someone else's hosted game, but the problem may not even be at the network at all. Maybe it's caused by competing or disrupting software on one of the computers. I also suggest testing other networked applications, specifically peer-to-peer UDP games like ioquake3.

So it turns out it's not 0 A.D. specifically.  I just played against my wife in a round of Warzone 2100 and though it didn't disconnect, it would take moments where it would freeze for several seconds and we'd have a little icon on the right side of the screen telling us the clients were re-syncing.  So it's something to do with my networking setup.  I'm using a GL-iNet Flint2 OpenWRT based WiFi router.

[gerowen]

I just wanted to reply to this topic to let everybody know that I figured out the problem.  There is some kind of issue with the Realtek 8520BE wireless card in my wife's laptop.  We're using the firmware-realtek package to enable it and after a lot of troubleshooting, we narrowed it down to that WiFi card.  It even caused a hard reboot when we tried playing one game together.  I was able to play with my brother between a Linux and macOS machine, she was able to play with the firmware removed and using her phone tethered over USB and everything, but if she tries to play with her built-in wireless card the problems return.

I have a spare WiFi card laying around I may try to swap into it and see if it works better.

[Norse_Harold]

10 hours ago, gerowen said:

I just wanted to reply to this topic to let everybody know that I figured out the problem.  There is some kind of issue with the Realtek 8520BE wireless card in my wife's laptop.

Great, glad that our troubleshooting session helped narrow things down enough to identify this issue as the cause of the symptoms.

For those watching at home, logs of the troubleshooting conversation on IRC are here and here.

Before I buy new hardware I do some searching for discussion of how well it's supported by Linux. Fortunately, there are pretty thorough and updated lists of which wifi products are supported here.

Edited September 2 by Norse_Harold

[gerowen]

Dug out a spare wifi card I had left over from another laptop I worked on.  This one is still Realtek, but a slightly older model and it worked great.  I'm not sure if the card itself was faulty, or if the firmware available for it on Debian just isn't the greatest.  Either way though, we just played a round of 0 A.D. and had no problems for the entire duration, so problem solved, :-)