Handling disconnections

MeltdownZA

I was playing against my friend today. He would be in the game for about 10-15 seconds then would just disconnect.
I however had no disconnection issues at all.

I assume its safe to say his internet connection is the problem? He uses the new 10 meg ADSL here in South Africa, but I've heard the exchanges are not handling it too well, could this be the cause? I'm also in South Africa but use the 4 meg ADSL.

Are there any buffer settings I can change to make the setting more stable?

Thanks

mindlube

I haven't seen any such settings, but I guess it points out that you should write y our game to allow reconnections & restoring of game state, if at all possible.

dreamora

A bad connection can't be fixed.
But you could change your configurations on your photon server and raise the timeout and explicitely use TCP connections instead of UDP to get a more guaranteed connection.

But if your game is action oriented and focuses on low latency, there is really not much you can do, players with bad lines drop out of such games regularly, commercial games at times even issue temporal banes to prevent such players from messing up team based games totally (same as with max ping / latency values)

MeltdownZA

Since I will be using the Photon cloud service I assume 'I' won't be able to up the timeout or change to explicit TCP?

dreamora

change to TCP is no problem, but you will need to change the PUN code yourself.

timeout is out of your hands though thats true.
But if you are about south afrika it might be favorable to host it down there as SAs interconnect hops are crap at best as you likely know and if you create something focused at your local market I would definitely weight the needs on latency vs not maintaining your own machine

Kaiserludi

MeltdownZA wrote:

Since I will be using the Photon cloud service I assume 'I' won't be able to up the timeout or change to explicit TCP?

The decision about the used protocol tcp vs. udp is totally up to the client. The server will use for communication with that client the protocol, which the client has specified on establishing the connection.

MeltdownZA

dreamora wrote:

change to TCP is no problem, but you will need to change the PUN code yourself.

timeout is out of your hands though thats true.
But if you are about south afrika it might be favorable to host it down there as SAs interconnect hops are crap at best as you likely know and if you create something focused at your local market I would definitely weight the needs on latency vs not maintaining your own machine

Thanks, but the game is only being developed in South Africa, it will be played across the rest of the world

Tobias

Sooner or later, Photon Cloud will add regional hosting but we can't yet say where those will be located and if that helps you in SA.

Give TCP a chance.
It's not exposed in the API of PUN (cause we favor UDP), so search the code for .UDP and make that .TCP. Also make sure to change the server port from :5055 to :4530.

mindlube

Tobias, sorry to jack this thread but if I'm using RPCs is it safe to assume they are reliable and it's not necessary to change UDP -> TCP? Thanks and sorry if it's obvious I'm pretty new to Photon.

Tobias

RPCs are always sent reliable in Photon Unity Networking, yes.