TOPIC:

Hi, after a few years, I'd tried a few games. Today the BusyBee server rebooted twice whilst in the middle of a game. Company progress was gone, server returned to starting year. Any light on this?

Hi,

We just upgraded to 1.11.1 and it seems that since that upgrade this is the behavior of our servers...
To be fair, I am not sure if we can fix it easily, since a brand new OpenTTD version could introduce a lot of changes for which we need to rebuild the software which controls the server... the main problem is that BTPro is not maintaining that software and the person who was developping it is not really interested anymore to maintain it I think... we can always try to ask him though

Question now is: should we downgrade our servers back to 1.10.3, which was the last version that worked correctly...

Oppinions please?

I think we should observe/test/play version 1.11.1 for a while. Give it a chance
More oppinions, please!

I appreciate your honest perspective Frank. So far 40% of my games crashed, which would be reason for me to vote for downgrading. I take into account version 1.11 did not come with many important features, so what would we really miss?

However, if we'd go back to 1.10.3, would that mean we stay on that version forever? Is there anything we could do as a community to get a programmer (either the old one or a new one) interested?

Debug information regarding BusyBee server (I haven't played the other servers recently):

I noticed sometimes a player is unable to use any commands in the chat. For instance, when you type !rules in the chat, the server does not respond, although the typed text appears in the chat. If one doesn't get an answer to one command, he doesn't get an answer to other commands either, no matter what command or whether one tries later. It simply seems in these cases there is some connection lost, although the rest of the game appears to function normal. I haven't seen the code of course, but to me it wouldn't sound too unlogical the server reboots after a while simply because this disconnection is detected.

Importantly, the phenomenon seems to happen right at the start of a game (or not) and seems to be a good predictor of a server reboot later. When I type !rules at the start of a game and I get a proper response, I know I can finish my game and when I type !rules and I get no answer in the chat, I am sure the server reboots after a while. The fact the problem seems to occur either at the start of a game or not at all is giving me the idea the problem could lie in the initializing part of the game code.

I have to admit my sample size is too small to drop any scientific conclusions yet, but so far I haven't seen any cases which contradict the above. Hence I thought it would be worth to share this piece of information.

Hi GroteZakPatat,

I am currently trying to investigate on where the problem comes from. But since we don't have these sort of issues on any other server than the BusyBee, I think that there is an issue with the gamescript... But as I said, still investigating!

Thanks for your report. Keep them coming if you notice anything else of which you think: hey... that's weird!

Best regards,

Frank
Server Admin