Knights and Merchants.net Forum

It sometimes happens that the game doesn't notice a disconnect. I ignored this fact up until now, since it happened very rarely (various people had that, I had it a few times as well) and a quick rehost wasn't a problem. Now though, I had 2 unnoticed disconnects in one game, and combined with the fact that it was the first game since I got my modem replaced by my ISP's technician (because of an unrelated problem), I fear this might start occuring for me more often...

What do I mean by an unnoticed disconnect? Well, the game shows "waiting for player X" to me, but I can't type anything in the chat (whatever I type and press Enter, it doesn't appear). My connection gets fixed few seconds later but nothing happens, the game simply refuses to notice that my connection had dropped for a while. Therefore, I can't even reconnect, which means a rehost is needed. Having contact with others on Teamspeak, I know very well that 30 seconds have passed (sometimes the "connection dropped" message appears for the disconnected guy after 30 seconds, but not in this case).

Now, I know this is caused by my internet having disconnects in the first place (even before the modem got replaced, I had lots of them, but they were always noticed by the game, so it wasn't a problem), but I consider it also a bug in the game, because it's supposed to reconnect while the connection is working again. The game obviously notices that SOMEONE disconnected, but it doesn't know it's me. Is (or will be?) there a way to force the game to try to reconnect?

Thanks for reporting. This could be caused by bugs on the Linux server which occasionally causes it to handle disconnects incorrectly (and a few others things). These bugs have been around for a long time (possibly since we first released Linux versions of the server), but they appear to be fixed since r5116. Freddy has been helping us test in the public release, and his server has now been running without problems since the last fixes I sent, r5081.

Can you remember which server you were on when the unnoticed disconnections happened? I can check if it's Linux, and if so that's probably the cause of the problem.

Yeah, forgot to mention that it was indeed the public release. We certainly played for a while on Nizgard but were forced to rehost after 4 minutes (first, various people had terrible lags, and in a short while, the server crashed and everyone got the timeout... if Nissarin reads this - it was yesterday around 23:30) But my unnoticed disconnects happened either on Syd's server, or the Astranaar.com server (more likely the second one). (This was really an unlucky day for us - after like 5 rehosts and at ~30 minutes to pt, we decided to stop trying to play :/)

That sounds very much like it was caused by the server. Astranaar.com is a Linux server so it will suffer from this bug. Syd's is Windows so it will not, so I recommend you play on it in r4179 because of the bug (in r5116 and newer it doesn't matter because the bug has been fixed). With the new release so close (<1 month hopefully) we don't think it's worth release a patch for the servers of the public release.

I'm trying to restart the "stable" server everyday because the problem with ghost connections seems to "stack" over time and CPU usage slowly goes up, when it reaches 100% the server is done for.

PS:
The RC server on the other hand is doing great.. I can't say for sure the problem is gone due to smaller number of players but so far so good (it up and running since release).

We believe all the issues with the Linux server have now been fixed, Freddy has been running a test server for the public release for a month now without issues. If you want to try it out on your server you can download it here: (it uses the protocol for the public release, r4179)
http://lewin.hodgman.id.au/temp/kam_rem ... _r5081.zip

Will do. Thanks.