limbo state; unable to interact at login, possibly desync

[InflatedLyric 39]

I am not quite sure how to describe my problem briefly, so I will just explain what happened.

I played on stable branch Tuesday morning at approx. 10:15 am PST. I logged into a low pop server regular hive. I had last played a full week before, but I was disconnected at a restart in the middle of cherno and never logged back in. After logging in, carrying two primary guns, I tried to put the M4 in my hands like it should have been. Two or three minutes later (forever standing in the middle of cherno, even on low pop) my screen flashes black/grey and white. I remember thinking it was probably an infected hitting me, but since I could not pull a weapon to my hands, I just ran. While running, I looked behind me and could see no infected, I thought maybe I got shot by a player. I continued running in relative circles around the same block in cherno (I thought when my weapon finally did show up in my hands, it would be easier to spot my dropped M4 on the street).

After a good 5 minutes and beginning to doubt I was even being chased by infected, although surely a player would have killed me by now, but something was not the same from my previous encounters with infected. Sounds were off and it really did not seem I was being chased either. Finally everything changes, my fire axe comes to my hands, there are infected running at me, and the game sounds of this situation are familiar again; I think I even heard the reload like I was logging in at this point. I killed 3 infected with my axe then retraced my steps looking for my M4. I killed several more infected before I found the M4 where I logged in, then I started taking them out with the gun (out of spite).

From this point on everything seemed normal. I made my way, looting as I went, from the main part of the city near the firehouse up to the high rise apartments, side by side grocery stores, and the office facing a hospital. I made my way to an electrical substation just North of the city. Here I decided to eat and regain healthy status and reload my coupled mag, toss out a 20 round mag after emptying the ammo. All of that is relatively pointless to mention, except to say as I walked away just after completing these actions the server restarted.

When I log back in I am still at the substation, but clearly rolled back to a point when my gun would have still been on the ground. Oh well, easily replaceable I still have 2 coupled mags and a decent scope the attachments and rds are the toughest lose, but the M4 will be replaced soon enough I am sure of it. I also notice the same thing is happening this time, I cannot pull a weapon up. I decide to go to Balota to hopefully replace my lost M4.

Same problem is happening where I cannot pull out a weapon, I have a mosin and a pistol so I should not feel defenseless. I take the long way to Balpta, running all the way to the coastal highway before going west. I am just trying to kill time for the game to start working right again. I did not expect it to take too long to fix, but I am now at Balota and not wanting to run toward the hangars and prison without a weapon. I stick next to the exterior wall and decide to look at the barracks. I try to look in the windows, I have decided I cannot ooen doors until this desync like problem fixes, but I am not sure I even tried. Standing there looking in the barracks my screen starts flashing grey and white. No sound. I take off across the airfield, this time my screen keeps flashing grey and white like I cannot escape my attacker (I am thinking maybe it was a player this time). I start to wonder if I am invincible in this state, I sure hope so since it is not like I am actually able to play like this. I am too afraid to test standing still. I decide my best bet is to run and not stop until I can play.

My main objective is still get an M4 when I can. I run west thinking I am more likely to find Zelenogorsk without a compass than anywhere else. I manage to run right into the Pavlovo military base. I kept checking the player screen and every person shows all 0's. I ran right through the military base not comfortable enough to stop. I ran east of Pavlovo and straight to Zelenogorsk. Still not fixed, I decide I will just run around Zeleno and head to NWAF.

At this point thoughts like "unplayable" are creeping into my head. Running, even sprinting, from cherno to zeleno is not quick and I have been stuck in a state of limbo between actually playing and just able to explore. If you know Zeleno, there are 4 barns each one on the outskirts of the city and situated at a cardinal direction. I was just making my way around the west barn, then the game starts to go normal. The red chain link desync indicator shows up, I hit p, to check the player screen. I have like 60k desync everyone else looks fine. The desync is very bad for a good bit of time. I assume it has something to do with the distance travelled while in limbo. After that game acts normal.

I have 350, or nearly, hours in SA and this stable branch is the first I have noticed this happen. I now recall after these incidents today, the same thing happening on Wednesday last week (last time I played), but it was much shorter time frame, much closer to a minute. I usually play more and read the forums more than I was able to this week. I checked the bug reports and I used the search function, plus manually reading the topic titles over the last 5 pages. I am seeing nothing like this problem anywhere. Has anyone else had this happen, ever?

[soulfirez 901]

Was all this done perhaps in the 3 hours every wens at 7gmt when they do maintenance to the hive???

Edited February 26, 2014 by SoulFirez

[InflatedLyric 39]

I do not think so. PST is GMT -8 so it was 16:00 on Tuesday afternoon.

[InflatedLyric 39]

It looks like it was a container bug after all. I have had other container issues previously and this did not seem to be the same thing. After what happened above, I decided to test it one day. I logged in and stayed in the same spot for an hour, never improved. So I started running, after about 45 minutes of this, I ran from near green mountain west into debug fields then ran back to the map and made my way NW of Lopatino, again never improving. This left me perplexed, both times before the issue seemed to correct itself. Of course, I may not have been active enough trying to interact with inventory.

During all this time testing I realized I could use food and drinks if they were visually accessible in my inventory (or inspect items, such as a compass). Right click the item and wait 2 mins for option menus to come up, click eat/drink wait several minutes and the sound would be heard -- nothing ever showed up in the GUI as in my hands, but after having moved something to hands by using it the scroll wheel option would be available to use that item for a brief time. The energized/hydrated/healthy indicators seemed to function normally. If I moused over my mosin attachments, they showed Pristine, but my LRS is worn and bipod was badly damaged. These could be inspected to show the correct item condition. All my clothes seemed to display the correct condition on mouseover.

The containers I carried were:

Yellow raincoat

UK camo vest

Green cargo pants

--ammo box

Hunting pack

--Yellow prot. Box (x3)

--medkit

I also had items with attachments:

Mosin (on back; hotbar)

-- LRS

--bipod

FNX45 (in yellow prot. Box; hotbar)

--silencer

--mag

M4 optic (yellow raincoat)

--battery

weapon flashlight (yellow prot. Box)

--battery

I logged in today with the thought that I would drop containers and check to see if there was any improvement. I ran to a road to pick up the item later if nothing was fixed (despite never picking anything up while glitching, I had seen loot appear in a hangar). I performed the actions of dropping the ammo box (it was full of ammo [pistol, mosin, and sks] and I even had about 60 rounds for mosin not inside it). It remained in my inventory. Checked the player screen and I am alone with all zeroes. I walk to a nearby water pump, about 1km. I was going to attempt to fill an empty water bottle that I had drank using the method described above during my testin session. I move it to my hands, it does not show up. I try to use scroll wheel to Fill bottle, it works, but it also seems to fix everything. I am met with the red desync chain, I hit the player key and suddenly 4 people appear on the list, but I appear at the top like they connected after I did. No problems since then, I went to Lopatino, NWAF, and Gvodnoz. I did not watch the time, but I crouch walked a good 5km leaving NWAF so it had to take quite a while. This is speculation that everything will still be good next time I log in, I rarely change servers and did not realize I should have tested it until typing this up.

[InflatedLyric 39]

Well I just logged in and it did happen again, but it only lasted several seconds. Compared to 1 hour 45 mins, I consider that to be solved.

edit: and the server restarted 2 minutes later and I picked a 3rd server and it is just fine again after about 1m desync red chain pops up and everything functions normally shortly after.

I just lost my replacement M4, lol

Edited February 28, 2014 by InflatedLyric

[Gekikara 4]

http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/1yffjr/psa_if_you_our_somebody_in_your_group_is/ rocket acknowledge the desync problem.

 

http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/post/78119153354/weekly-report-starting-our-focus-on-survival today's tumblr post
 

Guaranteed Network Messages

We now have a new system we are testing internally for sending guaranteed updates across the network. This is very important as we believe this will reduce the problems for those who are experiencing severe desync. We are still testing this internally, and it will be sent out to experimental for more testing next week.

:D

Edited March 1, 2014 by Gekikara