Day/Time synch

[Tquila (DayZ) 0]

Hey all,

I've got a server, which has had some peculiar problems as of late. It started 2 days ago, where the time/light on the server was dark, however, not pitch black. Then I died, logged out for a while whilst complaining to the gods of DayZ, and when I came back it was light. Blue sky, bright sun, everything. I was like "huh, that was weird". Then I died rather fast again (the whole starting process with dieing and all that), and once I came back it was pitch black. Very weird, however, it was quite late, so I thought it to be a synch issue with the hive.

Then last night, it was bright for unusually long. I stopped playing at ~21-22 and the server was still clear and not dark as it normally is (the dark, but not pitch black dark). Then I log in today, 14:30 and the server is pitch black. Restart and it changed to the proper time.

Is this a hive problem? Or should I just create some scheduled restarts to keep it all running smoothly? (if I do this, where do I make automated server broadcasts that it's going to restart?).

tl;dr: The time / day light has gone heywire. Can I fix it?

Regards

Tquila

[jwiechers 92]

My thoughts on the matter, perhaps others can weigh in to get some more hard data:

The major causes are, according to Dwarden and my own experience, desynchronization and simply "waiting" for the hive as well as low server FPS.

I've been experimenting with that for a little bit and keeping an eye on my watch. My experience with the current version is that synchronicity or reasonable synchronicity is maintained for about four hours, followed by a substantial increase of desynchronisation afterwards. In the first four hours, synchronized in-game watch time among several players does not deviate too much, typically (only tried this a couple of times when we could arrange this) less than five minutes. However, synchronicity with people who spawn in after a couple of hours is bad -- and gets worse quickly after four hours. At five hours, typical desynchronisation on my servers is about 30 minutes, after six hours, it's about 45 minutes.

As for what you can do: yeah, regular restarts are the only way. BEC is currently being modified to allow for proper information of players on your servers and I hope it gets it right soon. Some people use scripts and RCon. I advertise it as part of the MOTD (i.e. tell people that the servers may restart at 0600, 1200, 1800 and 2400 UTC) and generally get on five minutes prior to the restart, tell them to log-off and lock the server so no one can join and be disappointed.

Jens

[liquidje 38]

Maybe, for the time being, with something like AutoIt (or batchfiles, if rcon accepts command line commands) you can automate this, saving you the trouble of logging in four times a day for a server reset. Should save you some time!

[jwiechers 92]

Yeah, that is what some people do.

Others have been using FireDaemon Pro.

Hopefully, 1.7.2's improvements to performance will allow the intervals to grow.