Disconnects if a certain number of aircraft all spawn on the same airfield

[TP_Silk]

Hi guys,

 

My squadron run regular Sunday evening Ops missions against AI opponents on a Dogfight server hosted on a Dserver. We are currently lucky enough to have a pool of just fewer than 25 pilots available for these Ops missions and have formed two squadrons with custom skins to fly together. Since one of the recent updates that included some changes to the Netcode, we've begun having a few issues with players being disconnected if more than a given number spawn in on the same airfield. This number can be as low as 13-14 or as high as 20-21. Here's what we know...

 

• A single airfield spawn point (fakefield_rnwspawn) can generally contain between 9 and 15 aircraft depending on the size of the aircraft. This is a 60m wide and 90m deep box.
• If we use two of these fakefield_rnwspawn objects separated by something like 250-300m we sometimes have players start disconnecting at what seems to be a variable limit as described above.
• Last night when this happened we had the first squadron fly away from the field immediately after takeoff, at which point the disconnects ceased.
• All of this happens before any AI aircraft have been triggered to activate.

 

This leads us to believe that one of a few things may be happening.

 

1. It is possible that because we all use custom skins this is overloading the netcode in some way
2. It is also possible that the sheer number of player aircraft in such fairly close proximity is the cause
3. It is also possible that it is something that we haven't even considered yet, but probably to do with the netcode and the the way we design the mission spawning.

 

Is anyone else operating in a similar way and has maybe encountered similar issues? I realise that for most online servers it would be unusual for so many aircraft to be on the ground at the same field at the same time, so it is quite possible that this doesn't affect others.

 

What we've come up with so far are plans to either spawn our squadrons on different fields a few kilometres distance from each other (this would lose our historical accuracy but hopefully allow us all to spawn) or to run ops with the available players split between two servers, which would obviously deprive us of the fun of all flying together. A third option of spawning one squadron, having them taxi and take off then form up elsewhere before the second squadron spawns would work, but would probably take too much time.

 

Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

 

Silk

 

[TP_Jacko]

Silk I wonder if JimTM has come across any issues. In his MB bible he says To provide more room (i.e. spawn points), you can place more airfield objects (provided you have enough room near your spawn  location).We do have enough room.

[TP_Silk]

Indeed. I wonder, though, whether that was written before the netcode was tweaked and also whether it refers to 'fakefield' spawn points that allow fewer aircraft at one time and in a single line rather than the 'fakefield_rnwspawn' ones that we use?

 

I suspect that the fakefield_rnwspawn was originally only meant to be used actually on the runway rather than at two points along the taxiway as we use it.