freezing on zoning

[vladimir]

My EQEmu seems to be freezing almost every time I try to zone now... What happens is that EQ just freezes on the loading screen for the zone. I can tell whether or not the zone is going to load by whether or not a loading bar (the blue thing) appears within the first 5 secs or so after I try to zone in. This is also the case for logging in my character in the first place. This just started happening yesterday but has not happened before.

My friend told me he had stability problems with EQ a while ago and adjusting the chipset (RAM, etc) settings in BIOS to default helped, but when I tried doing that, no result was achieved. Does anyone have any suggestions about what I should try to fix the problem?

PS: if this should go in the support forum, please move it there... the comment for EQEmu General Support has to do with CONNECTING to EQEmu servers, which is not the case, so I put it here, just in case.

have you tried lowering your datarate?

[vladimir]

You know what...? I totally forgot about that! I have it set at 5.0 right now... what's a good value for EQEmu servers (namely GW, if that matters)?

its diferent for everyone, just move it to 3 and see if it makes a diference

[vladimir]

Tried it... fraid it didn't do anything :-\

Should I try to go any lower, or could the problem be something else?

[Wiz]

There are two possible reasons for this, in my experience.

1) Playerprofile is scrambled, a required packet is missing or a bad packet is sent.

This occurs during login, when playerprofile, checksum, weather, etc are being sent. If the playerprofile has some bad values, you send a packet that really shouldn't be sent at this point, or you're not sending one of the packet it expects it will sit and wait for the proper packets forever, never proceeding with login. The server admin needs to ensure all the routines are in order.

2) A required packet is properly constructed in the client process, but fails to be received by the player's client.

Some ISPs in particular has an issue where they require a packet going out (in the EQNetworkConnection's Process()) to be resent a bunch of times. Also if the packets are too speedily resent, it won't have properly recieved them, and thus gains the same problem as 1). Having the server admin increase the time between packet resends in EQNetworkConnection::Process() (I've found that upping the minimum from 250 to 500 works) will generally solve this for most users. Lower datarate will solve it for some because it artifically increases the resend time.