Alone in the game world

[creusot]

Sometimes when I (re)spawn I realize I am alone in the game world. No chat messages, the icons for other players are not moving, the squad and mission members lists do not update, and when I ask the time I only get local, not server time. But the game works perfectly well in all other respects.

When I restart the game this goes away and everything is normal.

Is this a known problem?

[OLDZEKE]

Sounds like you are right at the verge of losing host connection, that you are not getting packet updates.

This can happen due to autoupdaes, adobe and apple for example dont throttle their bandwith usage when they auto update and can cause other programs to not recieve a share of the bandwith.

[creusot]

Thank you, that sounds like a likely explanation. Although I keep wondering why it usually happens on the start of a new mission, and almost exclusively when flying.

[GOPHUR]

That's because you have multiple connections to the host. The map host is what you see when you are at the UI. The chat host is when you see chat messages and the cell connection is your place in the game world.

Sometimes you only lose one of these. So when you spawn and you don;t see anyone moving, you're not getting any updates from the connection to the host about those people but you may have info on them from a previous spawn.

When you move from the game world to the UI you are "handed off" to different servers. This can be an exit point for some connections. Often times this is in part due to a lossy connection from the client to the host and can be caused by low ping times or other events interfering with the packet stream.