The desync bug, cause of many bugs

I want to mention a bug with Orbus that seems to be a big problem that causes a wide variety of bugs. This has been there as long as I can remember, and I am going to name as much of them as I see necessary so you can see the big picture.

The general problem is, something happened that I am guessing the server is suppose to tell the client that happened. But the message never arrived at the client. Causing a desync on the client/server state. It seems to be a systematic problem with MANY MANY things in the game. I am really feeling this is more of a base of code keeping messages synced bug then specific bugs by now.

Okay here we go. Lets start with all the classes

  • Musky turret sometimes decides to never spawn on the belt anymore. So you deployed your turret and you can forget getting it back ever until you switch classes and basically request again for the turret by becoming a musky again.
  • Bard orbs will not deselect or select or a completely empowered orb will not be firable because it probably already fired the first time you tapped it. But only the server registered that and didnā€™t tell the client.
  • Shaman orbs sometimes donā€™t spawn back on the totem anymore. Same for shaman totems but they spawn delayed. I am guessing a request is made every X seconds again for the totems so it still comes back but waaay too late.
  • Mage spells donā€™t pop or anything. It happens rarely. Another bug is that you are sometimes not able to cast anymore with mage spells because I am pretty sure the server still thinks you have your super or another spell on your wand while the client thinks you donā€™t have that spell on your wand anymore. (pressing super both triggers again fixes it most of the times)
  • Ranger weak spots will not disappear on target and hang around forever.
  • Scoundrel your cards will stop regening making it impossible for you to grab cards anymore until you switch classes. a.k.a. scoundrel cards broke.
  • Warrior will sometimes lose the ability to use their sword. I am guessing this is a complete disconnect between the server and warrior sword tracking. So no approve messages from server anymore. Secondly warrior can sometimes use their horn but on the client side it did not go off. So your horn wonā€™t disappear and there is no noise etc. Other ppl can see you did it but you yourself canā€™t. Lastly, warrior shield will sometimes not break on the client side or not unbreak (stay red while being back up). You can still find out if it broke though by getting hit through your shield or other way around where you can still block with a red shield.
  • Paladin like to break on their books. You grab a heal book and youuuu didnā€™t heal upā€¦ and the book didnā€™t work. Other ppl will tell you you did heal up. Just keep spamming that one book that didnā€™t work until it is off cooldown on the server side which will trigger the request again and your desync of your book is gone. You can also groundslam the ground and not get any indication you groundslammed anything while in fact you did. You will also be tricked you still have your globes but you donā€™t have that.
  • All classes experience the SUPER desync. Your super can be visually stuck on your weapon until you use your super again or switch zones/relog.

Now for the general combat bugs

  • You can kill a monster and the server knows you are out of combat but you arenā€™t on the client side. So you will stay stuck in the combat speed. Pressing the ā€œstuck combatā€ button wonā€™t work probably because it will request the server to set the player out of combat. But its already out of combat so it wonā€™t tell the client it did that.
  • The opposite is also true, you will get in combat but the client never got the confirmation. So you can move with your maximum speed and run around with your mount when being in combat with a monster.
  • When you hit a target, you will normally see on the target a dmg number showing how much dmg you do on that hit. This can also desync. Which means the server will get the message, and some ppl will also see the hit number, but you didnā€™t get the confirmation on the client. This will then also mean you will miss the number in the combat.log file and your dps might be very different if person B uses the same combat parser.
  • The opposite is true too. A target hits you majorly (like oops I got a tankbuster in the face). You know your almost death but you look at your healthbar and nop its full. But THATS A LIE! you will die next normal hit. The healthbar didnā€™t update because again the server didnā€™t confirm it happened to the client.
  • The same is true for healing. Luckily for healing it is a process that happens most of the times every second with renew effects. So missing the I got healed on the client will be fixed the next second by the next tick of I got healed. Unless the only thing you want to know if you got a big heal and nothing else. Which will bring you sometimes in trouble not knowing your health in advance.
  • Healthbars donā€™t show up when you start combat with monsters sometimes. (donā€™t know if this is a desync thing but I wouldnā€™t be surprised). This can be frustrating for longer fights. But mostly for boss 4 of the raid where healthbar coordination is needed.
  • Rare occurrence but I have seen interrupt bars not show up even though they are happening.
  • Then you have bosses like boss 5 raid where you donā€™t see the very important green pools you have to stand in, or sewer slime you donā€™t see the bucket fall or the boss in green/blue phase. Or you donā€™t see an animation at all of something that a boss does. Like a tankbuster. Or it will be stuck in walking animation until you move the boss again to let it trigger the stop movement message again.

Out of combat desyncs

  • You can try harvesting an item on the ground forever but you will never be able to grab it. Because you guessed it, it got client side desynced xD
  • For critter capture when blowing your critter horn it will sometimes not go of on the client side. Same for the poop on the ground it will not disappear even though critters start spawning.
  • Accepting dailies counter doesnā€™t go down while you get a new daily.
  • Got no chest from doing a public event where you did get a reward from? Or didnā€™t even get a pop-up message of a reward even though you did everything for gold? Wait no more, move an item around in your inventory and tada your reward appears in your inventory.
  • Mmmmmh my grinding device didnā€™t lvl up even though I got a chest. That is just the good old desync. Replacing your grinding device resets it.
  • Well I didnā€™t get chest but I am sure I lvled up by now. Relog, it will request showing up the chest again. And it pops into existence. Or walk far away and close again. That helps too.
  • Whooaa but what about my shard T16 loot? I didnā€™t get a chest again. Well first of all donā€™t lie to yourself. And secondly its time to relog while someone else stays in the dungeon. Because you want the client to re-request the appearance of your chest.
  • And what about my roll? It didnā€™t show up either? I probably just pressed it immediatelyā€¦ NOP your fucked. The client server desync happened, and your roll pop-up shows only once. Reloging wonā€™t trigger showing it. And the devs arenā€™t allowed to spawn loot that was never there, so you just missed out on your roll. RIP. #BlameDesyncCode
  • I am guessing the ā€œcan you hear me?ā€ bug is related to all the desync bugs. But this might be more difficult to blame it on just a desync because it systematically decides to not send information to or from a client anymore.
  • (added this point in later) often when you trade someone and your done trading ,1 player will be stuck with the trade window still in front of them after the trade. Because of the desync you will not be able to get this trade window out of the way until you restart the game.

Mmmmh but I am death or notā€¦ bugs (deserves its own category)

  • Welp you just died buddy, but you donā€™t know that yet. You continue hitting monsters and mmmh none of your hits are registering. Ask your friends ā€œam I death?ā€ and you probably are. Restart your game. because you need to reload the area to fix the desync.
  • But if your friends said your not death but just frozen. Well your completely desynced. I am guessing the server doesnā€™t respond to you at all anymore and you should def restart your game or wait for the client to kick you to the login screen.
  • Then we have the fun famous I am death at graveyard. Ya apparently the server decided that after you press Graveyard that you donā€™t have to know as client that you are alive again. Well there are some fixes for this. Because you are in fact alive and everyone will see you alive. Best option is switching classes. It triggers a recheck and boom your alive again. You can also press graveyard again but there are some scenarioā€™s where you will kill your group (shared pain) or will be unable to res again because you just killed yourself and the group is actually in combat now. Lastly relogging works but ya know thats slow.
  • Then we have the walking ghosts. You or a friend rezzes someone or someone goes to graveyard and now that person walks around as a ghost. So the server sended to some ppl that this rezzed person is alive again, but not for others. So some ppl will see that person walk around as a ghost with the group. you also have the opposite ghost of someone that is death that doesnā€™t look death.

TL;DR Server is not telling client something happened on every aspect of the game. All 8 classes, combat related mechanics, out of combat related happenings like loot and are you death or not. This is a systematic problem for basically everything of the game that needs syncing up information.

I am very sure I can go on with calling out desync bugs but the point is made and I really think the best fix would be finding out how to prevent the server from not continuing to try to tell the client what it needs to know. Instead of trying to find the individual problems related to the specific desync.

16 Likes

+1 this is an underlying issue to everything.

A specific desync may not be frequent but because of the variety of possible desyncs this actually becomes a daily occurrence of something going wrong.

I think the reason most players donā€™t mention it constantly on the forum is because its just become something we ā€˜quickly relogā€™ and then forget - the variety of desyncs makes it that not 1 issue feels annoying enough to start a forum post about. All desyncs can be fixed with a relog or full close and re open of the game that at this point most experienced players are used to doing.

9 Likes

I really love this bug, I am okay if that one isnā€™t fixed :crazy_face:

Maybe we can also throw in the odd ā€œUnable to connect to serverā€ screen that pops up at the login screen. Sometimes after a crash and sometimes as I just launch the game. Closing and re-launching the game seems to be the fix.

I also wonder if some of these dsyncs are also the cause for the game to outright crash at times.

2 Likes

I would like to add that many of these bugs were mentioned and the devs either tried investigating or fixing many of them but without succes. Constantly repeating the bug after that on the forums is just beating a death horse. Doesnā€™t mean we arenā€™t really annoyed by it. But it feels useless to repeat what can not be fixed in a reasonable time by the devs before they move on with other stuff. And its so much by now.

4 Likes

OrbusVR: Quality < Quantity

Letā€™s just make more content! Guarentee this thread isnā€™t getting a response lol.

2 Likes

Hi, thanks for cataloguing these issues - obviously that takes a lot of effort to do so in this comprehensive manner. Weā€™ll discuss it with the team and hopefully have a more in depth response we can post here on this subject, I just wanted to let you know right this moment that weā€™re reading it and are planning to respond when we have more information.

11 Likes

Thank you for creating this giant list of bugs. Iā€™m fairly new to the game and have only experienced a few of them so far. But its good to know that the problem is not me or my system, its something wrong with the game. It makes me worry less, will tell myself to just try to relog and fix it instead of freaking out.

@SleepyBunny, Welcome to the game!
This game is awesome and if you allow yourself to get passed the annoyance of constant re-logging, Iā€™m sure you will embrace it as much as we did. Iā€™ve played this game for about two years and iā€™ve had some days of swearing my but off at the game because of what iā€™ve lost because of these exact bugs. BUT, the community is great, the devā€™s are great and re-logging has become second nature, no one is bothered by it per say and we are here to have fun!
I still wish more of the old Orbus would be in the game, but, thatā€™s another story.
Now that this post has been done (Thank you SCOTT!!!) at least itā€™s out in the open and if the devā€™s can figure out what it is, and if they do, this game, in my opinion will definitely a Merritt 9/10 score! (I would of gave you 10 had I not seen the old Orbus! LOL)
So I suggest you stick with us, and have tons of fun!! (Especially in Raids and Dungeons)

1 Like

We discussed these in one of our meetings, analyzing how we can tackle them and trying to see where they come from. Just a quick note first, while itā€™s understandable to think that all of these are caused by the same general issue from a player side look, many arenā€™t related and some are even purely client side or server side.

That being said, the main issue is reproducibility. Thereā€™s a giant difference between some we can replicate on our side in a dev environment (to which we can add way more logging, tweak tons of variables, restart the zones and server over and over, stuff that we canā€™t do on the live server) and those we canā€™t in terms of being able to track it down and fix it quickly.

As you pointed out before, most of these bugs only happen, or happen more often, with many players around. We do have a game plan to hopefully simulate that environment during testing in the future. Thatā€™s something weā€™re investigating and weā€™ll be working on that.

As a starting point and question to anyone willing to put in their 2 cents, what would you say is the top 4 most common of these issues that you think are desyncs? Not necessarily the most frustrating, but the most reliably occurring ones?

PS: We also have a good lead on crash reporting that we hope to implement in the near future which should in theory not only help with client crashes but also Oculus Quest reporting. Weā€™ll let you know when we have news about that.

4 Likes

None of those are happening ā€œreliablyā€ i think. That is the reason you could not reproduce them.
But those which are happening most often to me are:

  • inventory bugs: When I think I took an item from the chest and they disappear once I leave the player house, or items not showing in the inventory (move anything around to refreshā€¦ those)
  • Some of the status info are not showing: no healthbars, no info about the shard (%, time, etc. once the shard dungeon was started)
  • ā€œStuck in combatā€, when you are not actually in combat but can not mount and speed is reuced, but i think you can change classes for example. Stuck combat button does not help. Scott described it much better.
  • Shaman orbs not spawning in dungeon (just because i play shaman more often than musky or the others with similar problems)

None of them are reliably occuring as far as I know. Sometimes one of the bugs decides to happen more often, but with the amount I played it evens out. RNG ya know.

That is why it also seems like most of them are the same thing. If they are not, I mentioned alot of bugs and I know some of the bugs are probably more complicated then that like you said. But I am still thinking many of them are the same problem.

Definitely understand that. Like I said, hopefully if we get the ability to simulate something closer to a live environment on dev then weā€™ll be able to see these things appear much more commonly.

1 Like

Slightly off topic but please get that Crash reporter up and running asap! its my number 1 issue with the game currently. I lose count of how many times I crash per week so I hope your ready for me to use that reporter tool a lot when it comes out :wink:

More on topic. I think raid boss 4 add minions spawning but not having health bars appear might be a somewhat frequent bug? It would happen to 1 person out of 10 when they spawn 3 / 4 times during the fight. But like others have said its not a guarantee for that to happen. perhaps its the way they spawn in or how thereā€™s 10 people compared to the usual 5 from a dungeon that it happens? I assume they spawn in the same way a resurrected minion does as thatā€™s also usually why the health bar doesnā€™t appear from my experience.

1 Like

Most common by far that Iā€™ve noticed is shaman orbs not spawning, and stuck combat not getting me out of (a typically lack of) combat. Iā€™m trying to send in bug reports everytime it happens, but in shard runs and raids Iā€™m more focused on just doing my job :confused:

Inventory Bugs - happening very frequently, actually I had an impression since the OG there was certain tiles which were always broke (like items vanishing when put into that one); needs more testing, I can watch this theory in reborn and write reports if it happens.

Musky Turret gone, Shaman orbs not spawning, Dead and not able to reawaken (all frequent) and reports in general: Iā€™d love to report all these happening but as each and every dungeon bug I donā€™t have the time to do it and write it up. Simply not possible to report bugs if the timer is ticking and you are stressed out already, needing to relog or change classes to fix that.
I dunno if there could be any system where we dont have to type a bug report, but perhaps even pre-write the things we wanted to report during dungeon runs so itā€™s just a matter of secs.

Things like

  • Critter Hunt, critters not spawning after horn, or poop still there (VERY frequent, can reproduce these in less than an hour playing I believe)
  • Health bars of mobs not showing

Would it really be helpful if we write reports about this every time, or, more reports at least? They happen in dungeons, but also in the overworld all the time, but I thought itā€™s that frequent that devs donā€™t need more data, might be wrong tho.

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I would volunteer to have my character get imported into the test server and if many more are willing, you could end up with a testing player base where debug can be enabled and whatnot, sure, affecting the performance, but if it does replicate the bugs we see, perhaps might be worth while?

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I donā€™t play any classes other than mage, so I canā€™t speak to the bugs of those classes, but as a mage I experience desyncs pretty often. I would say once or sometimes twice per play session. Iā€™ll just be casting spells, then my wand will stop working. The wand still draws, but when I click the button to submit the spell nothing happens (no spell and no sparkles saying I did the spell wrong). I can still see other people moving when this happens, and I can still hear them in game, but I always have to relog to fix it. I donā€™t know why it happens so I canā€™t replicate it.

Then there is the one where the game thinks that there is a spell on your wand so you canā€™t draw anything. This will sometimes happen while casting spells, and you can fix it by pressing both triggers and activating the super to clear the spell off the wand.

I would like to point out that you can activate your super while your weapon isnā€™t even out. This has tripped me up in PvP many times because I will get an affliction 2 ready, and when I get to the fight the affliction is on my wand, but wonā€™t shoot because the game has cleared the spell.

Sometimes the game will run smooth for hours? and other times, I will relog 4 times in 10 minutes because of the bugs/desyncsā€¦

One of the most common ones for me is the inventory bugging out, Iā€™ve sent quite a few in game bug reports for it, most noticable for me when trying to bank quite a few items at once, use the button to put all items in the bank and something that should go in doesnā€™t go into itā€™s stack in the bank and stays in the inventory, to fix it, you have to the items next to each other either both in the bank or both in the inventory and then join the stacks together

I havenā€™t raided in quite a while but every time I would raid someone in the raid would get the health bar issue on boss 4 like ewok said so that could probably be reproduced easily enough

Desync on death, Iā€™m not sure how reproducible it is, but Iā€™ve noticed it happens sometimes when you have some sort of ā€œsudden deathā€ which can be lots of incoming damage happening in a very short burst, Iā€™ve had it happen while in PvP when being spammed by attacks from paladin/scoundrel, might be worth looking into that

Stuck in combat is also a very common one, not sure if I can provide any extra info on how it happens though

Shaman orbs not respawning, for one. Similarly, totems can take a touch longer to respawn or just wonā€™t respawn at all

Also, load-outs breaking. Of course, thereā€™s the times when Iā€™ll go from say Shaman to Warrior, but my armor and totems stay equipped, and then thereā€™s other time, where, say, I was changing classes from Shaman to Scoundrel, but not only does the armor not change, but the 4 slots for equipping totems are still open, and my totems are still out, but it says my pistol is equipped. I typically fix it by changing to the first class, and that typically fixes it, but my load-out will still break as a result.
And, of course, being stuck in combat when I am in fact not in combat. The stuck combat feature is useless, and going to graveyard has worked less and less in recent weeks. I pretty much have to aggro an enemy just to kill it for it to work as normal.
Also, sometimes auto-run gets stuck, and no matter what way I move the control stick, I keep moving towards my head gaze.
And similarly to the class swap thing, sometimes items on my toolbelt wonā€™t change or will even disappear altogether(happens with fishing rod).
Also, critter capture will often not work. Iā€™ll stand exactly on top of the poop, and it just wonā€™t activate. It seems to happen more often with net gun 1 than net gun 2. Sometimes, the critters will even spawn, but the poop stays until all the critters despawn.
This one is a bit more infrequent, but sometimes in dungeons HP bars will show as empty even though the boss very much so has health left.
Also random, and I may just be doing it wrong, but totemic calling doesnā€™t work. Like, ever. Iā€™ve tried every method I could think of, it just does not work. Though I donā€™t think itā€™s related to the desync bug
Another rare one, also unlikely caused by the desync bug, but when I did a raid about a week back, the skybox just straight up disappeared during the 5th boss. I have screenshots I can eventually pull off my Quest, but it looked black with a white grid pattern of sorts, in a square wrapping around the map. My Quest later crashed, and restarting the game seemed to have fixed it.
Thatā€™s all the time weā€™ve got. Iā€™ve got to get back to playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on my Nintendo 3DS. See you around.

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