[1.190.0] [DS] Ship not moving/slowing down after some time

I had this bug twice back in December on a DS. Both times I panicked and didn't record until I gave up or felt comfortable looking away from the issue. The recordings were only to show my faction mates what happened to our expensive components and defense drone should it get destroyed. The solution was to grind all ship controllers on the grid.

The first time my welder ship assumed a mildly fixed speed on a fixed vector. It was full of extremely expensive mod items. I went to fly around my base and halfway to my destination the ship started drifting away uncontrollably. It had a mildly fixed velocity, dampeners helped a little but didn't fully stop it and turning off the dampeners gave it a fully fixed velocity. The vector was fully fixed, attempting to fly perpendicular to the vector caused it to rubberband back to the vector repeatedly. I ground down half the ship trying to fix it, note the components floating in space and the half a ship I'm trying to salvage. I didn't grind the cockpit as I would have no way to control it once gone. You can see the dampeners fighting the vector. I tried moving in all directions in case the DS or controller believed I had a key pressed in (WASD C/Space). I gave up on it. :'(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po1flrdMIhI&feature=youtu.be

The second time my remote defense drone assumed an expanding orbit and an increasing speed. I was moving it remotely when it started drifting away. It was going about 10m/s when the bug triggered. It was orbiting my base, the speed was increasing and the orbit was expanding. The speed peaked at 92m/s. I returned to base to grab my welder ship mk2 and docked on it with landing gear. My welder ship only partially slowed it down. Once I ground the remote control away it started to fully slow down. I was terrified it would crash into an asteroid so I didn't start recording until after I docked my welder ship on it. The recording wasn't very informative so I didn't upload it.

I don't know what triggered this bug or how to reproduce it. The ship controllers seemed to be applying force in the direction is was being told to go when the bug triggered. The thrusters were not pushing it in the vector it was heading, in fact it was trying to stop with the dampeners. I tried everything to fix it without grinding the controller. If I allowed the ship to partially slow with dampeners and turned the entire grid off, it would accelerate back to the fixed velocity without power.

Hopefully this is enough info.

Hello,

we do see problems like these occurring on our Game servers every now and then still, where whatever unknown factors cause grids to misbehave.

Most of the time this includes grids being stuck to connectors and always rubberbanding back for example.

My assumption is this is actually a sync issue where the client thinks the ship is undocked, but the server thinks otherwise. Unfortunately this is something impossible to reproduce on purpose it just "happens". More than often enough if the simulation speed is already bad.

Similarily with Ships not slowing down correctly. I would guess that this is a problem with client prediction and a desync of for example the state inertia dampeners are in. If for example the client thinks they are off, but the server things they are on. Therefore the server slows down the ship, but the client predicts it keeps going.

To make it less of a problem on our servers I created the Shipfixer plugin (for Torch based Servers) that prettymuch allows players to help themselves by typing !fixship into chat. Which then automatically cuts and pastes the grid which forces client and server back in sync.

If I knew how to actually reproduce it I could give you more information but sadly I cannot. Since Client and Server just communicate via UDP it is possible that packages just get lost in network traffic so maybe thats a cause for problems.

Hello, LordTylus,

thanks for coming back to this thread.

I need to confess that I did not experience any of the behavior that you are describing here :( So if you can share any more info or have better steps to reproduce, please share these here on this thread. That will be really big help in order to hunt this one down.

Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department