Slitherine

A game between Archie and I (Hereclea).

After I completed my turn the game would not upload. I got the following error

Categorised as: Network connection error (Code -1)
State: List Games
Response Type: Error
Error: Name resolution error (Code 103)
Time: 2011-05-26 05:07:46
Content:

Ultimately I gave up and closed down FoG. I then tried to restart it and got the following error

Categorised as: Network connection error (Code -1)
(Whole response) State: Verify
Response Type: Error
Error: Name resolution error (Code 103)
Time: 2011-05-26 05:08:34
Content:

Now when I go into the game none of my moves are there and it is waiting for my moves. How do I get the game back to where it was at the end of my turn?

Could save me some....

Please can I have some advice regarding what to do. Thanks.

Slitherine: What should I do to get my moves uploaded?

We'll check and get back to you.

Thanks, I appreciate the help.

Hi Iain,

Any progress? I'm sure both Archie and I would like to progress this game.

It's still sitting in 'My Turn' on my account if you need to look at it.

Thanks,
Morbio

At a guess, you will probably have to make your move again. As far as I can tell, the server doesn't keep any record of the state of your game between downloading it and then uploading it when you finish your turn, and there is no local back up data saved to your hard drive in the case of a failure to upload. The game does seem to save some intermediate state for games against the AI since the game can often recover from a crash in that situation, but not for multi-player games. Since you failed to upload your move most likely you will need to take your turn again since the state of the game on the server sounds like it is the one from the beginning of your turn.

It would be a useful enhancement if the game would save the state of the game locally for multi-player games until it is uploaded again although I guess could be an issue with providing some possibility that a cheater could find a way to modify the saved game file. My laptop has some tendency to shutdown due to overheating when running FoG so I would certainly appreciate it if data to recover an interrupted move was saved locally.

Chris

OK Chris, thanks for the help.

I thought the game had some changes recently to avoid this need and to stop the suggested cheating process of pulling the plug when rolls go badly.

I must say I'm disappointed in the lack of response from Slitherine. This issue has been posted about 10 days and the best I got after chasing a couple of times is "We'll check and get back to you". that was 6 days ago!

Sorry about the delay in replying. The error, 'Name resolution error (Code 103)' means (or should mean) that you effectively are not connected to the internet -- the game cannot look up the server, www.slitherine.com.

I assume from your message that you are successfully logging on and listing challenges before you receive this message. Is that right?

If you are successfully logging on, then the error message must be inaccurate, as the game has successfully resolved www.slitherine.com a few seconds ago.

If you are not even managing to log on to multiplayer, then please firstly check that a firewall is not blocking the game from accessing the internet. Also, I assume you are using the same computer to post on this forum and actually play the game?

Thanks

Eric, I log on and play the game most nights without problem. In this instance, I couldn't sleep (hence the 5am upload attempt), logged on, saw I had a game waiting for me, made my moves then pressed the 'next player turn' button at which point it tried to upload as normal, but failed.

The only unusual aspect is the time I was playing 05:00 UK time.

Do you still get error 103 when you try the same match now, or has it resolved itself? I suppose network infrastructure maintenance sometimes gets scheduled for the middle of the night.

As Chris said, there is no local cache of the game upload. We've discussed at length whether to add this feature. The trouble with it is that some people like to play their multiplayer games from more than once PC. So, a failed upload might be stored on PC 1, and then the same game turn gets played (partly or to the end) and uploaded successfully on PC 2. Then there's potential to get out of sync when the person logs in on PC 1 again: it would try to send an old game turn up to the server.

Thanks for the feedback.

I remade the moves last night and the game uploaded successfully. The good news is that I think the points (coincidentally) ended up the same as what I remember from the 1st set of moves. So at a macro level there is no difference, but individual units are different.

Regarding the cacheing of the game, then the scenario you describe would apply to a small minority (IMO) and then it's only in a small number of situations (hopefully very rare) where the synchronisation discrepancy would occur. Is this sufficient an occurance to stop a solution? Assuming that you want a foolproof solution then why not make the 1st part of the upload process a check to see what version (or date-time stamp) was last uploaded? If it is the same as the version stored in the local cache it uploads the saved version, if different (more recent) then it doesn't upload and could delete (or move to an archive folder) so that the waiting list is kept clean.

Also, a solution like this could make it more difficult for a deliberate cheating, i.e. unplugging of the game and replaying until favourable outcome is obtained. If the game connection is lost and the game restarted, then the latest position could be presented to the user so that moves already made are still there and then no benefit would be gained. By time-stamping the cache and storing the time stamp it in separate log files it would also make difficult for the computer savvy to delete the cached version too.

Just a few thoughts....