Create Vehicle Restriction 0

[Tricks]

Hey guys,

 

Just a quick question, from time to time our server goes through a little phase where it prevents regular players from joining the server with this error. They are spawning in as pigeons and getting kicked. Not sure what is causing this because it doesn't happen all the time. Thanks!

[Tricks]

Anyone have a fix for this?

[insertcoins]

well, it's to do with the limited resources your server has. Might have to streamline your basic.cfg

[MGT]

It's when the game can't get character data from the database, there's a million and one reasons why this happens, here are some of the causes i've seen

 

Server fps very low, database poorly optmised, mission file errors, server file errors, excessive server groups, players with squad.xmls's, players with bandwidth of 60-70, poorly optimised basic.cfg's

[Tricks]

Wowzers, a lot of issues! I have a lot of debugging to do!

[ToejaM]

The major reason for it is the excessive groups like MGT says. Arma can only handle 144 groups.

 

What happens is that when there are too many groups, the mod (DayZ) forces you to try and spawn but because there are no groups left Arma tells you that you're a seagull. In the battle eye filters there is a kick for it, turning it off will stop you being kicked but you still can't spawn.

 

You've probably noticed that when people logout that zombies disappear, thats because their client 'owns' these zombies. Each town has its own zombie group + additional groups spawned by more players. Even animals take up groups and don't forget that if you have a 50 man server full, that is immediately 50 people taking up 50 of the 144 groups available, which is why it happens when the server is full. Add on to this that 50 people will be in 50 different places.

 

I'm unsure if there is an animal group around, if additional players can spawn additional animals as its not something I've looked into.

 

Wild zombies I believe spawn as individual groups, so if you're near a town and you see zombies within spawning distance.. you'll have animal groups, player groups, town zombies, additonal zombies + wild zombies. Imagine this for each town or area that is occupied and its easy to see how the groups mount up.

 

One way to solve it is to delete all zombies on the server, as un-immersive as this is it does work. The other is to have an overly aggressive cleanup script. The next is to try and force all entities within a certain area to join the same group but I think if you do this then they tend to roam together and you don't see what appears to be random animal movements, as I believe animals spawn in their own groups.

 

The other major issue is when battle-eye sharts its self.

[raymix]

Would DZMS/WAI/EMS/DZAI scripts also require extra groups and thus become part of this bottleneck?

[Tricks]

I guess there is no way in increase the total number of "groups"?

[ToejaM]

The group amount is hardcoded and there isnt a way to change it. AI takes up groups aswell, any unit controlled by AI takes up a group, I think even the traders take up a group don't they? I know this is why in the Altis Life mod there is a 'master' group which has all AI linked together but if you stop them from roaming/moving/doing anything it stops their instinct to regroup together. This is why many mods tend to favour the static object over the human variant.

 

What many other mods do is focus more on the dynamic spawning and aggressive cleanup.

 

Spawning everything only when you need it also helps performance, this I think is why the zombie spawn range is 300m but personally and I was thinking about this last night, a better option might be to have a bigger spawn radius just containing one group of zombies instead of localizing it, stops many more groups and stops players knowing if someone is in a town or not. If it was limited to the current max view distance, no-one would ever know if another player was around due to zombies but this is a discussion for another day I guess.

 

Luckily vehicles don't take up group slots, nor buildables (also considered vehicles by arma).

 

The only thing I'm unsure of is how the AI groups are affected if they are in one big group, I imagine they will just move around as a huge mess of AI rather than having the potential to take different routes as usually the 'leader' or first person of the group dictates where that group goes.

 

I'm sure its easy enough to script into an admin debug monitor how many groups are on the server and to follow on from this, perhaps if group count = XX then delete last XX groups with an idea to always keep enough groups open for players to connect and always keep at LEAST one group slot available permanently. 

[Tricks]

Thanks for the great information ToejaM!

[ToejaM]

Just want to clarify that I dont think that the Epoch or DayZ cleanup is shit, re-reading my post makes me look snobby in that respect.

 

I think that if more work was done to add zombies or other dynamic AI to existing groups it would greatly reduce the chance of CVR#1 - How many traders are there? 20 ish? Thats quite a fair few when you think that there are 144 groups available.

 

Might be worth investing in a kill all zombies on the server button, its better than rebooting the server which tends to lose you players as people call it a day on restarts.

 

Something else that may work is a simple if zombie group is within XX distance of player then exit / add pending zombies to the group, bringing me back to the: I think zombie spawns should 1) Be triggered dependant on view distance and 2) Zombies should cover a much bigger area. Additonally perhaps on each restart only certain cities can spawn zombies and these will have an ever present zombie population which gets added to depending on players nearby, one bugbear with DayZ is that you can easily tell where players are depending on zombie presence.

 

Edit: All ideas for community projects :)

[Tricks]

Wish there was a fix for this!!! Keeps happening this weekend, killing our server population!

[Uro]

According to your sig, your server is offline :P

[Face]

To clear up a few misconceptions, zombies and animals do not take up groups. They are spawned as "agents", not "units" as players and AI are. Agents are basically dummy units with no built-in AI behaviors and only do what their controlling scripts tell them to do. Agents are all independent units and can't be part of groups - they can't even be joined to groups using the Join or JoinSilent scripting commands.

 

What's correct is that the pigeon issue is caused by the group limit being reached. In Arma2, there is a hardcoded maximum of 144 groups per "side": west (player side), east and resistance. East and Resistance are typically used by AI scripts but won't cause the pigeon problem. This is why AI script authors should always avoid using the West side for AI groups, you can't always expect the server cleanup to remove empty West groups to keep under the limit.

 

All DayZ mods have a server-side cleanup procedure that regularly cleans up empty groups to avoid the 144 limit being reached. The problem is that high server loads could slow down this cleanup loop to a near-halt, so I would suggest you tone down the amount of AI created on your server if you are using any AI addons (AI take up huge amounts of server resources) and try uninstalling any unneeded script addons, I've seen many scripts liberally using publicVariable commands which drive up server desync and lag as they are priority network commands.

 

I don't have very many suggestions on how to actually reduce your server load since I've never run an actual server myself, so maybe some other people here experienced with running their own servers can give some suggestions.

[Tricks]

Thanks Face, great information! Wish there was a way to increase the groups past 144 :(