Author Topic: Unable to complete connection to a server  (Read 2197 times)

slickriptide

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Unable to complete connection to a server
« on: July 20, 2018, 02:57:05 PM »
I have a Windows 10 computer that's been my main Pchat computer since forever. I fired up Paragon Chat for the first time in many months, and had a really slow time connecting to my personal Openfire 4.2.3 server, to the point that PChat timed out. I tried connecting to chat.cohtitan.com and managed to connect. Likewise, the next few times I experimented, I had very slow connections but I managed to get connected. Some time later the same day, I tried connecting to both chat.cohtitan.com and to my personal server and I've failed every time to connect to either one.

The issue is limited to this particular computer. I've used a laptop and another desktop and they work as expected.

The symptom is that I'm able to launch Paragon Chat, choose a character, and enter the city. At the Atlas Park loading screen, however, the progress bar stalls out at around the halfway point. It inches forward for the next several seconds, and times out at around two-thirds of the progress bar.

I can see from the admin screen of my Openfire server (which is running on the same machine) that it never registers any users in the paragonchat or atlaspark chat rooms, so it looks like the connection is never succeeding.

Are there any flags I could set in Paragon Chat to print some debug traces to the debug window or to a log file?

The only think I can think of is something off the wall like a stray lmhosts entry that's messing up the dns. Any clues how to see what Paragon Chat is doing at the point where it's getting hung up?

slickriptide

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Re: Unable to complete connection to a server
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2018, 06:06:32 PM »
Okay, I "solved" this on my own. Sort of.

After launching with -debug -debug and -console 1 and watching the various things that the client was trying to do, I opened up options from the CoH client login screen and turned all of the available graphics options down to the minimum values.

The result was ugly graphics, but consistently successful connection betweeen 30-45 seconds.

Probably a case of Windows 10 messing around with my graphics drivers without my knowledge.

Anyway,  it looks like I need to solve this by experimenting to find a "good" graphics setting and probably also checking that I've got the best drivers installed for my graphics card, as opposed to what Windows 10 thinks I should be using.

Codewalker

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Re: Unable to complete connection to a server
« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2018, 06:21:46 PM »
It's probably graphics drivers or a low RAM condition.

The connection to XMPP doesn't happen until after the zone loads and the client starts sending input packets. If it's hanging on the load screen, that's long before it even tries to connect.

From time to time I have seen an oddity during development where certain versions of AMD drivers really don't like something the COH client is doing and cause long load screen hangs (doesn't happen always, just sometimes). For me at least, minimizing the window causes loading to finish almost immediately. Rather strange, but it works.

slickriptide

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Re: Unable to complete connection to a server
« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2018, 10:23:30 PM »
How about that.

As it happens, this IS a AMD GPU and minimizing like you suggested does seem to let me get launched with full high-res graphics.

I'll take it. Weird, but as long as it works, and it seems that it does.