Players sometimes crashing if teleported too quickly when joining a game

[lewisakura (lewi)]

On Basketball Zero, we use a “custom server” mechanism for private servers; players get teleported to a subplace when they join a private server, which lets us have a different player count for things like tournament settings where we need more players than normal in a game server.

As part of this, you will be teleported to a reserved server when you join the PS, however we notice that for some players they can crash during this, and for me specifically I actually crash a lot when trying to join them. Eventually I can actually get in, but it takes a few tries. The crash is a simple freeze and close kind, so no error message is produced.

If the teleport takes a couple seconds longer, or happens after being in the game after a while, there is no issue. This is specifically if you’re rapidly teleported when you join the game.

I personally experience similar behavior on other games that do the same thing.

I found this bug report from 2024 with a similar issue:

Players crashing in-game when teleporting to a new place

We launched an update for our game Death Ball that creates ranked games for players by teleporting them to private server instance of a new place id (15558626179). Suddenly weve been recieving reports (and videos) of players crashing, but we have no logs to diagnose what the issue might be. We have crash logs from a user but we are unsure how to read this. Can we please get some support on diagnosing the problem? Log 1: 0.610.0.6100472_20240203T232904Z_Player_9383F_last.log - Google Drive Log…

The game crashes in the exact same way, however that occurred during any teleport. This is just when you’re teleporting quickly at the start.

A private message is associated with this bug report

[MrJake092209 (Europa)]

I know I’m not staff but what teleport methods do you use in this process? I’d like to see if it is replicable

[lewisakura (lewi)]

Nothing special, just TeleportAsync with teleport data to a reserved server.

[unahb4]

Hi, thanks for reporting this. Could you reproduce this issue and send new logs if you have a chance. Thanks!

[cobygoat24]

@lewisakura

TeleportAsync

Hi @lewisakura,

I’ve been trying to replicate this on my own. I have a few questions:

1. Would you mind sharing me your code for the teleport and where you’re running the script?
2. How soon are after game start are you starting the teleport? It does take a bit of time for the Players object to load, from some experimentation I’m seeing around 1.5 seconds. Could you add a log line before the teleport to make sure the players look right?
3. You mention reserved servers, is this only happening for reserved server teleports or all teleports?
4. If this is still happening and you can send me a recent client log, I’d love to take a look! I tried recreating this in your experience by joining on a private server, but wasn’t able to recreate.

I would recommend adding a ~2 second buffer right after the game starts to allow it to fully load the data model. But would love to understand your situation to help improve the error messaging and avoid client crashes.

Best,
cobygoat24

[lewisakura (lewi)]

Unfortunately I don’t work on this game anymore so it’s a bit difficult to give the info, but I’ll give it to the best of my memory.

1. It was more or less the equivalent of PlayerAdded → ReserveServer → TeleportAsync instantly done on the server, so not really too much delays.
2. Whenever PlayerAdded gets fired.
3. Reserved servers were the one causing the crashes. I can’t say about others, we don’t use them.
4. Haven’t had a log for it in a while, but we did occasionally get crash reports about it.

I’ll forward the advice onto the new team as well as this issue, maybe they can take it over.

[cobygoat24]

Thanks for the response! We made some recent improvements to reserved server teleports as well, which should mitigate this issue. If the new team does notice any issues, around this, feel free to reopen the issue. Thank you!