Shutting down servers is really broken

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#1

Reproduction Steps
Create an experience with multiple places. Teleport to a place that is not the start place.
Shut down this place from its Place page (not experience page) using “Shut Down All Servers”

Clients in the servers will begin experiencing odd behavior such as:

  • animations stopping
  • localscripts stopping
  • jumping disabled

However, they can still move around for a minute and see eachother. A “Developer has shut the game down” message is never displayed, leading to lots of bug reports from our users.

Is this because we use ::BindToClose() perhaps?

Affected game: https://www.roblox.com/games/2727067538/World-Zero

Video of server that has supposedly been shut down:

Expected Behavior
Servers should be shut down immediately (to the player’s knowledge) with players shown the message that the developer has shut down the server.

Actual Behavior
Players are “slowly” disconnected with things like animations, jumping, chat and UI becoming disabled. However they can still walk around and see other players walking around as well.

Workaround
No, this is severe and results in players never returning to our experience. This bug has been around for nearly two years

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Other
Impact: Very High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2019-11-01 00:11:00 (-07:00)
Date Last Experienced: 2021-09-06 00:09:00 (-07:00)

15 Likes
Shutting Down Servers Does Not Inform Users
Shutting Down Servers Does Not Inform Users
#2

Thanks for the report, we are looking into this.

4 Likes
#3

This behavior can happen if there is a large backlog of data to replicate: position information flows in one channel, animation states flows in a second channel which is shared with RemoteEvent, RemoteFunction, and property updates. If there is a large volume of data being sent via RemoteEvent, RemoteFunction, and property updates it can cause the animations to become backlogged while the avatar positions continuing to be shared.

If you open the shift-f3 menu while in this state, what does it show? In particular, if this is happening the Ping number should be large & rising

shift-f3-ping
shift-f3-ping959×753 152 KB

#4

Yes. In my game (My Island Resort) whenever I shut down a server, the plots completely disappear. It’s a tycoon game by the way.

It doesn’t affect me much as I don’t shut down severs frequently.

There is a lot of position replication and players are constantly buying items and new instances are created.

#5

One thing that would be helpful for debugging the issue would be a recent client log where it experiences this issue. From the log information, we would be able to get more information from that server that experienced this issue.

2 Likes
#6

This is still a huge mess.

Shutting down servers will often display no message to the user (regardless of if it’s a teleport game or not) but will do things like delete models, and still let them walk around.

Other times, it will display a “Client initiated disconnect” message which is also unclear to the user.

This has been broken for years and it would be amazing to see fixed so we can update without our users thinking the game broke. This is awful for false bug reports after each update. We never know if something’s actually broken or if they just disconnected but got no message.

8 Likes