Sometimes Unions fail to load/stream

In our game Aftermath, we use primarily unions when creating our buildings around the map. The buildings are grouped on a per-model basis, and we utilize streaming to load them in for everyone, as we have a very large game-world (16k x 16k)

Today we got a weird bug report, which is that on a certain building, the floor union simply never loaded. This absolutely ruins gameplay and soft-locks players who try to enter this building due to our server-sided anti-noclip detection. Their client assumes there is nothing there, and lets them pass through–The server disagrees.

This is the video we received:
Medal TV link (Fails to embed)

What is happening in the video:

  • Multiple Unions do not exist on the players client allowing him to walk through them
  • The server-sided anti no-clip knows these unions are here and prevent the user from going through them (teleporting back to the last known safe-spot)
  • The player is completely softlocked because his client and server are stuck disagreeing with eachother.

What we do not know:

  • Is this specifically a streaming issue or Is this a CDN issue?
  • Does this only affect this one building? (We have copies of it around the map)

So far just this one player has reported the issue.

Expected behavior

I expect unions to load, always, and if they dont, it retries (Whether its from a CDN issue or streaming issue). A failure like this ruins the gameplay.

2 Likes