Sometimes Unions fail to load/stream

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
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1

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.

3 Likes
2

Possibly related, but there’s been a long-standing issue where things occasionally fail to load and just never seem to retry.
I’ve experienced this many times in the client and studio over the past year (maybe two or more)

An example of this is a studio instance I’m running, where a wheel texture has failed to load, with two days of this instance being open and new assets being loaded without issue.
image

3

@orange451 Thanks for reporting the issue. What is the device that the player experienced the issue on? Was is desktop, mobile, or console?

4

The platform is not known in the example. I assume strongly the platform is desktop:

  1. I hear key clicks in the video (Using keyboard/mouse)
  2. He is on a high population server (Rules out crossplay disabled mode)
  3. Majority of our playerbase are PC players. 1-9 console player to pc player ratio.

So he’s either a normal PC player, or specifically a console player with a keyboard & mouse playing on crossplay enabled servers, which is quite rare.

5

This is what I also mentioned in my post about whether or not this issue is a CDN issue. So I think this does fit here. The client should re request assets from the CDN if they fail to download.

If our example above is a CDN failure, then it can lead to a catastrophic failure in our game loop causing players to die and lose hours of work.

6

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this bug seems to happen once in a while for this exact grass part, every brown part is supposed to have grass on top which are unions. the person who experienced it was playing on desktop.