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1. Click icon, launcher starts, shows newsfeed, checks for current versioning.
2. Signin screen (enter username and password)
3. If login successful, progress bar with several texts that roll up from the bottom
4. Character select screen - pick a toon
5. Another progress bar
6. In-game.
At which point in the above progression does the problem occur? Or is something else entirely happening?
Background info: How old is the computer and how much RAM does it have?
Possible cause: Software firewall not configured to allow DDO to connect/receive connections can give the error you report.
1-HAY! TURBINE! I IZ LOADINGS MAH DOODAD!
2-Turbine goes: Oh really? You're in the Market
3-OOO! I HAZ ASSETZ! I LOADZ EM FIRST!
4- *crickets chirp*
5- *grass grows*
6- *Earth's sun goes red giant*
7- *Heat death of the universe*
8-OKAYZ! RAM LOADED WIF STUFFZ! U THERE? TURBINE? TURBINE??
If at any point between 3 and 8 you click or such, you get the warning the game isn't responding and wants to close. If you leave it alone, eventually you get a 'disconnected from server' - your computer reached state #8, and turbine hung up on you ages ago thinking you gave up. Now if DDO had an internal defrag like LOTRO (not an HD defrag, though that helps a bit, a defrag of the internals of the files)...that might help
If *THIS* is your issue, the preloader helps by shoving the files in a memory cache before the game even starts, so your first character loading goes smooth...it just grabs the cache instead of slowly loading from the drive.
--------
Past that, well, not sure. If you got to character select you've pretty much got all the network stuff in order.
He whose name cannot be typed in English above seems to have this one very descriptively covered. In short, by the time you pick a character, you've already connected to the server to verify your account and download your available characters and such, so the existence of a connection to the server is verified. Best I can tell, if the process beyond that takes too long, DDO bugs out and stops listening to you. The DDO preloader shortens that load time and makes it less likely you get a timeout.
It still all suggests either a slow computer or a crappy internet connection.
Hmm, on a related note: would this preloader help with avoiding crash-on-area-transitions? An infamous crash that a lot of people seem to be experiencing is when going into the demon sands wilderness area after playing a bit. That one crashes 90% of the time. Turbine never fixed this (never bothered if you ask me), but it always struck me as some form of inefficient data handling (loading/unloading).
We've a pair of guild members that use the preloader, and regardless of that fact... some new maps are crashouts. Particular ones being the Desert and Vale exploration areas. It's to the point we load in, wait for them to crash, then reload in, THEN start to buff.
Then again, the preloader seems to terminate itself after you're finally in, and windows might be clearing the cache... Generally their transition issues are after they've been in game for a while. So it might MIGHT (i'll get our resident crashers to try) work if you ran the preloader AGAIN (just not login the launcher..once it opens launcher just kill the new launcher - won't interfere with client) - this way the files are 'for sure' in cache. Seems an awful lot of work though for something Turbine should just fix (i.e. organise/clean up their .dat files instead of randomly tacking things onto it.
Then again, our regular 'crash on transition' people ARE crashing LESS...they went from always to "a chunk of the time".
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/420738-How-to-make-the-game-loading-faster-DDOPreload-official
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Doug: you can just call her Mireru if you rather :P [display name is reference to telling guildies oft if they screw up, i'll kill them myself. or annoy me. or if bored. or if it will be funny].
It's not so much the internet connection, people with great ping time and large bandwidth have the issue...while someone like me with a piddly 3M DSL have none. Common theme is people with SSD drives eyeblink at the problem, people with high RPM drives go 'eh, not so bad', and the rest are 'TURBINE U SUK'. A search at the official forums will lend to this problem dating back forevers... and just getting worse as more things are added. Up until shadowfell I never needed a preloader.
Now if only they'd fix that damned crafting hall. Higher tier recipies would be nice, but taking 2 hours to break only 80 items? Uuuaaaaaaaa......
If it's 'strictly' a windows cache issue, amount of RAM would be the most likely determiner of who experiences the problem.
I speak 3 languages passably well, but none of them is eastern. Have no idea what to make of kanji or whatever it's called when not Japanese. No insult was intended, Mireru.
Can't say for sure, but I'd bet that internet connection can play into it. Still, I think mostly it's about hardware. Problem is, my 2 computers are so far apart in capability that I can't really pick one difference and say it's why the one computer has the problem and the other doesn't.
Every barter exchange in the game that insists on 1 at a time transactions is annoying. Aside from the lag-fails, it's the worst thing about Mabar... definitely the worst thing about Crystal Cove... not much fun with the Festivult jester or the Risia turnins either.
Mind you, some of those used to be even worse, so .. I guess we take what progress we can get.
I noticed the crashing a lot when I reinstalled this game on Steam. It turned out that the texture cache size was the culprit here. It was set to in inordinate high amount, sucking up all my memory. I crashed regularly then entering the market or one of the houses. Turning the texture cache down freed up my memory and gave the game some room to breathe. Just waiting a bit longer on the loading screens now.
Suffice it to say, it really looks like DDO has become Turbine's red-headed stepchild that they circulate between the interns to take a jab at. Performance and quality of life fixes (as they are called on the forums) are plain ignored, they do not bring in money as new features do (bean counter argument, not mine). Add to this that a new programmer would rather build his/her own stuff than to tackle someone else's mess. I don't blame the programmer, I'd rather not fix someone else's mess either unless I was absolutely certain I could fix it.
As I said before, just enjoying the good stuff of this game (there's still a lot of it), and ignoring the bad. Eventually karma will catch up to DDO and make it crash & burn horribly. Oh what a day will that be, the forums full of trolls going "I told you so." Too bad a great game has to suffer because of it.
Doug, no offense was taken :) And it's kanji (characters well..stolen from chinese :P ) + kana (100% original..maybe; more simple looking ) used in the name. Korean characters would be hangul, and are those round box+squiggle looking things. Chinese uses, well...chinese characters (all complex), either the old traditional, or the post-Mao 'standardised'. Those are the three you're most likely to run into in online games. At least, as far as game producers. Playerwise, Philipines has a large gaming group (but uses latin letters), and so does Thailand (no clue, but I've learned to swear in it~)
The name just means: "I'll kill [you]".
--end derail-----
As to RAM amount you forget one thing: DDO is 32-bit. It has a hard ceiling of 2Gig of ram, which is immediately runs into. Any RAM above it, is not material*. The only exception would be the three trillion Awesomium.exe processes it spawns. The high-res dat file alone blows past this, so swapping cache and memory would be a must, and with the hard-drive speed + playing 'seek and find the scattered bits inside the file' whenever loading... *shrug* Turbine doesn't really believe their is a problem, or at least admitt to. Amusing though that people that went to SSD suddenly had instant loads though and no disconnects.
It is why so proud of the people making GalCiv3... "screw 32-bit, update to a system not a decade old, we want our large maps to NOT bog down and crash to desktop 100 turns in"
It's too much to hope for, but I'd love there be a secret cabal of coders working on DDO 2.0 : a new 64-bit engine, ground-up purposed for all the abuse they gave the old Havok engine. I'd bet they could claim back a lot of lost players, attract new players, if they did. There is love for the game as much as hate...but squandered potential has poisoned that.
Maybe when D&D Next (5.0) comes out? :D
*Yes, it's more room for windows memory cache, but windows is the one to handle that, so it's up to it what it decides to unload for not being 'used' or such. I'll make no claims to understand it :D I have 8-gig on this box, and still get disconnects w/o preload, and sometimes load a map dead later (though infreq-I usually kill ddo every few hours anyways due to char jumping building up a stutter)
*bangs head* *bangs head* Are we STILL running up against memory addressing ceilings? Back when I started in computers and we were mucking around with 'extended vs expanded' RAM above 1MB, we were soooo happy when 32 bit windows made the whole thing go away.
.. but I thought 32 bit addressing allowed 4GB? Hmm.. or do I remember that windows hogged half of that? .. long time since I was a tech....
I've read dev postings suggesting that the DDO code makes spaghetti look simple. Might not be too much to hope for them to be rewriting from the ground up, but it's probably too much to expect.
All evidence suggests that the underlying premise and gameplay still have life in them, if only the codebase could be cleaned up so that the bugs can at least stop building on one another.
Well. this was actually my point. More RAM = more cache = less % chance of something specific being swapped out. It's a brute-force approach to a fix and nothing like elegant, but probably still the biggest contributor to these specific types of problems that can be affected by the end user.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
DDO is pretty much "Pentium Oblivious"..other than Direct X it's what, pretty much meant for the 2004ish computers? There was a hack to make DDO's flag set to being aware, but it'd just revert itself.
As for spaghetti..there is no end to the reoccurence of bugs because a new update broke a kludge some dev used to workaround some old bug...
There was that hillarious Fountain of Kobolds knockback thing last year or so where you could get knocked back through walls: the devs quickly figured out WHAT caused it (small collision boxes on mobs fighting for space)..but entangling the issue without breaking everything else... hehe.
Get Daddy WB to donate some funds and just have a team 'ground up it'. The player base would LOVE to have what exists working better, if it meant nothing new for a bit. There are bugs on known issues that date back to.. well.. forever. Pretty much feels though we're just a legacy cash cow that is drying up, and one day be discarded *shrug* c'est la guerre
Problem is bug fixes/rewrites don't generate direct cash flow. New content can be specifically sold (a la MotD & Shadowfell), or at least provides incentive for those who subscribe to continue (in the epic GH vein).
Still.. with all the Ottos boxes sold at about $40-$50 a pop, they ought to be able to afford some code optimization.
But that's money already in the bank. Why would you spend that money on something without a calculable return?
How about not giving them any money at all until they fix the thing? Of course they will just opt to pull the plug then. Much cheaper to send Rover to the farm and buy a new dog than to spend a lot of cash on fixing up Rover for another year or so.
I recently bought a bunch of games from gog many of whose playability is awesome. I play Jagged Alliance 2:Gold from Steam too. And one of my all-time favs was Star Control I (DOS-based.. no Windows version ever released). Some are simple, some are complex; it's the replay value that makes them live on.
It's hard knowing that if Turbine ever pulls the plug, nothing quite like DDO will probably ever rise from the ashes. Flawed as it is, it's still the best MMORPG I've ever played.