Possible fix for the "power says it's recharged but it's not" bug

[Vanden]

You've probably encountered this bug yourself: a power's icon in your tray is full-sized and lit up, but you go to activate it and you get the "Recharging..." message. Maybe you get hit by some recharge-modifying effect and the client recalculates all your power recharge states, and the power greys out on its own to show it's still recharging. It happens when there's some kind of hiccup in the mapserver and the client gets ahead of where the server says your powers are. It seems to be happening a lot more on Homecoming than it did in the old days on Live.

 

Now, I don't know anything about making this stop happening entirely (though that would be ideal), but I think I have an idea to keep the bug from tripping us players up in combat. In the General Combat chat channel, every time a power recharges you get a message about it. "Hasten is recharged," for example. These messages come from the mapserver, and they aren't affected by the bug. If there was an option to only light up powers after use when this message is received from the server, the client should stop getting ahead of the mapserver when depicting power recharges. The General Combat messages are already being sent from the mapserver to the client, so this option wouldn't affect network traffic at all.

[carroto]

On 8/18/2019 at 2:22 PM, Vanden said:

If there was an option to only light up powers after use when this message is received from the server, the client should stop getting ahead of the mapserver when depicting power recharges.

If that message gets lost or delayed then the client would never allow you to use the power again.  I'm not sure there's an easy answer that won't cause your access to powers to be delayed in certain situations relative to what happens now.

[Vanden]

6 hours ago, carroto said:

If that message gets lost or delayed then the client would never allow you to use the power again.  I'm not sure there's an easy answer that won't cause your access to powers to be delayed in certain situations relative to what happens now.

Every time you try to use a power the client pings the server to try to use it, and the server is what determines whether a power is recharged, so that wouldn't happen.

[carroto]

40 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Every time you try to use a power the client pings the server to try to use it, and the server is what determines whether a power is recharged, so that wouldn't happen.

So you're saying that if you click on a power button that's not refreshed and the client plays the "not recharged" sound, it's still sending the command to the server?  I have no knowledge about that, but if that is true it would be a surprise to me.  I don't recall ever experiencing clicking a power that shows it's not refreshed and having it activate anyway.

[Vanden]

1 hour ago, carroto said:

So you're saying that if you click on a power button that's not refreshed and the client plays the "not recharged" sound, it's still sending the command to the server?

That’s how it works, yes.

1 hour ago, carroto said:

I don't recall ever experiencing clicking a power that shows it's not refreshed and having it activate anyway.

That’s because the situation where that would happen, where the mapserver somehow runs faster than the client expects, virtually never happens. 

 

The only way I could see it happen is if you get hit by a recharge boost, but the packet that tells your client to recalculate the displays of your recharge status somehow gets dropped and never retransmitted.

Edited August 22, 2019 by Vanden