A couple folks have reported their connection to the game dropping unexpectedly from the play screen.
This can result in:
A sad picard error, either when you send a message or when a new pose comes in.
Poses not appearing (either your own or someone else’s) until you manually refresh the page.
I should note that scenario #2 is 100% expected if your work firewall blocks websocket connections, or you’re playing on a device that goes to sleep (a tablet or a closed laptop). When this happens, though, there should be a variety of notifications.
And (depending on your game and browser notification settings), possibly also a desktop alert:
If you are getting play screen errors (either #1 or #2) it would be helpful if you could provide me more info to help figure out what’s happening:
Game Information - Is this happening everywhere or just on certain games?
Network Information - Is it happening only at work with a weird firewall, or only at home with a wonky wifi connection?
Error Details - Which scenario are you seeing, 1 or 2?
If #1, can you get your game admin to send me the detailed error from the debug log?
If #2, are you seeing any of the notifications I mentioned above?
Browser Console - Every browser has a developer console (in Chrome it’s under View → Developer → Javascript Console) that may show helpful red error text.
Feel free to post or PM the info or anything else you think is relevant. Thanks!
I was just watching this scene, so I didn’t want to try and pose/OOC in it.
Somewhen between 8:18a-8:37a, the portal stopped updating without any notification or error-message. The pose-timer was still updating, so it looked like no one had posed in 30+ minutes, but - when I refreshed - people had been posing.
It’s 100% a firewall issue. Doesn’t happen on my home PC.
Thanks for the info! It seems like the firewall is somehow managing to stop the websocket connection without the websocket realizing it’s been stopped. Hmmmmm.
This happens to me all the time when I use Firefox (my preferred browser) while using the portal, to the point where if I know I’m going to be scening or doing something else somewhat time-intensive, like looking at jobs, I pull up Chrome, even though I don’t use it for anything else. I’m on my desktop at home with a wired connection. I just recreated the error by leaving the site up this morning for 20ish minutes or so. (I may not be grabbing the right bit from the browser console but those errors coincided with the timeout notification I got). If there’s any way to mitigate this on Firefox that’d be great, but cache clearing and various other things don’t seem to help.
That’d be awesome. I know the portal is known to work better with Chrome (and I have no issues on that browser) but it’s weird to me because it feels like it’s gotten noticeably worse over…I want to say the last few months. The most recent ‘me complaining’ page on the game I can find is from August but that was after trying to change some browser settings/clear stuff out and it’d been happening for a while. For a long time prior to that (apart from maybe some lagging when pages loaded) it was perfectly usable on Firefox and play screen stuff like pages/poses/other notifications updated just fine without it timing out. My first assumption was it was caused by an update but the problems didn’t feel at the time like they coincided with any of the upgrades, so idk.
So the error you cited is apparently a known thing in firefox that they claim is working as intended. Something about iframes security? Ares doesn’t use iframes by default, so I’m wondering if this is happening on a specific game with customizations, or all games? (Might be a similar but unrelated problem)
@Cidward Hmm. I left my computer sitting on the play screen in firefox for well over an hour and didn’t see any errors. Are you on the most recent version of firefox?
Yep, I’ve got the most updated version. I’m wondering if one of my extensions if the problem (I use LastPass, Grammarly, and some privacy stuff like Facebook container). Turning all of them off didn’t appear to do that much but I’m gonna uninstall/reinstall, clear everything out again, and see what happens. Thanks for looking at this, Fara, your work is majorly appreciated.
@Cidward (and anyone else experiencing errors) - V104 has an improvement to the notifications when the websocket connection goes down. It also has some extra logging to the debug console, available in Chroms via View -> Developer -> Javascript Console and in Firefox via Tools -> Developer Tools -> Browser Console. (other browsers will have a similar feature) If you see it again, can you please see if there’s anything in the console.
