not able to hear everyone with coms in halo 2

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 11:17 am

Okay, tell me what you need to know.

What happened yesterday was this:

We were playing in messenger mode with 5-8 people at a time. After playing for a while, we got kicked out of the game (Halo2) with the "reconnecting" message displaying. We could still talk to eachother, but we couldn't do anything else (all that we could see was the black "reconnecting" screen).

After a minute or so, we also lost the ability to talk to eachother (while still waiting to reconnect). We then noticed that the Kai engine on the pc crashed (fatal exception). This was the case with all of us who were playing. We then restarted the Kai engine en shut down the UI and restarted that one again too, and started playing Halo 2 again. But after about 5 to 15 minutes the exact same would happen again.
I think it happened about 8 times last night.

When we played in Arena mode (to test if voicing worked allready) the crash didn't occur at all. We then headed back to messenger mode and started another Halo2 game, but again the engine crashed. This time it took a lot longer before it crashed though (30 mins approx) and someone else was the Party Leader (and thus hosting the game). It crashed twice again after that with this host, both with longer intervals inbetween than with the first host.

Party details:

All players were running the latest Xlink Kai engine on a WinXP pc. The 1st host has a 1 mbit upstream, the 2nd host a 512 mbit upstream, and both hosts had the full bandwith available to Xlink Kai (all other participants too by the way). The number of participants varied inbetween 5 and 8. All participants were located either in the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK or USA.

We also played with a similar party the day before yesterday and we didn't have a crash at all then (we played for about 3 hrs).

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 2:38 pm

I too have this same issue with the voice chat, i can hear ppl fine when we are in the game lobby, but voice communication stops once the Game starts. If I host a game i can hear everybody, but only if I host. I'm Glad you guys found the bug and are working on the fix. Very Happy

Kai Is the best thing that happened to my life!!!! Next to getting some ass!

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 4:21 pm

First off I would like to say I love this program. I was using Xbconnect (I even donated to them) but found connecting a group together painful.

I have only been using this for a few weeks and like it a lot though I have seen some minor issues.

Last night DIE-HARD was in my arena and shed some light on things. Please tell me if I’m getting this correct.

I’m running a dedicated arena. Static ip with ~15Mb down and 6Mb up. Bandwidth is not an issue. When playing only 1.2 Mb/s up is being used, yet we are having the same voice issues as others.

What I understand is that if there is heavy traffic (how much?) the Xboxes go into a mode where they save bandwidth by filtering the voice packets from Client to Client.

If I can get everybody to join using “I’m hosting” somehow this tells the Xboxes not to filter and the voice should work as expected. Only teams will hear each other.
Am I correct?

Is the update that is taking place tonight automatic? What does it fix?

Also (on a separate note) what causes messenger mode to crash so much. Is there a way to make it more stable? And Is there a way to detect cheaters (people with trainers running?)
And finally. A friend of mine can’t seem to download the maps. DIE-HARD said this was purely a system link problem. How can Microsoft not address this?

Thanks for letting me ask so many questions. We will be playing under mryuk late tonight again.

Oh yea, I wish I could take back my donation to them and double the one I’m sending you guys!

mryuk

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 5:46 pm

I am working on a very detailed explination of the problem and will post once i get TD's approval.

As for the "not able to load map" problem.... Read here.
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=1131908

hmm it seems they have deleted 99% of the posts about the Unable to load Map problem. There where tons of these the 1st week halo 2 was out.

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 6:30 pm

I used google and found my answers on the map thing. Thanks.

Is the update that is taking place tonight automatic? What does it fix? or whell you be posting that info too?

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 6:52 pm

Hope it will all be okay after the update, when you have played with voicing functioning okay, you don't wanna go back Wink

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 7:16 pm

It worked when we used xbconnect. But id rather suffer than go back to that.

Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 8:37 pm

Yeah i cant go back to XbConnect, YOu couldnt even pay me to use that Ugly interface again. Anyway, I hope they get the fix out tonight, as I plan to play some Drunken Halo Laughing

, tonight!

Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 8:02 pm

Well here are the details for the guys who wanted to know.
Auto Update comming soon don't worry Wink

---------------------------------

Ok let me show some images to help explain the story.

This is your standard network mesh. P2P. As you can see every person can talk to every other person. This is great for Racing games and others that don’t need to carefully track each player.

This is your standard Server/Client based game. Games like Halo 2, Rainbow 6, and most 1st person shooters are done. They are done this way because there needs to be 1 system in charge of deciding whether or not a player is shot. This is why some games that are poorly designed can have you “die” with no one in site. The server was not seeing the same screen you where for whatever reason, lag, packet loss, Evil or Very Mad

cheats!>

These games are the ones that require a Host with a large upload bandwidth and not just down. The Host has to be able to constantly relay what is going on to everyone. This is why many games have “Dedicated Servers”. They are fast and serve one purpose.

One of the great features of Kai is it’s built in bandwidth triggers. Each arena has a bandwidth limit set to reduce lag. This is why there is the Hosting Status. It bypasses the set triggers for the given arena. This works great for the games. The only problem is the voice is built on top of the game. In other words it is not Server/Client based. The voice is P2P like in image one.

While in the Halo 2 lobby you are able to talk because the bandwidth is low enough that it hasn’t triggered the “stop tunneling to new IP’s” trigger. This is why you are able to chat and hear everyone. Once the game starts and the trigger is active. Your Kai is only seeing that 1 IP is being used (the one of the Host) and it stops tunneling to other users. So now you go from P2P in image 1 to the Server/Client setup in image 2

From the images you should be able to see why you are no longer able to chat with anyone but the host.

Yes it is being fixed. No you don’t need any more detail. All you need is patience. Very Happy

We can’t pump out auto updates like we could in the past, we need to make sure the win32 version is compatible with the *nix versions now before pushing out any updates and making sure the *nix versions get updated as well if needed.

Yes this is a ton of info and if you still don’t understand… well that’s probably ok because this didn’t interest you anyway Wink

Your just here to play Smile

Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:42 pm

Thanks for the great info. if there is something i can do to help, just ask.

Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2004 12:54 am

just got the new updated kai
not working at all same as before .
I and 5 friends all on different boxes tryed it and all were updated with7.0.5.4
we set back to HOSTING on all computers and now some of us can't hear the others in the game on voice proximity?

hope to hear back from ya soon
ps we did this just after the up date.

we play'ed few games and it works ok here and there?????????

Team XLink Administrator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 4061

Yeah its not working here either. everyone in the private arena had the updated engine.

Kai Beginner Joined: 30 Nov 2004 Posts: 3 Location: Canada

people are saying there is an update, but i dont notice a change in the way things work.. im hoping it will be fixed soon.. i enjoy xlink alot more than xbc, and i dont want a reason to go back.. Razz

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 7:33 pm

Any chance we can get an update on the fix? Also, once the fix is released is there anything required to get the update?

Thanks to everyone that is working on this problem.

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 11:31 pm

still not working we are still setting everyone to host.

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 12:45 am

I'll bring it under attention again..

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 4:09 am

dfunked wrote:

I'll bring it under attention again..

THANKS MAN !!!! i love this site dude your all kewl with me!!!

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 1:28 pm

whenever I try to get around this problem by setting my status to host, all the games disappear? why?

Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 6:50 pm

just wanted to say that i'm online a lot and willing to help out with this problem

Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 10:15 am

naskhan wrote:

whenever I try to get around this problem by setting my status to host, all the games disappear? why?

THATS EASY JUST SET TO HOST AFTER YOUR IN THE ROOM.but you need to set it to host before you start the game you will not be able to talk to all.
the reason is that xlink thinks your wanting to host not join.