Fire Plough still not working on servers

[Pablo_Sky]

I cant get a campfire started with Fire Plough playing on servers.
Im on the succession game server (ping: 250ms), and it didnt work correctly.
I had spent all the Fire Plough trying it, and nothing.
But Bow Drill work perfectly

[FlowerChild]

If someone else could verify this, I'd appreciate it.

[Mesh]

Fire Ploughs are working fine on my server. We do have the occasional "rotten luck" though, I remember specifically one of the lads one night went through four full fire ploughs, ran out of wood (fresh spawn), gave up and logged off waited for day instead. Generally though it all works fine, they're meant to be shit at starting fires, it's rubbing two shafts together

[FlowerChild]

Fire Ploughs are working fine on my server. We do have the occasional "rotten luck" though, I remember specifically one of the lads one night went through four full fire ploughs, ran out of wood (fresh spawn), gave up and logged off waited for day instead.

Hmmm... that is a tad suspicious. I don't think I've ever managed to go through an entire plough without starting a fire.

The way it works is that your odds go up the longer you rub it. So while it's theoretically possible to go through a whole plough without starting a fire, assuming he was using it properly, it's probably heading towards winning the lotto territory to go through several without any luck.

Further confirmation would be appreciated though. The code I put in place awhile back when similar problems were reported should be fairly robust in terms of handling high latency situations, and the next step would require a fairly extensive reworking of some of the game's net code, so I'd prefer to be absolutely certain before heading off in that direction.

[eleninrec]

In our server the problem persists. About one third of the time I go through multiple ploughs without success. Bow drills generally work within a range of 1.5 drills, but in rare cases three drills can be used up. I have visual feedback when this occurs, as the fire starter durability goes upward (reverse) and the item name is re-displayed above the hotbar, as if I selected it again. I generally rely on the host player for firemaking.
Both of us and the WiFi router are all in the same room, and the ping indicator is always perfect. So we believe it is linked to dedicated server performance issue, rather than network latency.

It is also noteworthy that this problem didn't exist in the early game. It appeared after our world got around 90 in-game days old.

[Mesh]

I'll be streaming again on Monday. I'll keep aware of it and ask the guys to use fire ploughs instead of bow drills to test it and we'll keep track of any out of the ordinary stuff

[Nelgoth]

My friend just went through 2 1/2 fire ploughs and we are playing on a ABCEEEEF server. It seems to happen to my friend the most. I am running the server on my machine. Let me know if you need more info.

[FlowerChild]

I just made a small change in the firestarter code that I'm hoping might resolve this. Let me know if this persists after next release.

[Mesh]

Just a quick bit of feedback here, on my smp server, lighting a clay oven just now I went through half a fire plough, then a full one and then two thirds of a third plough before my oven lit.

[FlowerChild]

Just a quick bit of feedback here, on my smp server, lighting a clay oven just now I went through half a fire plough, then a full one and then two thirds of a third plough before my oven lit.

I think there may be some confusion over how the fire plough works:

It's the plough itself that heats up, not the oven. So, if it doesn't work on the half plough, you get no bonus to success on the 2nd one. The bit about using a half plough first is why I bring this up, as ploughs with more than half damage are essentially garbage, as they don't have enough durability to heat up to the point where they can start a fire.

Also, this is without any breaks right? Soon as you stop rubbing those sticks together, the plough begins to cool again. If you went through a full plough without a light, that is indeed weird (but not impossible), unless you stopped briefly at any point.

[Mesh]

I think there may be some confusion over how the fire plough works.

Ohhhhh my bad then, because yeah I think I stopped mid way through. Now that I think of how a fire plough actually works it makes perfect sense. My apologies, I'll bear that in mind

[FlowerChild]

Ohhhhh my bad then, because yeah I think I stopped mid way through. Now that I think of how a fire plough actually works it makes perfect sense. My apologies, I'll bear that in mind

Well, it's a valuable piece of feedback info actually. I think I'll rework the interface slightly to make how this works a bit more obvious, as you're not the first person that I've seen get confused by this.

[the_fodder]

This seems like a good place to bring up a similar yet opposite issue Xaedblade had with the flint and steel. He burns through durability starting 3 ovens. He was using a continual motion, like with the new fire starters , instead of pausing for the cool down added in 2013 that prevent players using as a weapon.

I timestamped the 10 second clip if you want to see. https://youtu.be/rdqoJ5CqDIo?t=5m5s

Sorry if this is in the wrong place. It just seemed logical to bring up since you were talking about the feedback firestarters give the user.

[FlowerChild]

This seems like a good place to bring up a similar yet opposite issue Xaedblade had with the flint and steel. He burns through durability starting 3 ovens. He was using a continual motion, like with the new fire starters , instead of pausing for the cool down added in 2013 that prevent players using as a weapon.

Errrr... what cooldown? Unless you're talking about a vanilla thing I don't know about, I resolved the above by putting in random variance on the fire starting attempts and having animals flee when you tried to start a fire with flint & steel.

Flint and Steel is totally random, with no warmup and cooldown mechanics, so it's entirely possible to burn through more or less of one like with what happened to Xaeblade.

[the_fodder]

Errrr... what cooldown? Unless you're talking about a vanilla thing I don't know about, I resolved the above by putting in random variance on the fire starting attempts and having animals flee when you tried to start a fire with flint & steel.

Flint and Steel is totally random, with no warmup and cooldown mechanics, so it's entirely possible to burn through more or less of one like with what happened to Xaeblade.

Yes, random variance. I was under the impression that there was also a punishment for spamming the flint & Steel as it was an easy way to not agro sleeping silverfish. I guess I am just remembering. nothing to see here. move along.

[eleninrec]

Yesterday I had some extensive testing opportunity in our server. With the new release, both bow drills and fire ploughs are now working very well. Thank you very much!

[FlowerChild]

Yesterday I had some extensive testing opportunity in our server. With the new release, both bow drills and fire ploughs are now working very well. Thank you very much!

Hey, that's great news! Thanks for passing it along!

Additional confirmation from others would still be very much appreciated given the number of variables involved, but hopefully this thing is dead.

[Pablo_Sky]

It still not working for me, i used 3 whole fire plought until starving, and nothing.
I think is a problem with the ping of the server, i tried in a server with 500ms of ping.
But on the local server that I open for my family, they can light the campfire perfectly (about 150ms).

[FlowerChild]

It still not working for me, i used 3 whole fire plought until starving, and nothing.
I think is a problem with the ping of the server, i tried in a server with 500ms of ping.
But on the local server that I open for my family, they can light the campfire perfectly (about 150ms).

500 ms is rather extreme. The measures I've put in place reduce the impact of lag (check out the archaic correct usage of the term on me :) ), but don't eliminate it entirely, and 500 ms is getting into tin cans and cord territory. That's a full half second of round trip time on a data packet, nevermind what lag spikes might wind up bringing it up to.

I can always up the tolerance on the code a bit more (I've got it set as a numerical value I can adjust right now), but at a certain point "your connection sucks" becomes the correct response.

[FlowerChild]

I doubled the grace period before the fire starters start to cool down after you stop using them, which will hopefully prevent problems on all but the most insanely bad connections.

If this is still happening after next release, I suspect the more extensive rewrite I was trying to avoid will be the required course of action.