FFXI Black Screen on Login - anyone else get it?

[Faranim]

Sometimes when I log into my character, after choosing "Yes" on the character select screen, it fades to black and hangs there. It never gets to the "Downloading Data" screen and I have to End the Process and restart POL.

This happens from a fresh boot of POL, no weird 2 boxing going on. I'd say it happens about 20% of the time for me.

I was just wondering if this happens to anyone else, or why it might happen? My best guess is that a couple of important packets are getting dropped which sends the client into an infinite loop, but my connection is pretty solid and I really doubt I could be losing important packets like that.

[aurik]

Sometimes when I log into my character, after choosing "Yes" on the character select screen, it fades to black and hangs there. It never gets to the "Downloading Data" screen and I have to End the Process and restart POL.

This happens from a fresh boot of POL, no weird 2 boxing going on. I'd say it happens about 20% of the time for me.

I was just wondering if this happens to anyone else, or why it might happen? My best guess is that a couple of important packets are getting dropped which sends the client into an infinite loop, but my connection is pretty solid and I really doubt I could be losing important packets like that.

Yep I bet your connection is failing when you switch from the character server to the zone server. Are you logging in whitegate often?

[Faranim]

Sometimes when I log into my character, after choosing "Yes" on the character select screen, it fades to black and hangs there. It never gets to the "Downloading Data" screen and I have to End the Process and restart POL.

This happens from a fresh boot of POL, no weird 2 boxing going on. I'd say it happens about 20% of the time for me.

I was just wondering if this happens to anyone else, or why it might happen? My best guess is that a couple of important packets are getting dropped which sends the client into an infinite loop, but my connection is pretty solid and I really doubt I could be losing important packets like that.

Yep I bet your connection is failing when you switch from the character server to the zone server. Are you logging in whitegate often?

Yes, I logout every night at whitegate. Probably explains it.

[Calina]

i get that prob but only on my vista pc on my xp pc it happens but very rarly no clue what cuases it just restart pol and it will usaly work fine

[Shuemue]

Yeah it happens to me every so often, I have no answer as to why, other than shitty SE coding.

[Calina]

i read somewhere that the way SE sends packets is instead of sending 1 on a sucure line or somthing they just send it twice if first dosent get there they prey second does so what iam guessing is both arent making it and it just freezes up

i realy dont understand it myself nor do i know if iam using right words to discribe it

[Faranim]

According to Cliff (or whoever it was that did the work at the time), FFXI uses an absolutely horrid networking protocol.

They don't use TCP (secure, guaranteed delivery of data), but with good reason (TCP requires maintaining a large # of open connections).

Instead they use UDP. UDP is like the mail, you put a letter into your mailbox and *hope* it gets to the destination. Usually when using UDP, you implement some sort of handshaking procedure to ensure the data got there properly. But appearantly FFXI devs were too lazy to do this, so instead of actually verifying that the data was sent successfully, they just "put 2 letters in the mail" and hope at least 1 makes it.

I'm just not sure if the problem is from my end, or from SE's end.

[Calina]

According to Cliff (or whoever it was that did the work at the time), FFXI uses an absolutely horrid networking protocol.

They don't use TCP (secure, guaranteed delivery of data), but with good reason (TCP requires maintaining a large # of open connections).

Instead they use UDP. UDP is like the mail, you put a letter into your mailbox and *hope* it gets to the destination. Usually when using UDP, you implement some sort of handshaking procedure to ensure the data got there properly. But appearantly FFXI devs were too lazy to do this, so instead of actually verifying that the data was sent successfully, they just "put 2 letters in the mail" and hope at least 1 makes it.

I'm just not sure if the problem is from my end, or from SE's end.

ya thats what i was thinking of thz for posting it completly