Ghost Players on server
 

A few people are reporting Ghost Players ont their servers, or players which are connected but have no name or score when viewed in HLSW and cannot be kicked.

I have just been reading a topic over on Steam Forums and some people thinks its related to the latest OB Engine update causing instability issues with SM (he doesn't mention SM as i direct cause however he does say the next step for him is to remove SM).

The reason given for the Ghosts is that clients are suffering from hl2.exe has stopped responding errors when the server initiates a map chnnge and as the cleint drops the connection to the server during the map change the drop is not registered with the server causing the slot to be filled with a player who is no longer connected.

I have no idea if there is any truth to this and at first i didn't believe it, however just to be safe i updated my DOD server to MM 1.9DEV & SM 1.3.2 (from MM 1,8 & SM 1.3.1) and since i did (about 3 day ago) i have not had any ghosts on my server.

Our clans second DOD which is owned and run by another person who does not believe in keeping his server up to date is still running MM 1.7 and SM 1.2.4 is still having this issue with ghosts.

Was wondering if any of you guys can shed any light on this (as you guys make SM)

Heres hoping we can get a decent explaination as to why so many of us are seeing these ghosts.

Heres the link to the topic on Steam Forums

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

there was a discussion on the mailing list and the only way to get rid of them is to restart the server

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

Is this a sourcemod issue or a server issue?

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

Yeah, it has been happening on my TF2 Server when viewed via HLSW since the last update. The ghost players are players that have left and are no longer on the server and they just show blank. It is a protocol problem i believe.

http://forum.hlsw.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2816

Quote:

- Lob (UK)

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

may be it is sourcemod issue

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

We have been having ghost issues on all of our servers and tried updating all of them to 1.3.2 but we continued getting them. I am going to disable SM and see what happens.

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

Additionally, one of our admins think it could be related to putting brackets around an entire username. Sounds silly, I know, but when players are on with a name like <subjectnamehere> the ghosts appear.

http://i47.tinypic.com/2yws677.jpg

If you look at the pic, you can see the names with brackets and the times of the ghosts... they are very close. When these people leave, the ghost stays.

UPDATE: Meh... we tested this theory and it is not the problem.

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

Same issue here...

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

The issue comes from the recent updates.

In fact, A2S_PLAYER are broken. At the begining you have what looks like a timestamp. Then the player id is always 0 and sometimes you have 4 ou 5 \x0 (null char) together.

It brokes a lots of parser (gamemonitor, hlsw and a lot of php query scripts) but the steam browser seems ok with the mess.

The best solution is to roll back to the last engine. It works for me with DoD:S.

Re: Ghost Players on server
 

So is this something we can't fix, something that only Valve can fix?