TriadCity Message of the Day
2018-07-15

While trying to fix a worldwide networking problem, we've done a crazy thing.

Here's the glitch. The current generation of HTML5/JQuery TriadCity clients lacks control over network connections. The technology is called "WebSockets" and basically we're stuck with whatever parameters the browser vendors choose. And, it seems to be the case that they've all chosen fairly short connect timeouts. It's like this. Imagine you're making a phone call to a friend but your cell phone company has decided that if your friend fails to pick up in under .5 seconds the call will disconnect. What this means for TriadCity players is, the farther you are from our server in Oregon, the more likely the browser will drop your connection to TriadCity before you can log in. We hear that it's often difficult for players in Korea, Australia, the EU, or India to get connected.

So for experimental purposes we've put "proxy" servers in several locations around the world. Yay AWS, which makes this easy. Then we've configured DNS — click the link for info — to use "latency based routing". Ultimately this means that if you're in Australia, your TC client will connect to our Sydney proxy, which forwards to our Oregon server; if you're in the EU you'll hit London then Oregon. Stuff like that. In theory this allows the browsers to connect before timing out.

This is experimental. If you find you're having connection issues, please shoot a note to support@smartmonsters.com. If this turns out to make things worse we'll tear it down. But — so far so good!

Meet you in the city!

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