The Software

---

If you want to play D&D online you need virtual tabletop software. It's one part specialized whiteboard, one part document management. All of these features operate in a real-time multi-user state.

In all my years of playing D&D online and testing dozens of products that want to be the software of choice, there is really only one solid* product out there. Kloogewerks. It is Java based and thus, it runs on all the various platforms our DMs and Players use.

The drawback is however, that even at its best, *Kloogewerks is an unreliable, unstable software. When something breaks the problems are buried so far in the Java stack that you go crazy trying to diagnose them. Java can be downright detrimentally selfish about sharing information about itself and who it 'talks' to.

---

The Problem

Sometime in November of 2007 our once stable Kloogewerks started to act up. Over the past three years of using Kloogewerks, you know it does this from time to time. However this is the first time it was acting up in a way that was actually hindering gameplay.

For full disclosure, our DM hosts the game on a Windows Vista Basic laptop and we all connect with various operating systems: Mac OSX, Windows XP, etc. The winter holidays are a somewhat sporadic time for our usual weekly gaming sessions, so this is somewhat to blame for letting the problem go on for three months, but nonetheless it was a a problem that we "worked around" for those past three months.

The symptoms are that the DM would start a server session, and after two client connections to the server, all others who tried to connect would be denied. If one of the two who were successfully connected would quit, even they would not be able to reconnect. The only fix was to restart Klooge and then again, only two more users could connect.

We thought that maybe it was a recent Windows Vista Basic patch that had pushed out that was reinforcing the maximum of two tpcip.sys connections in Vista Basic. This seemed likely, as only two clients could connect. After two separate late-night, remote troubleshooting get-togethers (instead of playing), we installed who-knows-what tcpip.sys hacks patches on the Vista machine. All ultimately failed to get things working.

So we moved on to removing Windows Security patches that had been pushed out recently. Removing none of those fixed the problem. Our DM even when the extra step and installed Windows XP on another computer to try and host Kloogewerks there. Unfortunately as that is an older machine, it would crash every time that someone would connect to it via any Java server-type program (including Kloogewerks), so that was no good.

In what turned out to be a step in the right direction, we all decided to revert our Java back a few months with the security patches that have come out recently. All of us were using the latest version of the JRE 1.6.0.4 (which came out in January 2008) yet our problems spanned back to 1.6.0.3 (released in 2007 sometime). So we went back to 1.6.0.2, yet this still didn't fix our problems.

Some of our users at this point were so frustrated with Kloogewerks that they were starting to research how to migrate our campaign to OpenRPG or MapTool. In a last ditch effort to prove the worth of Klooge, I finally figured out how to get the server license files working on my Macintosh OSX computer and I started a server session.

One user, two users, then three, four and five users were able to connect!  Yet would it last? They disconnected, and then reconnected just fine. It looks like it was some sort of Windows problem after all. Looking at my OSX stats, I was running Java 1.5.0_13. I still run OSX Tiger and this was the JRE version out for it.

I'd like to note here that I really dislike the way Sun versions Java JRE, JSE, JDK, etc. Why not just have a major version that follows the main Java branch?

---

The Solution

We had our Windows Vista Basic DM uninstall all remnants of Java Runtime from Vista, install JRE version 1.6.0.1 (first version of 1.6) and sweet victory, it worked! We were all able to all reconnect to his server and resume our campaign.

There is still one lingering problem we are having however. One of our Windows Server 2003 users seems to have a special problem with this Klooge in that when he connects to the server, it will almost immediately drop his connection and then Kloogewerks will proceed to deny all subsequent connection attempts from anyone.
Good thing for us that he has another computer on which to use Klooge, which works without a problem.

Here is the link to download older verison of the JRE (Thanks Brad):
http://java.sun.com/products/archive

Egads! I hate diagnosing problems like this.

In an e-mail from Keith Williams, he let me know that the next version of Kloogewerks coming out soon will have a few more safeguards against players locking up the master. Thanks Keith. Just as long as you log the connection attempts *somewhere* that would be better than what we have now.


technorati: Kloogewerks, Klooge, dnd, software, virtual, tabletop, fixes, java
More Blog posts:


Created 42 weeks, 4 days ago