FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Is there a "correct" way to disconnect from a public server? Up to yesterday, I'd only ever been playing offline or on a LAN and I had been using the ESCape menu and choosing "Exit to Menu" (I think that's the right wording) but I noticed today that I couldn't get back on a server when I tried to reconnect. I got the screen with the clouds and a message saying "connecting to server"... and it just sat there, seemingly doing nothing.

For fun I tried to see if the server had a valid http server (to ascertain if the server itself was active) and it did, with a nifty little page that showed who was online. Lo and behold, I was listed as being online, even though I had still failed to connect. So I shut down Minetest completely, refreshed the public server web page and sure enough, I was still listed as being online. Upon reloading Minetest, I still couldn't connect to the server.

Prior to all of this, I had connected to the server but once the connecting and loading of assets was complete, I couldn't see most of the map. Only a few blocks in my surrounding area. The rest of the blocks were invisible and no matter which direction I went in there was no redraw or loading of blocks. I was basically stuck on a small section of blocks.

So it sounds like my game on the server crashed but the server didn't register it and so it just had me listed as connected. I'm assuming at some point, my username will time-out and I'll be able to connect again. I'm just wondering if it was something I did wrong that caused all of this.

I played online for the first time yesterday and had a similar problem where blocks weren't loading and large areas of the map were invisible but I believe I was able to disconnect and reconnect and that seemed to fix the problem.

The server I used today was mt.bremaweb.com. I'm using Minetest 0.4.7 on 64 bit Windows 7 with 4GB RAM and an NVidia graphics card with 2GB of RAM (Direct X diagnostics actually shows 3789MB, so it seems its using virtual memory?)

I saw you online at one point, but didn't say anything, I was busy dealing with newbies.

And that part, Connecting to server... i have that problem too now.

First of all, its Minetest, not MineTest.

What you have described just looks like a bad connection to the server. It seems like the "logout" package from your client hasnt reached the server (yet), so you have to wait until your (dead) player on the server pings out.
There are very few ways to incorrectly disconnect (e.g. sending SIGKILL to Minetest); closing the window, "Exist to Menu" and "Exit to OS" are all proper ways of closing the connection to the server.

PilzAdam wrote:First of all, its Minetest, not MineTest.

My apologies. I have corrected my original post.

PilzAdam wrote:What you have described just looks like a bad connection to the server. It seems like the "logout" package from your client hasnt reached the server (yet), so you have to wait until your (dead) player on the server pings out.
There are very few ways to incorrectly disconnect (e.g. sending SIGKILL to Minetest); closing the window, "Exist to Menu" and "Exit to OS" are all proper ways of closing the connection to the server.

Thanks for your response.