LOL - gentlemen. I'm touched. No, not in that way (Rev, put your hands where I can see them). Thanks for the kind words. However, let's save it for the time when/if I've beaten this glitch, because I won't feel I deserve it until the little bleedin' gremlin bastard is squished firmly on the pavement of Kavala square.
You should know that, as of today, noon-update server restart, I have 'tweaked' the bandwidth and packet sizes on the server, according to some dubious reference materials I've found on the net. Trouble is, like most things that are 'community-researched', there is an amount of inductive logic in any of these references. Like I said to someone the other night, if enough people see rabbits when there is thunder, pretty soon they start believing that rabbits cause lightning. And other voodoo shit like that. So, I have no idea whether the bandwidth changes are going to eliminate the packet-drop, and/or whether they are going to cause some other (unrelated) issue when the server gets full. We shall see.
My first objective is to at least stop the massive 'packet-dropped' log-spam that we've been seeing since we moved to this new Vilayer server using the same basic configuration that Asdrubael had set up on his dedicated German server. I believe the network capacities of those two servers are vastly different, so for the moment, it's a case of turning the tap right down, and maybe edging it back up over time, to increase the performance without getting back into the turd-drop zone again. It'll probably take a while, and will involve a lot of 'how is it for you now, honey?' type questions, and honest/coherent/helpful/non-abusive answers coming back from the majority of the players. Repeat until solved.
Then, after that, I intend to strip the intestines out of Vampire's Auto-Gear-Saving scripts to find out why it is not saving primary weapons, some (but not all) items in vests, and a few other peculiar save-related glitches.
Then, if I can, I intend to kill the 'weapon-drop-on-disconnect' problem, so that there aren't so many random weapons being left around. Earlier attempts with this (also using a Vampire-inspired script), resulted in massively overpowering 'delete everything on the ground within 5m' scripts, and removal of varying levels of the player's primary, secondary and even backpack weapons, in the hope that ARMA3 would find them 'gone' when it tried to drop them on the floor by a player's corpse. Sounds great, except *sometimes* it appeared that this loss of weapon was being synced to the DB (somehow -because it shouldn't be), and that of course contributed to the feeling that gear somehow wasn't being saved (it was, it was just being deleted again upon death, which amounts to the same thing, really). As I said before, I could fucking swing for the twat at BIS who decided in March that it would be a good idea if weapons were left behind on the floor upon player-death, and didn't give us a server-side option to turn this behaviour off! Prize numpty, imho, and he's made me a fuck-ton of work as a result. I've been wrestling with that problem for an entire month, with no luck (as have many others, sadly).
Anyway. Onwards and upwards, as they say. Let me know whether the noon update today has made the blindest bit of difference to you (either way or no ways, please), and I'll stir that all into the mix... Cheers again.
Oh - and I must just add this in for GhostFire... The bug? It can run... but it can't hide!!!!
