"ERR NCSimple_Serializer (ch=0)" & "EXC Memory stream is not expendable"

[Thunderbolt-GER]

Hello,

 

After the current gameupdate 20.4 (b42) i have an issue on the multiplayer server i am playing (and co-admining) on.

 

At first, everything worked with the new version. After playing a few hours, the console popped up with thes flollowing errors, which causes that boxes can't be opened anymore (nothing happens when pressing 'e') and the sound of jumping and walking is also gone. The nature sound is still there.

 

ERR NCSimple_Serializer (ch=0)
EXC Memory stream is not expendable

 

I quit the game, restarted it and after i am loggin in the game and doing nothing, a few seconds (5-10) later the same 2 errors pop up in the console.

 

I deleted the mapdata of this server with the launcher, rebooted my machine and connected again.

The map downloaded completely, but after a few seconds the 2 errors popped up again.

 

Now i am out of ideas what to do and can't play anymore. Any pointers to what is going on there?

In the server log are no entries connected to this problem, it seems to be locally only.

 

Outputlog -> https://pastebin.com/BsWfACg8

 

I just validated my gamefiles via Steam, reconnected and did nothing (just staring at the screen) after i was logged in and after 17 seconds the 2 errors appeared again.

 

Edited April 26, 2022 by Thunderbolt-GER
Added output log (see edit history)

[chikorina]

Thank you for reporting.

This is an issue that occurs when you have a drone deployed on a dedicated server in A20.4.  

There is already a ticket for it.  Hopefully there will be a fix soon.

[Thunderbolt-GER]

Oh, i was just writing a "real" bugreport... I guess i don't have to do it then ?

 

So is there any way i can still play?

I guess deleting "drones.dat" would fix it, but everyone on the server would lose his/her drone ?

 

Anything i can do?

 

[AdmiralJT]

One of the guys on my server started having this error this morning after the server restarted, He played all night after the update with his drone deployed and didn't have a problem. He's gonna try and run without the drone to see if that's the issue.

 

[Callum123456789]

can vouch for this being an issue its really bad

[Cluessless4]

Have a friend that's currently experiencing this issue. We backed up our server, restarted it and the problem begin. We did the whole not touching the drone thing and it worked for a while, but he picked it up to move it and now the game no longer lets him in. He just stays stuck on creating a player. Hopefully, this is fixed soon.

[Spleenvendor]

3 hours ago, Thunderbolt-GER said:

Oh, i was just writing a "real" bugreport... I guess i don't have to do it then ?

 

So is there any way i can still play?

I guess deleting "drones.dat" would fix it, but everyone on the server would lose his/her drone ?

 

Anything i can do?

 

 

I tested deleting the drones.dat file and it didn't solve the issue for more than one of my players

[Thunderbolt-GER]

I also deleted the drones. dat and my problem is gone... I did not deploy a new drone tho, because i don't want the error to return

 

[On Day Seven]

Where is the drones.dat file on a dedicated server?

[Thunderbolt-GER]

14 hours ago, On Day Seven said:

Where is the drones.dat file on a dedicated server?

In the save game folder.

[P3rf3ctVZer0]

 

[On Day Seven]

Will players on 20.4 be able to connect to a 20.3 server - wouldn't have thought they could?

[selissi]

46 minutes ago, On Day Seven said:

Will players on 20.4 be able to connect to a 20.3 server - wouldn't have thought they could?

Don't think so. TFP should address this issue asap.

[FridayPie]

On 4/26/2022 at 2:39 PM, chikorina said:

Thank you for reporting.

This is an issue that occurs when you have a drone deployed on a dedicated server in A20.4.  

There is already a ticket for it.  Hopefully there will be a fix soon.

Look out for individual user profile  files too. Those who experience that error appear to have huge profiles (>1Mb compared to 8-30kb normal)

 

It seems it's either use of ANY transport entities (robots and drones included) causes this over time, gradually. It accumulates with time spent online, but drones appear is what triggers.

 

No signs of problem in logs until it happens. Then player is unable even complete player entity realization in-world or downloading of rules, server silently closes connection to client but shows player online.

[On Day Seven]

2 hours ago, selissi said:

Don't think so. TFP should address this issue asap.

Yeah, this is pretty bad - especially with the Region/Language change. There seems to be alot less servers running now... which was good for me until the drone issue occurred

[WaywardEko]

Here to pile on to this issue.  Had to shut down my stream last night because of this issue.   Half of the folks on my community server are having this issue and a handful can't even log in after updated to 20.4.  We are going to roll back to 20.3 as 20.4 is too unstable for consumption.

[Backslash2099]

I had this issue and found a work around if you're not able to log in. The first time I had the error pop up I was able to log in a couple times but kept getting the error and had to relog. Eventually I was no longer able to log in.

 

I solved this by copying my player profile to a single player world, start the single player game, exit the single player game, copying the player profile back to the dedicated server. There seems to be a limit of 2 mb on player profiles for dedicated servers, and it can't get bigger than that. This limit doesn't seem to exist for single player worlds. Something with the drone is loading up the player profile with info that it shouldn't be. Once you load into a single player world, it cleans the erroring data and brings your player profile down to the size it should be and then you can load it on the server.

 

For now it seems we just need to put the drones in a box until TFP can fix the issue.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Backslash2099 (see edit history)

[SofaKING]

On 4/30/2022 at 1:09 AM, Backslash2099 said:

I had this issue and found a work around if you're not able to log in. The first time I had the error pop up I was able to log in a couple times but kept getting the error and had to relog. Eventually I was no longer able to log in.

 

I solved this by copying my player profile to a single player world, start the single player game, exit the single player game, copying the player profile back to the dedicated server. There seems to be a limit of 2 mb on player profiles for dedicated servers, and it can't get bigger than that. This limit doesn't seem to exist for single player worlds. Something with the drone is loading up the player profile with info that it shouldn't be. Once you load into a single player world, it cleans the erroring data and brings your player profile down to the size it should be and then you can load it on the server.

 

For now it seems we just need to put the drones in a box until TFP can fix the issue.

Can you PLEASE details what you exaclty copied and where, thank.

[Wezul]

Hi All. I made an account just for this issue. I found this forum because I and a few of the people on the server I'm on are having this  issue. I Had a drone deployed, and saw the issue mentioned about a drone, so I put it away and took it out of my inventory, relogged and everything was fine. told the others and same for them.. a week passes and now I'm getting the same issue just doing anything. Loot a crate, error pops up. Go to my workbench, nope sorry, now you can't interact with anything. 

 

Other than the drone issue, is there a fix found for this, or something else that could be causing the error? The server I'm on if pretty well modded, and it started happening first this time, when I was in an added POI, but thats probably just coincidence as it happens anytime now. 

[luya21]

I have the same issue even I remove the drone and it still come back and it even got worst I am unable to get in my friends server after getting the error i am stuck in creating player more then a hour or more

[Kuvuplan]

We have been using a Friends Only server since Alpha 20 was released, and have had Drones following us around since we first encountered them.

 

About 3 in-game days into 20.4, 3 of us got hit with this issue and it was right before a Blood Moon was about to start.  We tried server restarts and other debugging steps which ended up not working until we encountered this thread.

 

One of us stayed safe by putting the drone away as soon as we learned that it was a probable cause.

 

Another managed to avoid the issue for awhile by running away from their spawn point after recovering from this crash.  Which managed to prevent the Drone from waking up and following them around causing a crash.  After the blood moon, they walked over to the drone, which then activated.  They emptied it's inventory, put the drone into their inventory, and then got this crash.  After a logout and log in, they seemed fine, and had the drone on their belt.

 

Another followed Backslash2099's advise and that resulted in a .ttp that went from a bit over 2,000 KB to 30 KB after using a single player world to sanitize it.  There was some strangeness with their inventory, but it seemed to work out.

 

Another followed those same steps, but got error messages about downloading and modifying data, and each time they loaded that profile, they got a level 1 character at a starting point, with a 10 KB .ttp file.  We ended up using a backup of their profile from earlier in the day.  They lost 3 in-game days worth of progression, but that's better than starting over from scratch.

 

 

When the issue was hitting us, we couldn't go longer than 30 seconds logged in before the console error would show up, and then be in a private session type thing where the other players would be stationary, and we couldn't interact with world objects.

After our various recovery steps and preventions, we managed to finish the Blood Moon (After using some settime commands on the server to delay it a bit while we debugged) and stay connected after the looting and rebuilding afterwards.

 

 

The 20.3 backup files for all 4 of our player profiles have about 2,000 KB .ttp files.

After we shut down the server post blood moon, the one that had a restore, and then shoved the drone into a storage box is at 30 KB.

The one with a successful singe-player sanitize is at 62 KB.

The one who avoided it by putting a drone in a box before getting the error is at 1,777 KB.

The one who ran from the drone, then went back for it is at 2,045 KB with the drone still in their inventory.  This one knows to watch out and stash the drone somewhere safe next time we launch the server.

[Kuvuplan]

13 hours ago, SofaKING said:

Can you PLEASE details what you exaclty copied and where, thank.

 

On the dedicated server, with the server off, grab the 3 files for the affected player at %APPDATA%/Roaming/7DaysToDie/Saves/[Map Name]/[Game Name]/Saves

There is a .map, a .ttp, and a .bak of the .ttp file.

Give a copy of those files to the player.  Reading the server logs can give clues on which sets of files go to which player.  Also, the .ttp file has the username string in there somewhere if you open it as a text file and know what username(s) to search for.

 

Note:  The player profile saves use the same path on the server and client PC's.

 

That player creates a new single player game, preferably with the same map.  Our player that succeeded used a map they downloaded (Which was different from the server's custom map).  The one that failed was using Navezgane.

After that new game is created, quit, overwrite their %APPDATA%/Roaming/7DaysToDie/Saves/[Map Name]/[Game Name]/Saves with the files that came from the server.

Then re-launch the single player game.

While that game is running, it should be obvious that this character is not starting from scratch.  Inventory should have some stuff.

Quit that game.

They then grab those files and send them back to the server.

The server overwrites it's copy of %APPDATA%/Roaming/7DaysToDie/Saves/[Map Name]/[Game Name]/Saves from the ones the player sent.  (Hopefully the server has backups in case something goes wrong/worse)

Server launches, players connect, and should be safe from that issue, long enough at least to put their drones away.

Edited May 2, 2022 by Kuvuplan (see edit history)

[Thunderbolt-GER]

I want to add some additional info.

 

When i had the "ERR NCSimple_Serializer (ch=0)" & "EXC Memory stream is not expendable" error on our hosted Multiplayer server, i did shut down the server, deleted the drones.dat and drones.dat.bak files, restarted the server and the error was gone, along with all drones of course. I did not ever deploy a new drone after that.

 

I am currently NOT having any problems on our server, but i just noticed, checking via ftp, that my player profile (*.ttp & *.ttp.bak) files are 2093913 bytes large. So > 2 MB.

 

So just the fact, that my profile is larger than 2 MB, does not seem to cause an error with 100% certainity.

 

I looked at the last part of my profile with a text- & hex editor and will attach screenshots, in case it will be helpful for the devs (if they read in this forum anyway).

 

The data in the screenshots repeats until the end of file.

 

[Da Capin]

On 4/26/2022 at 12:45 PM, Thunderbolt-GER said:

Oh, i was just writing a "real" bugreport... I guess i don't have to do it then ?

 

So is there any way i can still play?

I guess deleting "drones.dat" would fix it, but everyone on the server would lose his/her drone ?

 

Anything i can do?

 

Can confirm this works if your player data isn't already too large.

On my friends server he can't connect as the files are too big for him but now he's deleted the drones.dat everyone else can connect who either hasn't used a drone or hadn't used one too long.

[mecks]

2 hours ago, Thunderbolt-GER said:

I want to add some additional info.

 

When i had the "ERR NCSimple_Serializer (ch=0)" & "EXC Memory stream is not expendable" error on our hosted Multiplayer server, i did shut down the server, deleted the drones.dat and drones.dat.bak files, restarted the server and the error was gone, along with all drones of course. I did not ever deploy a new drone after that.

 

I am currently NOT having any problems on our server, but i just noticed, checking via ftp, that my player profile (*.ttp & *.ttp.bak) files are 2093913 bytes large. So > 2 MB.

 

So just the fact, that my profile is larger than 2 MB, does not seem to cause an error with 100% certainity.

 

I looked at the last part of my profile with a text- & hex editor and will attach screenshots, in case it will be helpful for the devs (if they read in this forum anyway).

 

The data in the screenshots repeats until the end of file.

 

This got me thinking and I tried manually deleting the repeated characters (server-side), but ran into an issue where there's a coded expected bytes - so you can't just do that.

 

(Acceptable) If someone has an ICD of the players' .ttp file so we could figure out where the expected bytes are we could manually delete the characters, change the message (byte) size of the file and fix the profiles by hand. (Or maybe we need the devs to send this out?) 

(Better) Devs could run something on server startup and periodically to remove these entries for us.

(Best) Above + remove whatever code was added that's adding these erroneous entries.

 

Server log of the error:

 2022-05-02T11:09:29 281.076 ERR Loading player data failed for player 'EOS_0002dbea74864e59af3ae61262f44c5e', rolling back: Attempted to read past the end of the stream.
  at PooledBinaryReader.FillBuffer (System.Int32 _numBytes) [0x00030] in <ef95c36efe6a4645bb0ec98b58e164be>:0
  at PooledBinaryReader.ReadUInt16 () [0x00000] in <ef95c36efe6a4645bb0ec98b58e164be>:0
  at PlayerDataFile.Read (PooledBinaryReader _br, System.UInt32 _version) [0x003a4] in <ef95c36efe6a4645bb0ec98b58e164be>:0
  at PlayerDataFile.Load (System.String _dir, System.String _playerName) [0x00086] in <ef95c36efe6a4645bb0ec98b58e164be>:0 

Edited May 2, 2022 by mecks (see edit history)