I recently ran a session with some friends this past Tuesday, and a very strange thing happened. Over the course of the five hours of use, there were a couple extra users that showed up in the session, both of which were using the same title that I use, (mine was noted as such). I was wondering if this was actually rando people somehow getting into my game, or was it the dev, (sorry, I forget his/your name), of Shmeppy?
I just want to make sure that no random person/peoples could gain access to the individual sessions. Especially if the particular url numbers are only sent/shared with the individuals that are involved in that game.
I took a look to make sure that I had an actual concrete understanding of what a “weird connection issue” is that would cause this. This is a bit technical, but for anyone who’s curious:
The Shmeppy client (which is what’s running in your browser) will “ping” the server every 2 seconds or so. The server will respond with a “pong” as quickly as it can.
If the Shmeppy client doesn’t hear from the server within about 12 seconds, it decides that the connection is dead, and shows “disconnected.” This can happen in various situations like if the server crashes or if your internet connection gets unplugged/you get too far from your router. In your case, “craptacular internet” would mean that your internet connection is essentially getting unplugged every once in awhile.
Whenever the Shmeppy client gets disconnected, it will immediately try to re-establish a connection with the server. So if the issue is resolved shortly after disconnection, you can be connected again quite quickly.
Now, the server is also doing a similar thing. If it hasn’t heard a ping from the client recently, it’ll determine the connection is dead and boot the client from the game, removing them from the peer list. But instead of the 12 second deadline that the client has, the server waits 30 seconds before doing this.
So… In the event that you abnormally disconnect and your client discards the connection, but then manages to reconnect, all within the 30 second timeframe of the server’s ping deadline, you’ll see your own computer appear twice. Because your current (alive) connection will show up, and your old (dead) connection will also show up. But your old connection will vanish before long once the server realizes its dead.
All to say: yes, this can happen if you have craptacular internet, and there’s nothing to be worried about. If it often ends up confusing people I might do something about it (I could have a particular instance of Shmeppy’s client get a unique identifier, so that when it reconnects the server can realize that it’s the same client as who should be at the other end of the now-dead-connection).