So randomly in voobly, never during game, me and many other people 'go fp', suddenly the connection to all other users break. Happens like 10x a day, very annoying. The solution is simple: quit voobly and start it again. After that you are connected to all users again. But in that time maybe you lose your spot in a game that was finally full after waiting 30 minutes. But why can voobly not do this by itself? Reestablish the connection? Why you have to restart for it? Maybe you can make a button to reconnect or something.

AOC is a P2P game and this has nothing to do with the Voobly client. When you go FP, it means that your traffic is routed through the Voobly Proxy Servers -- simply because you have lost the connection to other players.

In many cases people have disconnected their VPNs and then getting a new ip address when reconnecting. Or even worse, they are using their mobile connection in order to play where your ip address changes a lot.

You shouldn't have these problems however when using a DSL / cable or fibre connection and a properly forwarded port.

I wrote this self-help article not so long ago:
[You must login to view link]

It's the voobly client that keeps the connection to the other players... When suddenly the connection to all other players goes dead while the rest of the internet keeps functioning, and when this is solved by restarting voobly, it is clear that it's the voobly client that is the problem.

VPN stays connected through all this. That's not the problem. I'm also not using mobile connection.

I'm just asking to implement a functionality that does the same as restarting voobly, only without having to restart voobly.

If you lose connection to the other players, you will fall back to our proxy server which then tries to reconnect you to other players again. Once the connection has been re-established, no traffic is routed through the proxy anymore.

In other words: as long as you are normally connected, your are playing totally independent from Voobly. Without Voobly, you would drop from the game and would be unable to reconnect and you wouldn't have this fall-back possibility.

AOC is a [You must login to view link] (therefore you are forwarding port 16000 UDP in your router): "UDP is a connectionless protocol meaning that messages are sent without negotiating a connection and that UDP doesn't keep track of what it has sent"

When using a VPN, you have a [You must login to view link], which explains the long FP period and the UDP packets are sent to nowhere. If the VPN is UPD based as well, then this timeout effect will be much higher, as it would still show you as connected at this point, even though you are not (and it would probably do another handshake to re-establish the tunnel and never show a disconnect/reconnect status to you). You'd still get a new ip address and even if the public IP address of your VPN provider is still the same, the (local) IP address on your end has changed since [You must login to view link] and therefore you will no longer be able to connect. These are the downsides of every VPN and the problem is clearly related to this.

It also wouldn't surprise me if Voobly would (sometimes) close as well (even though we are using high timeout values as well).

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Why do you use a VPN in the first place if you don't have to?

This doesn't happen in the game! It never does, it only happen in voobly game room, you are connected to all other players, then suddenly when some new players join, it stays on connecting, and when you do /ping it doesn't find any connections anymore, even not to the people you were previously connected to. During this time, you remain connected to voobly all the time, you can still chat in game room and switch host etc.
And it doesn't only happen to old connections that might be timed out, but also to completely new connections when new players join the game room. All of them break at the same time.

Question also is not what causes it, but the question is why voobly doesn't reestablish the connection itself and you have to restart the program to establish it again. Because it's clearly possible to reestablish these connections, else it would give connection problems after the restart too.

Someone who appears FP to you is attempting to reconnect to YOU using the proxy server because no direct connection is possible at this time. When you ping someone, you ping them within the game room "network". You connect to a game room (there is a handshake which can take up to 10 seconds) and then your are able to ping another player who is connected as well. If you get a timeout here, then the client has disconnected (either you or them) and you must wait for the network timeout -- simply because it's UDP (I have explained this above). If you however re-enter the game room or switch between spectator and player it will force the client to repeat the connection handshake again instead of waiting for the network timeout (and the proxy server to take over).

Again, this is a peer to peer game, Voobly does not really act as central server here, we just force all game traffic through a single port (UDP 16000). The connection therefore cannot be reset by Voobly and even if Voobly could do this, it wouldn't work because you can only do this using TCP (aka TCP Reset).

What you describe above are symptoms, but not the actual problem. I recommend switching to direct connections and give up any VPNs, this will also solve the issues you are having.