I am new here and played some text adventures but most of the time I will get something like Sorry, your session has expired and the game has finished which I have no clue what that means I know it doesn't mean that's the end of the game because I have seen more of the story and it will give me that error in the middle of the session has anybody else had this problem and it's not even internet or if I am logged in.
The session expiration error when playing online might mean either that your connection was unreliable and the server was unable to sens a response to you (I've seen this happen if I'm playing on mobile and move out of wifi range, or after my laptop goes to sleep with a game open); or the server was restarted while you were playing. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do apart from try again, and hope you saved your progress recently.
In my experience it is okay to sample games online but to play them comfortably, without fear of sudden disconnection, they really need to be downloaded to a Windows environment and played offline.
After a certain length of time, if you're inactive, the game will time out in the same way if you're inactive on a computer it will fall asleep. There may be a different length of time for games open to a clear internet connection and games where the internet is weak, but the message I get when my internet flickers is, "sorry, your connection was interrupted. " The message I get when I leave the game open without taking any action for half a minute, maybe more, is, "sorry, your session has expired." And either way, I'm reminded to restart my game.
The current web-based Quest player will time your game out after two minutes. There's a "keep alive" script that pings in the background so you don't actually have to take a turn every two minutes - as long as the tab is open and active, and your internet connection stays up, that should be enough to keep your session going.
It's not ideal though, as if your connection goes down briefly, or you switch to a different tab, the "keep alive" might not be sent, and your session will be timed out.
It is necessary due to the way the web-based player currently works. Everybody's game state is on the server, and quite a lot of people can be playing at once, so to ensure the memory doesn't run out, it's quite aggressive at purging games that look like they're not being played any more.
I am currently working on a new version of the player that works in a different way, using WASM so that the game is running entirely in the browser. This means once the game is loaded, no further connection to the server is necessary - the game is running offline, so you don't need to worry about your internet connection, or putting your tab into the background. Stay tuned...
