Eventually the next day on random chance I tried to copy paste my first message(that worked) to the code block I was trying to send my message at. It worked. so I looked, the ONLY diffrence was the len variable the first message used a variable that had a sizeof(message param) summed for all the parameters being sent for that message. The next one had the len hard-coded. So I did the same with second message. IT WORKED!. I had no idea why to me the two should have been identical. I thought it had to be something in the buffer.writeUInt() function provided by node.js.
Being happy I finally fixed my issues I called my wife in(no one else around to talk too about my code). And showed her the issue... my code was as follows.
[source lang="jscript"]message.writeUInt16LE(8, 0); //this was the bad code[/source]
[source lang="jscript"]var len = 2+4;message.writeUInt16LE(len, 0); // this code worked.... [/source]
And my wife replies. "In what world does 2+4 = 8"... DOH! I spent all that time because I was trying to pass 8 instead of 6 as length for the variable. I did the math in my head and was just flying through stuff I thought I was a no brainer. It snagged me for far too long. This problem produced no errors or crashes, and everything reported success in sending/recevivng... I thought it HAD to be something buggy in node.js.
So a little annoyed at myself. But happy I fixed it. I figured I could help others remember that sometimes you need to slow down and check EVERYTHING you did even if you don't think it could possibly be the problem.
Thanks guys,
Eric R.
