Ugh. Okay. Lobbies. Fix. Now.

(I mean when they get back to work.)

I'm kinda fuming right now.

Here are some problems, as many as my pissed off head can name.

-Laggy as ****.
-Can't ******* join games.
-Can't ******* see games.
-Lobby is spazy... I see a game, and when I click it, theres another under my mouse!
-Lobby is laggy and spazy. I click it, and before it highlights in this lag *** ****, another pops up and it highlights that.
-Can't ******* join games.
-Loggy is laggy.
-I'm out of icecream
-Can't ******* join games.


That is all.

If you are using the steam version try using the PA.exe to run the game instead. Let me know if that fixes the issue. or download the uber launcher version. (fixed the issue for some friends)

I would love an update that is nothing but multiplayer and lobby bug fixes.

I would suggest launching from PAMM, it usually helps out alot for me in terms of general lag though it has gotten a bit stronger due to the many newer players

I quit using steam because of uncountable crashes. this is all 100% vanilla goodness and it makes me 10x as mad

Can somebody post a link to the uber launcher. please

Launching from pamm does not fix this.

@OP - you didn't say please!

https://store.uberent.com/download/pa - second link on the download page after you log in.

Yeah, iv had to redownload after like, 10 months of updates that left my launcher at 6 gigs.

That said, is there a list of commanders people are supposed to have? Because I feel like ive only got like 7.

Yeah here is a short list of stuff that sucks about the lobbies:

• Even during peak hours it is very difficult to populate a custom match. Too many players start lobbies (often with terrible settings, i.e. 10+ planets) rather than joining. A simple 'join random custom match' button on the welcome page would fix this
• The join button takes ages to appear and often is too late (lobby is full by arrival)
• For some strange reason there is no filter for locked games... very annoying
• No vote to kick system, no ping noise when lobby is full (so annoying to wait 10 minutes for a lobby to fill, then have all the players abandon you because one guy is idle...)
• Still seems like there are random bugs where you sometimes need to add a spec slot in order to use the last slot
• Filter doesn't remember your last settings
• Difficult to determine if a system has too much orbital 'space' in it (which leads to huge lag and transit times). Should be like a system radius?

And more....

Huh, I have always thought it's the opposite.

Ok, this is it. I can't handle this anymore. I'm done with PA. there are simply too many problems with it. I'll be back in a month or so.

Hmm so I had a look at what data I can see in palobby.net's network requests.

So... enter the horror:

... damn 750 kbyte is tooo big for pastebin.
So how does the server browser currently work?
Simple: Ask the uber server for all games once per second. All games means ... most of them. Not sure what rules are applied, but currently it transmits data on ~100 games (EDIT: oh wait that was filtering done by palobby.net, so PA itself just transmits all of them). Only a fraction of these is visible due to the filter settings and only a fraction of the per game data is actually shown in the server browser. The data transmitted includes the full map definition of some custom maps for some games at seems. No idea how they managed to do that but if somebody with a 2 megabyte sized custom map reproduces that it will basically be a DOS attack onto the server browser.

@jables PLEASE fix this horror. You are transmitting roughly 750kbyte/s to show this list of games:


From that bandwidth you could stream a full video in 720p, maybe even 1080p instead.
Well you are trying to, my connection to your servers does not seem to be good enough for it.

Do you actually pay for this bandwidth?!

We should make bets to how few bytes per second this can be compressed if done correctly. lol
Maybe I'll try what I can do, it's a nice task I guess.

So if I chose to load 16 radius 1300 planets and It goes near 2MB of data it'll crash the browser??? (If that system is actually big enough to be a few MB.)

Not sure. I tried to do that with a smaller map to test but with my map it had the csg stuff replaced with some small key instead. Though it did include all mex positions for all maps it seems.
So if you were to make a map with a lot of mex you'd break it guaranteed. Or by figuring out how to mmake it transmit all map data. Some games in tthe data stream have all map data. No idea why. They have not that much foor those games, but if somebody has a bigger map in there.... it would mmake the server browser even slower. As in "you need to download 3 megabytes before you can see any games, oh and when you are finished you have a dozen more such requests in the queue..."

Well maybe that's why the browser sometimes locks up and the join buttons don't work... For any games...

Unless I'm the only one that had that problem before.

Once upon a time there was this nice mod ;(

But really, the lobby needs some layout improvements and speed fixes

Layout fixes because sometimes I find a good looking game which then ends up being locked. Why not make locked games have a different colour or always have them at the bottom of the list

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-faster-server-browser-mod.63947/page-4#post-1051256

Best news of the day!!

Uber, implement this mod when it is up again!! It might save you a lot of work