EDIT: This thread has kind of become about the issue of what I've coined 'Streamed Framerates'. The way I see it is you have your traditional framerate which is currently in a perfectly acceptable place in my opinion. Then you have the actual amount/frequency of updates of the game state which is being sent/recieved between the client and the server. Currently this is where I am experiencing big issues with the gameplay because it's causing me to get artificial stuttering because I am not recieving the game state at a fast enough frequency to make the game anywhere near playable. Uber have acknowledged this (see bottom of page) and optimization will take place at a later date. My question is will it be possible to optimize the engine to the extent that they need to to create the epic multiplayer battles touted in the kickstarter/devblog videos. I'm probably getting in their bonnet far too much but I want to see this game flourish as a multiplayer game and feel this is a more important issue than adding more features at this point. OP: I've noticed when I build a nuclear missile launcher and then built a nuke within it I can't seem to fire it. Is it a shortcut key? I have tried selecting the launcher then right clicking an enemy base but no missile flies out and no explosion happens. The pathing/flocking works really great for open areas with few obstacles but I have played a few games where I wanted to use the terrain to my advantage by holing my base inbetween the cracks in the ground. This caused a major headache with units getting stuck in cracks all over the place. Is there any chance you can implement a hybrid pathing system whereby upon getting stuck a unit then switches into a more traditional RTS pathing mode until he's found his way out? I've heard that Uber has artificially capped the server end to figure out what stuff might be causing issues. Could anyone link me to a video/thread that explains what that means because currently I'm experiencing some pretty unbearable lag/stuttering on size 3+ maps but my GPU/CPU aren't getting that hot. I was just wondering if someone could explain in technical terms what Uber are attempting to do with their server based gameplay and how close the current state of that system is to completion. 20 hours in game now and loving it, macro'ing the **** out of opponents and generally loving the epic graphics and the Torchlight style shading and colour palette is really good for a strategy game.
On start of alpha test neutrino mentioned that all games run only using one processor core. There was no new info about that (or I just don't seen it), so probably all game servers still use only one core. We also know that Uber run game servers on cloud instances at Amazon EC2 and Softlayer, so they have some limitation in bandwidth and CPU usage. First you need to press Ctrl+P in game in check what FPS you have. High FPS with choppy unit movements it's usually server lag or bandwidth throttling. But I seriously can say you that in most of situations it's bandwidth throttling and not server CPU limit. Especially if you have slow internet like 2-4mbps. What exactly do you want to know? PS: If you check forums for networking architecture topics you easily find answers for most of possible questions.
So are you saying that 2-4mb internet is slow? That is standard broadband speed in the UK! I want to know is all the gameplay calculated server side then sent back to the client, this is what I heard because it will allow people with even really crappy computers to play and won't slow the game down. My pc is high end, 4.9ghz OC, 4gb gtx680 and 16gb vengeance RAM. So I can only assume the stuttering/lag is server side. If a 2-4mb connection means that the game will stutter/lag forever (even after release) then I would rather the dev's made the majority of gameplay calculations carry out on the clients pc rather than the server side. As I said 2-4mb is really the standard broadband speed in the UK. Also thanks for mentioning the 'Network Architecture' thing, I wasn't sure of what the correct terminology to search for was. I'll take a look now and try and find some answers. EDIT: I started an ai game with a size 4 tropical planet. When fully zoomed out looking at planet at start of game I am getting a constant 30fps. I find that actually quite low considering my hardware. I can achieve 80-120 fps in terribly optimized games such as Arma 2 and Farcry 3. When I open my task manager my cpu is at 12% usage on 1 core with the other cores hardly utilized and not seeing any hyperthreading activity. Considering the amount of polygons/tris etc and the lack of a lot of fancy new graphical niceties such as AO, DoF and other post processing effects it seems like a very low framerate. Yes I know it's an alpha, just wanting to get some answers on if this will improve. My DxDiag:
Sad as it is this is true, we pay an arm and a leg for **** broadband, it always says 5mb but it never is.
This ^ Also that's not hindered me in any games I've played online in the last few years. I can play sc2, bf3, dota 2, dayz and arma 2 + 3 all perfectly fine with no game breaking lag/stutter.
I only lived in London in different places for few years and I always had broadband with at least 6mbps download, but it's cost £30+ per month. And I always think that outside London there should be better speed because of less overloaded networking. Am I wrong? :? That is correct. Everything (except planet generation on start of game) simulated on server so slowest computer won't slow down everyone (may be on start a bit before planet generated). I totally sure problem not with your hardware. But it's incorrect to call stuttering "server side" while it's happen about bandwidth limit. PS: You drivers outdated a bit, even with such powerful hardware I always recommend to install latest drivers: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
kk, I will download latest drivers. I can agree it is not on server side if you what you suggesting with regards to my lag problem is true. So you think that 2-4mbs internet connection will cause lag/stutter in this game? That's pretty bad going considering that as I mentioned earlier I play all those other games with no real lag/stutter issues, all of which are hugely more graphically demanding and arma 2 + 3 are very complicated affairs having to ping bullet trajectories back and forth surely uses a lot more bandwidth than sending the locations of 1 commander and a few buildings back and forth?
Game only use CPU for planet generation, everything else probably will run even on super-slow CPU. If you really check polygons/tris count and compare it to bf3/far cry 3 you will find that in many situations PA currently have much more polygons than any of console game you played. And even after optimizations this game probably will have much more geometry than any first-person shooter made for consoles, it's all because all strategy games are usually have lot of geometry even if basic units models are simple. Yes, performance will be improved. I doubt developers can say you anything new about that.
If the decision to carry all gameplay calc's out on the server side is irreversible (therefore the main performance bottleneck will be the customers internet connection) then have Uber made any mention of a minimum required bandwidth? Will this be the first game that has a minimum required bandwidth over 4mbs in the spec requirements? Anyway I'm sure they're aware of this and there will be some network wizardry which can be utilized to compress the packages more efficiently or whatever. It would just be nice to get some official and technical breakdown of how that will work and what bandwidth will be required to enjoy the game at a constant sfps (streamed frames per second, I just made that up btw). And my problem is I am getting pretty bad stuttering with just 1 commander and the planet being streamed to me. Let alone big armies! Another thing is, sometimes I play a 4 player ffa on planet size 4 with little stutter, sometimes a 2 player ffa on size 2 planet with really bad stutter. All on EU server.
I don't think the average broad band speed is 2-4Mb, unless you mean 2-4MB (the difference being the B and b, one being Bytes the other being Bits) Here it says its more like 14.7mb http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/08/07/av ... s-to-rise/ Also remember that the game is in a completely un optimized state, so for example (correct me if I'm wrong) the game draws everything in view no matter the distance, even if you cant really see it, hence why when you zoom out on a planet with lots of trees the game comes to a crawl.
Yes, I totally sure it is. But I can't say you what you'll see at release. Graphically demanding not mean bandwidth demanding. In Arma you have maximum 128 players and probably not more than ~200-300 objects which position should be send over network, but usually on small servers it's much lower. You also need to consider that all shooters have special prediction algorithms which help to make lags less visible. E.g your game client starting animation/effects of shot before server confirm this action. In strategy game you have thousands of moving units and as long as I understand each projectile it's object which transferred over network.
I meant MB yes, and 2-4MBS is pretty standard for the UK, at least anywhere outside of London. With regards to it being unoptimized and drawing every poly regardless of distance, that would cause an fps drop from my hardware, but the stuttering/lag isn't fps in the traditional sense. Like I said it's kind of like we have 2 framerates here, even if my pc could acheive 120fps if my internet connection is not able to recieve the information that fast then I get a lower fps. My screen would still be drawing 120fps but I can only recieve 10fps for instance. Hope that made some sense
You are good at explaining the problem! I can see where you are coming from with regards to shooters vs RTS. But howcome I can play sc2, dota 2 and such like with no noticable stutter/lag. I can see dota 2 not having that much info to send but sc2 is surely sending a lot and I have no problems there! Sorry to draw the comparisons to sc2 as I've seen a lot of ppl do it before, but lets be honest it's the primary source of reference with regards to the modern day RTS. For another example I can play Sins of a Solar Empire with like 8 ppl ffa in massive galaxy warfare with again not much lag/stutter. I wouldn't feel the need to flog the issue to death if I could get a link to an official statement saying they are aware of the issue and with some timescale of fixing it or what the final extent of the issue could be. In my opinion this should be at the very top of priority list for sorting out before beta, because if a game isn't smooth then everything else just becomes a moot point. Like not much point having amazing gameplay/mechanics/art if the end user experience is stuttering. edit: Sc2 = starcraft 2
Dota 2 it's client-server game like PA, but it's have really few moving objects, it's also have predicting because it's based on Valve Source which have predicting. StarCraft 2 it's not client-server game, it's have P2P architecture and it's only use Blizzard servers for DRM. Sins it's also P2P game. I'm understand your position, but if you check other threads you find that developers answer about that multiple times. I mostly sure that garat come to this thread and repeat you answer which already was posted 100 times before. You just need to understand that PA isn't StarCraft 2 which was 3+ years in development before it's beta which never was a real "beta". This game have real alpha and will have real beta with bugs, stuttering and performance problems. :roll:
I'm pretty sure Uber are restricting server side processing and bandwidth artificially as an exercise to identify problems caused by non-ideal circumstances and to fix/optimize accordingly. It is expected they will remove these restrictions at some point in the future. One thing I notice during the lag/stuttering is that the game/simulation speed seems to be unaffected, indicating that the CPU is not the bottleneck in such situations. I'm not sure how much the bandwidth is being restricted though, so I can't say whether 2-4mbps will be enough to completely overcome the issue.
In PA we completely describe the game events and send them over the wire. If too much happens at once we can't send all the information in time. So events will arrive late and this produces a jumpy unit motion (regardless of fps). This is a known problem and there are a lot of optimizations that can be done to prevent this; however, we have not started optimizing it yet. We are still implementing core features, so there is a lot of optimization work that hasn't been done.
Ah right, wouldn't optimizing the engine be a priority before packing the game out with features? I know next to nothing about game development but my logic would dictate that when you produce a multi layered system you would make the foundations stable, functional and highly optimized before starting to build more layers ontop? If you design a totally new motorbike, you make sure the engine is working and has the power you need before you start designing the chassis, fairings, nobs and dials and all the fancy gubbins that make it look sexy. Unless of course your Italian.
You make the game feature complete first because otherwise optimisations can be lost when you add new features.
