Since the steam sale it's great to see a heap more people playing ... but the experience is woeful, so many people complaining of lag that was never there before... Is uber aware of the problem? Working on it?
Well they could scale out their servers... it's not like these people are going to keep playing or recommend it to their friends if the game turns to crap as soon as it starts to get interesting.... aws -> clone instance ... seems like a fix to me
Uber has been pretty quiet lately. I'd imagine they're aware of it. They have pretty detailed stats and info on their servers. I hope they add some more servers to handle the load.
We automatically add instances as more people come in. However, lag is a very generic term for about four or five different possible things, so you can't just "fix" lag by adding servers. That's rarely the problem. Knowing who us experiencing lag, and what kind is what helps us fix things.
But. But. Someone somewhere on the internet said lag happened because there aren't enough servers. So. Just add more servers and magically fix the problems!
How can I help? I often find my galactic war games will start to lag very badly getting close to the 15minute mark. at this point: The FPS are still running very fast and smooth, however the game would frequently pause for 10 seconds or more. I've had this get as bad as over a minute before the game continues. To clarify, animations still work, it's not graphical lag. The fabricators will still look like they are building something, but no unit positions, or progress bars progress. I have a DxDiag export too. Although I'm not really sure if those are safe to publish on the internet. Where should I send it?
When i experience "lag", it is because path-finding bugs are preventing AI from working as it should. They are hoarding hundreds of tanks inside their base, but they can't get out from there because of road block. If all those tanks had a chance to attack, they would've wiped the floor with enemy long time ago. Other issue caused by pathing bug is having some random games where AI commander gets stuck before building first factory. Easy wins
Based on this statement and your other report in the support forum I speculate your problem is packet loss. We use TCP/IP rather than UDP and the way it works is if a packet is dropped, it notices the missing packet and requests it get resent. All further packets are held up and not delivered to the game so it can guarantee the arrive in order. So if you get a bit of packet loss, you may get a hitch in the game while it waits to get the messages. The only thing you said that doesn't fit with this theory is that it happens more in Galactic War.
Actual problem in Galatic War: Physics lag. Happens way more often in Galactic War since the AI is unable to go T2 and will therefor continue T1 unit production until units start pushing each other. Also an extreme issue if playing on planets with water since the AI will produce land units until islands are entirely filled, pushing the physic system to the limits. Does NOT occur that often/early in regular games since the AI will switch over to T2 or distribute metal to air production instead. The AI must stop production if factory exits are blocked!!! That means: If collision events occur in the exit area.
I am sure original Total Annihilation series worked like that. They left a tank fabricated to 100% but not let it complete until there was empty space to move in.
What are those four to five possibilities for leg and leg or laggy? It would be really helpful when trying to diagnose peoples issues in the support forum. To have a good understanding of it.
Types of Lag, and all very different (off the top of my head, this is not comprehensive): GPU graphics lag (Ctrl-p First page will show this) CPU client lag (ctrl-p first page will show this) Network lag (general network congestion) - Hard to diagnose Network bandwidth throttle (Pretty easy to see - if you have a 20mbps connection, and it's tapped at 2mbps, assume you're at the throttle) ; This kind of lag should be much less common now Server lag: the server for some reason is having trouble keeping up with communication between the client and the server. Ctrl-p can show this on the.. third page I think. It doesn't use frames, but anything other a 1s time means something may be off. Sim lag: The server's cpu is having a hard time keeping up with the game now. Also easy to diagnose with the ctrl-p fourth page. Anything below 10fps on the sim means you're probably going to see some slowdown. I think there are a number of variants of what I listed here that can also cause "lag", but you can see why lag is a very bad catch all term. It can mean a lot of different things.
They already use Amazon instances to do that but as garat pointed out throwing more servers at it doesn't fix the problem. Also servers are not the only issue in the chain.
Client side interface lag due to insufficient CPU/GPU power Client side generic lag (full freeze for several seconds) due to swapping (insufficient RAM) Client side low FPS due to insufficient GPU power Client side "pop-up" texture due to insufficient VRAM Connection issues (Package drop / low bandwidth), resulting in "jumps" Server side physic simulation lag (multiple units in a tight spot screw the unit collision test) Server side generic simulation lag (unaware of any recent issues) Server side simulation freeze - when something gets stuck in an endless loop Server side CPU overload due to other instances on the same machine hogging to many resources Latter 4 result in a slow down / stop of the simulation, that means that the ingame clock is not in sync with real time clock. With first 5, ingame clock stays in sync with the real time clock. With the 5th one, projectiles are probably the first objects to be noticeably missing. Either the users Internet connection or Amazons Internet connection may be the problem. Wireless connections can still easily provoke this! The 8th shouldn't happen, but does frequently when some code changes went wrong. Usually results in connection loss, the game keeps "running" but you will disconnect instantly if you attempt to reconnect. So far, 6th is the most common issue when playing Galactic War. Actually quite uncommon when playing against human players.
