Hey ho, Pt4h here. I noticed some lag in the input (clicking, dragging, hotkeys) while I play the game and I wanted to ask if someone else has these too. From what I figured out so far it works like this: There are 2 states of the input system: normal and unresponsive. When I start a fresh game, it is normal all the time, but as time (or unit count?) increases, there are more and more short periods where the input is unresponsive, and the periods are getting longer and come more often as the game continues. While unresponsive, the game does not accept any input except mouse movement. Clicks (button down or up) or hotkeys are ignored or postponed to when the unresponsive period ends. This is how gameplay is affected: At first (after about 3-5 minutes) double clicks become impossible, because one of the clicks is almost always discarded or postponed so that it is interpreted as two separate clicks. That way I cannot select all of the same units on the screen anymore. Unresponsive periods last up to half of a second. Then (after 10-15 minutes) box selecting also fails. Basically when I start a box drag and an unresponsive period begins, the mouse release event is ignored, leaving me with a box stuck to the mouse pointer. Sometimes, the mouse release is handled after the unresponsive period ends, and sometimes I have to click manually to trigger the event. Scrolling is buggy as well, because the middle mouse button start drag and end drag events can be dropped or delayed, leaving me either unable to scroll or with endless scrolling with the button already released. Unresponsive periods last up to 5 seconds. Finally (after 25-30 minutes) selecting stuff is impossible, because the units I want to select walk right out of the selection box before the selection can finally complete. Building stuff is also quite hard, because my efforts to select some fabbers often result in actually selecting other things. Unresponsive periods last up to 20 seconds. After that, I cant play at all anymore because of the lag. Overall I noticed, that this problem intensified gradually over the last 5 months or so. Some time before I could just end the games quickly and all would be good, but now it has arrived at a threshold I cannot longer ignore. So back to my original question: Is this a known issue? Has someone else had this at the described magnitude? greetings, LostMekka aka Pt4h Edit: Forgot my system specs: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 940 Processor AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series 4GB RAM (probably my personal bottleneck) Win7 x64 (I hate myself for that ^^) Input: Razer Abyssus + standard keyboard Edit 2: just tested it with all mods disabled, the issue remains.
I got one hell of a beast as a computer, and when i put all the options on UBER and texture scaling on it's highest yeah i have the same problem. Might be same case for you aswell, try it out
Set the game to lowest settings. I played in lower resolution now, 720p only. Unplayable. Selecting units is impossible after just couple minutes, ussually 5+. I spend time selecting my units and fabricators instead of focusing on the game. I cannot compete like this >.>
Hmm after playing some more I think I actually do see the first part of the issues as well. Doubleclicking stuff in the early game is pretty easy, later it becomes pretty damn hard. I don't get to the impossible box selects, but they do get a bit slow, which is especially easy to notice when I select workers around a factory via a box select and right click the factory straight after that. In the earlier game that works out well. Later I click faster than the selection is processed by PA, so my right click happens too early. I play on 75% res scale and min details by now, but there is no big difference.
I am thinking this might be related to coherent doing too much at once. If the ui is busy receiving updates on create/destroy alerts, it can't keep up with mouse events. Knockout might just be doing too much with this data instead of simply holding it in an array until it is needed.
I am pretty sure that it either won't help or will break the UI, but when developing the army composition slider I had performance troubles with knockout as well. Recalculating the armies from thousands of events can become expensive. Apart from using a hackbucket system and only calculating deltas this knockout extra library fixed the last lags I had: https://github.com/mbest/knockout-deferred-updates It basically prevents updates from executing at once, bundling them together somehow. Crazy performance improvements in some situation. However the drawback is that suddenly updating knockout stuff is asynchronous. You can guess what changing a previously synchronous system to be asynronous can do...
Interface lag is something that needs to be stamped out as a really high priority. If there's one thing your game must have, it's a responsive UI. The selection box which lasts beyond mouse release is probably the most frustrating issue ever and it ruins the game.
I have this same issue. I can work around it often times with long queues, but the problem still remains
Just a thought here but I've not had this at all really and my system is pantz compared to what you guys are playing on. I do however have a 30 mbit cable broadband connection... Also are you guys using WiFi or Ethernet?
The same bug makes the awesome PiP feature useless... if u use it, the lagg comes even faster, and it will half the FPS...
I just had an unresponsive period of 50 seconds while testing the battle of the beasts map #1... EDIT: Also there was nothing really going on, it was vs sandbox AI and i had 50 air fabbers and a few buildings, that's nothing compared to normal games. Weirdly enough, scrolling (with mouse wheel) is not influenced by this bug. Also every click you perform generates a "click flash" on the planet surface immediately, though the clicks have no other action (selection, deselection) after the initial flash. We need to get Uber to fix this pronto, this is really game-breaking ^^ (Side note: I managed to upgrade to 8GB RAM [all DDR2 800], system is slightly faster overall, PA is not affected at all, the lag issue remains)
Thanks for your reply Yes, I use WLAN. Actually it is a bit more complicated, I have a LAN connection to a WLAN repeater. But I don't think that this is the problem, unless the game servers process the raw game input events like clicking somewhere or scroll dragging. I could not imagine why that would be the case.
