The lag in this game seems to be systemic

We need to be practical in how we solve the lag issues in this game. I don't see how optimization alone can solve the lag this game has especially if you want to play in a real solar system as appose to 1 planet and a moon (which can still get laggy btw). So perhaps when Uber reaches there limits on optimization they'll have to than consider ways to reduce the amount of units players have to make in order to build there armies.

I have 2 ideas to help with that objective.

1.) bring back the peregrines, you don't have to make em more or less cost effective than humming birds just simply a scaled up version of the hummingbird, we just need em to reduce the amount of units needed to fight for air dominance to reduce lag.

2. Late game buiding power is the 3rd resource required for a healthy economy. If you don't have the build power to spend your wealth than it goes to waste. So how about giving us one of those SupCom fake commanders that have the build power of 10 or so adv fabbers? 10 of those commanders instead of 100 fabbers for each player would reduce lag considerably.

One more thing I notice in my last game it was a FFA where 7 players built big bases and armies and it lag the game pretty hard. It so happend that 5 of those players had there commanders sniped by bumblebees lol. So after 5 of these huge *** bases and armies disappeared and there were only 2 players left with say 1000 less units than before the lag didn't improve the slightest little bit So I can only think of 1 reason for this and that is a memory leak? Its the "dead units" still being processed instead of forgotten about and still taxing your computer/uber server long after death I guess? Maybe just fixing the memory leak would solve our lag issues ha ha

I think it's probably got more to do with how Uber are trying to have the servers do the heavy lifting to put less stress on individual machines. Hopefully this will work out. If not we return to the old way of doing things, which leads to games only being as fast as their slowest member.

For me the lag seems to be more due to the planets than the units. I can play a game with hundreds and hundreds of units in the game without a significant increase in lag, but having just one more medium-large planet makes the game go to crap. And for the record, some planet systems take so long to load that by time I'm in the game and actually able to do stuff, the other players have already had a head start. I'm curious as to how far Uber is expecting to go with server-side handling. I hope it makes the game much more practical to play on older systems.

Older systems are definitely something they have to keep in mind as they develop the game, but as time progresses, those 'older systems' represent proportionally less and less of the users. As hardware breaks down, and people upgrade, the average rig will become more and more capable of running the game well.

You wanna put in considerations for older or low spec machines, but you don't wanna spend too much time working on making the game run on hardware that's on the way out.

The problem with the client-server approach they are going after is that while availability of computing power has become pretty homogeneous over the last couple of years, availability of bandwidth has not. Thus this reliance on high bandwidth connections might end up pretty crippling for a lot of people with hardware easily capable of running PA otherwise.

No, sacrificing gameplay like this should be an absolutely last resort, and really, be left to modders.

Mike

Only the server needs high speed. I would not call anything less than 10mbs high speed and the clients use far less. Open up resource monitor in windows and view the network tab to see how much the game is actually using.

'Murica.

I'm for one would remove the trees. reclaiming for trees in this game doesn't make sense. I think it lags the games and causes problems with laying down buildings. You have to reclaim the trees first then lay down buildings.

If tried that last few days to play with 6 -8 ai and the game just dies, and i mean dies, i can keep reconnect, but time just stops and nothing happens. Feels like there is some leaks or something.

Or maybe the calculations simply overwhelms the engine or server. its just like NOPE forget it.

I recently played a 5 planet system on the new build (1 tropic, 4 moon of moderate size), 4 players, 2 human 2 AI.

My fps on Uber graphics dropped only to around 20 fps (playable for me) and sim was at around 8 (also playable)

And this was with multiple planets with large area patroling armies. I can't really complain about that. And my machine is not that high end (AMD Phenom II X6 @2.8 GHz, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB), it just really likes the new multithreading.

A lot of the problems I'm finding people having are:
-Settings set too high. They set it to uber graphics, because it works fine at first, but then dies as soon as graphics memory runs out and they get angry.
-Wireless connection. If you are not really close/don't have a direct LOS on the router/have a crappy router, wireless will suffer huge packet loss and other connection problems. I play the game via wireless but my router is only about 20 feet away, with no walls in between and I paid more than $20 for it.
-Misunderstanding of minimum requirements. Minimum requirements are a MINIMUM, meaning the game should TURN ON with that hardware. No promises about it even vaguely running well. So for those of you with a low clock rate laptop dual core, sorry, that just isn't going to run happy. With the multithreading coming in, more cores the better.
-Overuse of laptops. Kinda mentioned this above a bit, laptops are NOT meant for gaming. Even "gaming" laptops can't hold a candle to a similarly priced desktop. Unless you have an absolute monster laptop with a propensity to melt whatever surface it is placed on, this just won't end well unless you play within the limits of you machine.

trees and the effect they have on pathing an economy is a core feature of PA and isn't going anywhere.

Whether to have them around is part of the strategic decision you have to make at the start of a game.

I liike the forest fires, they should allow the the fires burn down buildings you built and your armies that would be cool

This entire thread is silly. The game is still in development, poor performance is not at all indicative of some "systemic" problem that is impossible to solve.

What in the world makes you think that? In Uber's most recent pass on performance, they increased it dramatically. I've played other early access games with custom engines, and for most of those games performance was absolutely terrible until very late development. As other posters have said, the problem mostly seems to be due to planets and not units (units introduce lag, but not nearly to the same extent as a couple extra planets in my experience), so discussing how to alter gameplay to reduce unit count isn't even relevant.

Let's leave this kind of discussion for if (if, not when!) Uber can't do any more code optimizations.

edit: Also, considering Uber's not-at-all-modest goals for this game (like 40-player matches), it seems Uber themselves are pretty confident in their ability to improve performance.

Actually I have a dual core (4 thread) first gen i5 laptop and it runs PA very well *on low graphics settings* (as it has a rather old GT 420 graphics card with 1gb ram). Main thing PA needs- reasonably fast dual core processor, 8gb of ram and a good internet connection to run it well on low settings.

My main machine (a desktop) is a Phenom II, 4gb ram and a GTX 560. The result is on that machine I can play it on higher graphics settings (although I turn the texture resolution down due to my 560 only being 1 gb, I can run with HDR and AO though which makes things look much nicer), however I actually have to play on smaller maps than on the laptop. The RAM in this game is the key- ideally you want 2 gb graphics ram and 8 gb system ram for larger systems. 4gb ram limits you to about 2 large planets and 2 moons, and 1 gb vram limits you to low texture resolution.

Edit: When playing on either system I use a nice old fashioned Ethernet cable for my internet connection Trying to play over WiFi is a bad idea.

There are people out there, though, for which Wifi is not the limiting factor but the internet bandwidth behind that - even poor Wifi quality exceeds internet bandwidth by an order of magnitude or even two for me. And bandwidth consumption is far harder to optimize than hardware utilisation with it being inherently single-threaded and whatnot.
So PA's reliance on high bandwidth is indeed a limiting factor and not something easily optimised away.

PA only sends simple information from the server denoting co-ordinate positions of units and such. The bandwidth usage during a multi player game is no worse than Spring or Sup-Com from my experience. A 6mb download and 0.5mb upload rate are fine for most games.

I think people are mistaking server performance inssues for bandwidth problems. The servers that Uber rents for PA are quite slow so that is probably one of the issues- large groups of AI will literally kill the server. Also bear in mind that Uber have limited the max bandwidth use to 2mb- this is probably causing some of the problems as once the bandwidth limit is reached the server has to reduce the rate at which it updates information for the client.

Once the server is released a few things happen: 1 we can run our own servers for private games, 2 we can play fully off line. These will probably both improve the performance.

There's a lot going on in this thread but my understand is:

Number of planets and moons is limited by client memory not a server issue. So system size and lag are not directly related.

There is lag even with just one planet once enough units are in play.

Client Fps on high spec systems is fine even when lagging. So this points to the issue bring server based.

Finally I would love to hear what profiler uber are using. Im only doing boring enterprise software but at university profiling and optimizing code was a lot a fun. Often the gains from a single code change can be massive in terms of percentage improvement.

That sums it up nicely. One thing to note- the lag wasn't nearly as bad until the recent steam sale (when number of players increased dramatically)... I think perhaps the issue is simply too much load for the servers? It's also worth mentioning that some games don't lag much at all.

Honestly I think that the server bandwidth and power is the issue. I see the lag I get in games increase whenever there's a sale on.