Gameplay downgraded?

"Large armies? Who the hell uses large armies in interplanetary warfare? Nukes cause less lag. But I guess Lag is a form of warfare...."

Thank You very much for the reply.. I am confused when you said that nothing has been offloaded from the server to the client. Because on a normal match i am pulling about 150kb on the internet to play the match and yesterday it was only doing 30kb? Is that just a indication of severe server lag? If so on the average machine built to todays standards how many planets or how many objects do you reckon you could run in a match before a slow down occurs?

But do you understand my point of many people not wanting to play a game of a rate of 5 seconds for every second like in supreme commander? because as i understand there were many bugs in that as it kicked in too soon and never really recovered when the fight died down.. Is that something you are working hard on to prevent?

That alone is not an indication of server lag, but rather enhanced compression on the network part. Or simply less entities to be handled, e.g. because you were playing on planets without trees.

When he said that nothing was offloaded to the client, then this only means that the entire simulation still runs solely on the server. The client contributes nothing except for issuing commands.

There are no fixed numbers on this either.

Different types of objects come at a different cost.
Static objects like trees or walls do affect performance in some way - mostly due to interactions with the intel system - but you need hundred thousands of them to make a difference.
"Simple" units like air units, factories and various other buildings have a slightly higher cost, so you can currently still have a few thousand.
Moving ground units are much more expensive. When moving towards a single goal, I guess up to 1.000 units is currently a realistic number. With individual goals, like when using area patrol, 200-300.
And then there are also "bugged" units, like fabbers. When they happen to trigger a bug, as few as 20-50 can already cause a notable slow down.

Main problem in SupCom: Wreckages. If not reclaimed frequently, they would cause a major slowdown. And also some other bugs where leftovers piled up until the simulation could no longer handle real time. The game could recover, but only if the leftovers were removed. The fights themselves would have been bearable.

I would actually say that Uber has currently non of these specific bugs in the simulation, at least non which would be obvious. All major slow downs currently have a specific trigger, and the slow downs can be resolved by revoking certain overly expensive commands.
Unfortunately, this also means that we currently don't have unit wreckages at all, unless some proper aggregation is in place. This is because wreckages are not just something you can "turn off" when they start affecting the sim.

This is the actual case. It is NOT like supcom.

Supcom: If one person needed time dialation, it adjusted everyone's simulation speed.

PA: If one person needs time dialation, but not the main server or any other clients, then the clients continue at full speed and that single player keeps up with the occasional chop. If the SERVER SIMULATION, the big machine in the center, is unable to keep up with sim speed, then IT dialates and everyone experiences scaled down speed to smoothly transition between speed changes instead of equal speed and chopping up and hopping around.

This does NOT do what supcom did, I want to make that entirely evident for anyone consciously reading. For those of you who don't read and keep posting, well, we have already lost you, my hats off in memory...

Moderator: Edited for appropriateness.​

"slowing down the sim" so it is server-side?

Ehh.... There is no "individual dilation". All clients run at (approximately) the same speed, given that they are operating on the same set of historical data. If a client is "too slow", FPS are going to suffer and it's going to discard intermediate frames. But it is NOT going to slow down at all. It still continues to use only the most recent data on a best effort base.

Unless of course that player chooses individual replay speed as a part of Chronocam, but that is an entirely different thing.

Please read more carefully. He said "expected sim rate", not "slowing down the sim". The client is is trying to perform the prediction. The server only communicates current sim tick performance.

That is what we are trying to say. I like to believe you are just misunderstood tatsu.

What the deal is, is that the server sometimes has less fps, so instead of the old case of it having less fps AND causing choppiness due to the server having less fps, it now tells the client how to adjust it's visuals to avoid choppiness, to stretch animations in between slow server simulation instances.

What the deal isn't, is the server running slowly because of it. It happens because the server already is dipping into slow, something that has always happened in PA, especially in the past on large scale games.

It doesn't slow PA down to do this, it makes what would already chop, not chop. It runs just as slowly as it would with the chop. Which is faster than ever may I add, this dialation would have looked better with the old preoptimized choppy game.

Right now, I have trouble telling if the game is slow and I am seeing dialation, or if the game is running same speed, because of how optimized it is.

The servers have always had performance problems and they've been getting better with every build.

10 pages caused entirely by tats going full herp derp. My favourite moments were him insulting everyone for not understanding and not reading, all the while spouting rubbish about a feature he didn't understand because of posts he hadn't read.

Well the only real question is. How much is uber willing to pay for (more) server performance? And what may we expect in terms of (roughly) playable units per game?

I think uber realizes this is a major point of importance for most fans and I hope it'll be fine.

One thing has to be said: sim performance in the latest patch has been atrocious.

And this releases in five days. Wouldn't hold out too much hope for any change, bud.

Meh server performance fluctuates very often. One day it's amazing, the next terrible. (See last build PTE)

Does seem to be a lot of heated discussions in this thread which I wont get into but just wanted to add something to this thread and its just my opinion really. I wouldn't be totally against Uber putting an Optional Unit Cap Limit into the game this way we can have more control over our games. Maybe not have a set limit either, make it so we are able to set the limit, it would definitely help with the slow downs and could in-directly add a bit more strategy to the game because everyone wont be able to puck out 1000's of the same unit but of course, being able to set a "no limit" as well so we can still have the game as we currently have it. Just thinking more along the lines of just another small option to add for us in the lobby options.

I made a mod, SimplyLess, which simply scales the units in cost speed and armor.

It is supposed to take the volume out of army numbers, 1 ant does the work of 4 and costs 4, so you can full on produce and assault and the armies are simply 8-40 unit armies and not 20-100 unit armies.

I still would like to tweak it, it is supposed to play devils advocate and take a lot of the macro out of the scale but also a lot of the micro out of the reaction time and unit control (units move slower and have more health and less gap between unit counts). Yet, it still feels like it changes too much...

Wait, this post is going to get reported as solicitation. Well, the MAIN POINT is, the unit cap wouldn't help that much, and there are better ways to implement it, like reducing actual unit production rate, effectively reducing how many units there are.