Gameplay downgraded?

The game has always been slowed down by the server.

The only difference now is that it's more visually appealing and doesn't make units and projectiles teleport randomly and instead move smoothly.

Well it's not a part of the plan anymore, things change, and near nobody wants a unit cap.

Where is this unit cap? I never heard of them thinking of a unit cap, ever.

Ideally, the sim will always run at 10.0fps. But there's nothing to guarantee that, there can't be.
So this client smoothing is in place to help make the gameplay look smoother when the server starts stuttering. Even if the game were the best optimized piece of software in the world, this feature is still a good fallback, especially since people will eventually be able to run their own servers (and they may not have the best servers). To me, it sounds like you're complaining that the airplane you're on has seatbelts because you expect a smooth flight.
What's wrong with having a fallback?

Idk, i could see some use in an optional unit cap (esp. when it comes to more competetive play), even if i wouldn't use it for the most part. And really, PA is pretty much about customizability, isn't it?

Could also try to mod it in, not sure what that could break.

There was the mention on the KS part that you could play small games with low unit caps, as well as big battles with thousands of units.

Yes, and it always defeated the only advantage of a client/server infrastructure over p2p.

If players have to host their own servers to avoid lags, it's worst than p2p (the host quits/disconnect -> end of the game. The host wants to cheat? No one can do anything about it).

yes it does. as I stated above there is no good reason anymore why PA couldn't be P2P because of that bit of code.

with the current slow servers we're essentially back at square one, quare one being P2P and we'd be better served by ourselves the way we are in FAF were we filter people in hosts by CPU score.

Here the one in the host with the crap CPU score is the server (to persue that analogy) sadly we can't boot the server.

Yippy-kai-ay

All of that wouldn't have been a problem to me either since I planed to have my own PA server.

but that bit of code means I may have to deal with slowdowns because the code is mal-gauging the computer's capacity at a certain time.

The only reason why any of you are like "whoah chillax" is because none of you have grasped the technicalities of what's going on here.

My proposed solution (and the one UBER was going with up until this day) was to have everyone in the game unafected by the performance of the server (simply because the server is beefy enough to be running the game at 1.0).

this bit of code ALLOWS the server to run below 1.0 because they couldn't fill the cost gap.

do you understand?

No, it really isn't, in any way.

How is it mal-gauging? It kicks in when your sim speed drops below 10fps, and is dynamic and will turn off when no longer needed.

In FA, everyone is slowed down by the slowest player
In PA, everyone is only slowed down if the server can't handle it; other players' performance is irrelevant.

That's a strictly better scenario. And PA can do it with far, far more players than FA can, and players can re-join games if they drop, and many more benefits. Really, this isn't a good area if you're trying to compare FA favorably.

The simple solution was to put a unit cap

fuc*k it could have been a flexible and live unit cap.....updated according to the server's current load.

I don't understand why people don't understand why this is not like EVE's TIDI. IIUC, this is a consequence of setting a fixed number of simulation rounds per second. Once the sim becomes the bottleneck (e.g. late game), then you'll need more CPU cores to maintain consistent speed.

Dedicated servers are the way out. Shared servers will bottleneck earlier.

No if you host your own super server with your uber epic computer the sim won't slowdown (Until it gets to a point where it must) this means that computer hardware and sim performance go up linearly. Better computer = less lag for a longer period of time.

Remember that even without time dilation if the server sim speed slowed down so would everyone's, the only difference is now instead of appearing choppy and having units teleport the game simply slows down visually whilst still having the same server sim speed regardless of if you had time dilation or not. Server sim would still slow down for everyone.

you also got none of what I'm saying.

I'm comparing the two and finding them to be very similar beacause of the server's incapacity to keep up

No. That just doesn't make sense.
It's already been said, speed of the game depends on sim performance. Sim performance does NOT depend on client performance. New time dilation only smooths out client visuals.

we're not on shared servers.

YOU ARE NOT READING

that is not what the quotation you quoted says.

HELLO I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT CLIENT SPEED

Uhm, yes and no. The client already was in sync with the server. It's just didn't receive all of the data (if restricted by bandwidth), resulting some objects in the world appearing stuck / updating only once every few seconds. Or if the client had low FPS, it's simply discarding excess server frames.

I have not seen the code, but I do know some of the problems the server is having, as they are not exactly uncommon and easy to reproduce.

There are several cases where:

• The server falls into recomputing an previously impossible command every single server frame (including trying to find a path, not just once per goal, but per unit!)
• Collisions of multiple units cause a whole shower of collision events which in return - thanks to the push mechanic - trigger even more collision. Major slow down, even with the number of iterations already being limited.
• Problems with the flocking algorithm, causing massive collisions where armies should have been passing through each other instead, triggering unwanted collisions.
  
• Commands are not adapted to make use of the strengths of the path finding, namely reducing overhead whenever units share a common goal. Most prominent with the area patrol command which gives each unit an individual goal.
• Units getting "lost" (visibly getting stuck on obstacles, not "in" obstacles, but just running into them), which then requires for the navigation system to recompute the path. I don't know how this could have happened, assuming A* like algorithm for computing the pathing vector field, but it somehow did.

Nothing ever changed on the server side. They just make sure that animations are no longer running ahead of the server if the server can no longer keep up "real time". That is even necessary for minor slow downs, not just the giant ones we are experiencing currently.

This is impossible. The sim is on the server, in-game time is server sim time. That's how it works. That's how it has to work.

Hello, there is no such thing as client speed. Unless you mean client framerate, which has nothing to do with sim framerate anyway, and is completely independent.

you didn't read.

server speed doesn't have just ONE variable : it's power. there's a lot more, counting how many people play on it.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/gameplay-downgraded.63351/#post-987120