I have been playing a lot of games with AI'S. After a while of playing it seems like the game starts skipping I can move my camera and it doesn't lag I can't really play properly as units start skipping across the screen, normally it happens after a little while of playing. It's definitely not FPS lag, I have a good system. would it be something to do with Internet connection, I'm not sure whether it's still uses the Internet for playing an AI. I haven't tried it with playing other humans.
Correct, this is bandwidth throttling. When there not enough bandwidth between you and server to update information about all units in your vision there will be lag like this. If your connection speed is lower than 8Mbps it's can be problem on your side, but server-side also have limit like 6-7Mbps per client so even if your connection is really fast you'll get lags anyway.
If you have at least 8Mbps download speed and no bandwidth-inventive software running into the background then it's not likely problem on your side, but if you using WiFi it's can actually cause issues and in this case it's worth to check game while it's connected though Ethernet.
I logged on today to ask you for some assistance regarding this actually. I'm using wifi currently, I'll see if i can borrow a bit of cat5 from work tomorrow and I'll hook the pc up to the router and do a test, but I do get massive issues playing. It's definitely connection related, the only thing that stands out in the resource monitor is that the PA line has a massive 3300 ms latency to it. Full bandwidth use isn't more than 140kbps at peak anytime playing though. I've got a 14M up 1.4M down connection. Any tools I can use to find where the issue is occurring to help the fix? What should I look for?
I have completely no idea what Windows monitoring tools data mean so better find server IP in game logs and just ping it. Do you mean Kb/s (kilobit per second) or KB/s (kilobyte per second)? I suppose you mean vice versa?
Bandwidth: yup, meant it the other way around, apologies, I was sleepy. The rest I'll double check after I did the hardwired test tonight, but I'm 90% sure resource monitor displays kilobit.
Well now, this is interesting. Using wired lan rather than wifi basically fixes it, I had no lag issues whatsoever. Anything I can do to help a fix for the wifi lag, or is a bug already in the tracker?
It's clearly not game problem so you have to find out why WiFi works bad for you and it's can tricky because everything might affect Wifi connection. Start with: Make sure your router have maximum signal power set allowed in your country. If your hardware support 5GHz WiFi try to use it instead of 2GHz Scan for near WiFi networks and see what channels they using and make sure your router use less popular channel. You can also try to set 12-13 channels because those pretty rarely used due to some US limitations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels Make sure your router is away from any sources of electromagnetic interference, like microwave oven. Direct visibility always helps to have stable connection. Have fun!
I wouldn't think it to be the actual wireless network, as everything else works fine, although I'll go through them and confirm it, and I'll let you know. Thanks for the tips!
PA is extremely network-intensive game using TCP which mean if there was packet loss (or just lag spike) then every packet have to be re-delivered until game client can update it's state again. So you might not notice your WiFi problem in other apps because of that.
And to give you a personal anecdote as a reference, PA is able to make my WiFi router drop its connection in roughly one out of five games due to the sheer stress PA is exerting on it. Admittedly, it's a crappy cheap router, but no other program is able to do that. It's just the volume of traffic that overwhelms it.
Okiedoke. It is a piece of crap O2 wireless box. I'll diagnose the crap out of it, and report back with my findings. Edit: Yup, it is a pile of poop, but it seems that the migration to Sky will get me a new one, so hopefully that'll fix it.
Most OEM routers are garbage, so personally, id invest in a good router from Asus or the likes, these tend to be much more powerful and have much more stable firmware, which should hopefully help you. As a bonus, their RF equipment tends to be far better as well.
Yeah, I had a look in it's settings, basically the wireless section allows you to change the ssid and password. That's it. Pathetic lil thing. Will look into it, thanks.
No idea where you live, but in my personal experience nothing works better than BT and their routers isn't that bad. Anyway you can always buy some proper hardware and flash it with good firmware if you want. At moment I use Netgear 3500L v2 with Tomato firmware by Shibby and happy with it, but It's not best hardware for WiFi because I only use it on laptop rarely. For WiFi possible something like ASUS RT-AC66U should be good, but you also need other hardware that support 5GHz band.
UK, central London. Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check them out. I'd prefer to use wireless for the comfort of it, although I ran a cat5 now so it should be fine, not a biggie. That said, won't this issue improve as we edge closer to release and the netcode gets optimised further? Surely this isn't the final state of it, and a great many players will want to play the game via their wireless networks. Thanks for all your help mate, if you use doge give me your wallet code and I'll tip you some of the meagre amount I managed to mine
Same story, Isle of Dogs. I tried multiple ISP in London and BT had higher bandwidth limitations than any other ISP and lot of bandwidth was always useful for me. Situation might be changed in last year, but I doubt it personally. Let's just say this isn't problem of game and just problem of bad wireless connection. If Uber switch to UDP and make PA work with packet loss then client should handle connection loss or high delays better, but it's not just "netcode optimization".
