Yo, Just woke up and watched the live stream. Jon asks who would be interested in having a Singapore server. +1 right here! And like Jon says, I'm not sure how much having this server will help. Can the US people tell the difference in performance when connecting to an EU or an AU game instead of their own US server?
I can't typically connect to non-US games, but they have no problems playing with me. I've got 100/100/1ms ping, so I know it's not me v0v
Connecting to non-US games can take a while, but once in-game any lag is unnoticable until the game starts choking for bandwith, which is once 1000+ units are fielded. I think the real issue is the crappy Internet Providers in European and Oriental countries. I hear way more eurobros complaining about low bandwith and high pings than I do 'muricans. Edit: Wow, that's harash, censoring chanspeak.
Non EU for me is a problem in most cases but when it comes to RTS I think anything under 500 is playable.
I can play pretty well on US servers. The internet in Australia is downright horrible. We are rolling out a fiber network, but due to the utter incompetence of the government, who say it is "on revised schedule", it isn't due to be completed for another 117 years. They literally changed the schedule to meet how much they had completed, just so they didn't have to say it was behind. They are useless. Meanwhile we are stuck on ye olde ADSL 2. I really wish as an interim stop gap they would roll out VDSL and put fiber on the backburner till thats done.
Yeah or the coalition's Fiber to the Node plan as that surely would be able to be implemented much faster, go back and do the to the home part when all the exchanges are done. On Topic Ive not noticed a difference between Australian games, (except the rarity) and EU or US ones.
+1 for Singapore server. There are a lot of Asians in the world. Anyway, I hope it helps with the lag as well. The ping for me to Singapore is 1/2 that to Australia. Well, here's hoping
This is a good visual map of all the fiber routes in water around the world, you can click on each cable and see it's speed. http://www.cablemap.info/ If you look at Australia and it's connections to Singapore you can see the under water fiber connection aren't actually that great, connecting to Perth. Singapore is very well connected to the rest of Asia but in fact Australia has ok connections to the USA if you're in Sydney. So in someways it might make a lot of sense to have another server in Singapore because of it's connections to the rest of Asia & Australia to keeps it's own server because of the poor connections to the rest of the world. Also this map doesn't show ground fiber connections. My guess is the waterways are well mapped and public to stop ships dragging an anchor through a cable.
Important note for those looking at the cable map posted above. the big singa-perth cable has not been completed yet. (untick future cables down the bottom)
The time saving and up-front cost saving is relatively small, and the upkeep far higher (and cost to the consumer higher, because fiber to the node doesn't remove the need for dedicated phone line rental). In a very short time the coalition's NBN will cost even more than just doing it right the first time, and it wont stop the issues we are having with the outdated copper network, (since the same copper will still be used to go from the nodes to the houses), and we'll still be stuck with the same slow upload speeds and still relatively slow download speeds, with no upgrade path down the track besides going to Fiber to the Home anyway. The fiber to the node plan only exists for political reasons (can't be seen to agree with labor). No-one in the actual industry thinks it's a good idea.
If nothing comes of this, I will be in Singapore in November to get married. (fiances family live there, and I can test it on laptop)
Hi neutrino, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at least in my experience the game actually runs worse on the Australian server than it does on the US one. I played my friend in Australia who I convinced to buy the game last night. On the Australian server during fighting, the game sometimes paused for 10 seconds at a time, then I saw some action. He said it didn't lag for him. We played on the US server and it wasn't nearly as bad for me. Although once we did that *he* complained that it was more laggy. The US game was a longer game so maybe he's not used the current performance issues. If you have logs and are interested the games were with me and "nubrub" I'm a web guy and I work with Australian companies and I can tell you sometimes form here the connection gets so bad my job is impossible to do. I can't FTP and download files because everything times out. I can still happily connect to UK/US websites so it's not to do with my ISP connection which is a 25 megabit one. Yesterday however the connection didn't seem so bad (for my job) I'll continue to play games this week and report back later and let you know how consistent this experience is. EDIT: Ping times to Australia are better though, so maybe it's a bandwidth issue? Ping times to Sydney vs Texas below Aus Server (SYDNEY) Code: Pinging 109.200.212.126 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 109.200.212.126: bytes=32 time=174ms TTL=116 Reply from 109.200.212.126: bytes=32 time=159ms TTL=116 Reply from 109.200.212.126: bytes=32 time=168ms TTL=116 Request timed out. Ping statistics for 109.200.212.126: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 159ms, Maximum = 174ms, Average = 167ms US Server (TEXAS) Code: Pinging 75.126.116.197 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 75.126.116.197: bytes=32 time=255ms TTL=118 Reply from 75.126.116.197: bytes=32 time=243ms TTL=118 Reply from 75.126.116.197: bytes=32 time=251ms TTL=118 Reply from 75.126.116.197: bytes=32 time=246ms TTL=118 Ping statistics for 75.126.116.197: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 243ms, Maximum = 255ms, Average = 248ms
I have tried Australia server. I am in Malaysia as well. Anyway, I am not sure what the lag is caused by, sometimes I think it is my video card only having 1gb video memory, other times I think it is the server restricting the bandwidth, other times, it seems that lots of units attacking or moving causes the stuttering. Well, oh well, I figured if it doesn't cost you any more money to have the option for Asia/Singapore, why not. Thanks for replying My system: CPU I5 3570K. Video Card AMD 7750 Ram 8gb Internet Fiber Optic 5/5 mb/s
You toggle rendering performance panel (FPS and some extra OpenGL info) by using Ctrl+P hotkey. If it's rendering lag you should understand it because camera will lag and framerate will be slow. Choppy units movement mean it's bandwidth throttling and it's looks different.
I think the stuttering of units moving attacking is the worse. It happens even if my framerate is still high (40-60fps). But weird because I though high ping shouldn't affect the game. Perhaps it is bandwidth throttling like you said. Small planets with less units seems to work quite well.
A bit late now, but I thought I might as well feed back on this. I have recently been finding the Australian connection not so bad anymore, it's probably better than US and definitely better than EU for me. I haven't been having the internet connection problems with Aus anymore with my work either, therefore it must have been a global network issue or something. So I'm content for the time being. I haven't seen a single Asian country join any of my tournaments yet, so I'm assuming that there's not so many people here playing yet. In which case I'd understand the reluctance to put a server here. Once we're able to set up our own servers this won't be an issue anyway. So I'm happy to deal with this through Alpha/Beta.
I would appreciate an indicator of ones internet speed. So people could decide on which servers they connect. So far I can't really distinguish where people are form and how fast their internet is. Ours here in Switzerland is pretty solid (20Mbps - 150Mbps). But sometimes people join and the game is a lag-fest from the beginning on.
