The lobbies make me very angry

Not sure why people are crapping all over you. PA has changed a lot for the better in the past two months, but the lobby is one place that needs some serious love and attention to detail. It is a buggy, laggy crapfest and just saying 'play small systems' doesn't address it. I have a beastly PC and run large games just fine but the lobby is still lobby-simulator 2014.

I REALLY hope lobby simulator is updated with the next update, since they're reworking the main menu.

Almost every single time someone ("someone" generally being new players) joins a game with a medium to large size system (single radius 1000 planet, 4 radius 600 planets, etc) they type "lag" into chat, and then I see nothing else from them, only an icon spinning on their ghost the entire time in lobby, which means they alt-f4'd from lag.

@jables I know you guys are super busy but the game is slowly taking the term "lobby simulator" and I think it's quite amusing how accurate that term is. Please include some type of pop-up notification when you join a lobby to verify people that it's the game loading, not their PC on fire.

70% of these bugs would be gone or less annoying with a pop-up.

Yeah most of my frustration with PA comes from all that was listed by OP's first post, along with the huge bandwidth needed to just get a list of the few games that are joinable.

This:
1) Loading a huge system causes major lag, and ultimately causes people to leave, then bug-up the lobby even more.

definately this one. mein got i hate it
2) Changing the game type (FFA or teams) resets the entire system and causes people to lag even more, then leave, and then bug the lobby. (that "failed to join game" ****)

I'd be so thankful for a ping feature. And screw the anti spam function! they just need to read up!
5) Removing slots causes every player to un-ready which really becomes annoying when people are not paying attention to the lobby. Would be nice to have a ping feature.

Actually all the points are valid. Nice work @KillerKiwiJuice . Take a good look at this @jables .

I'd like to mention that the "failed to join game" might not be caused by someone merely leaving the lobby.

I actually have no idea how to reproduce it, but Murphy's law tends to happen with every lobby. I remember there was a thread in support that points to the direction of people crashing and bugging the lobby. Maybe the game thinks the bugged slot is "open", but when someone tries to join that slot, they get an error.

The fact that loading huge systems takes a while is not that big of an issue. If you join a lobby with ten radius 1000 jungle planets, you know what you're getting into.

However, the real problem is that the client practically freezes while the system is loading in. If I get stuck loading a system, that could be several minutes in which I can't communicate in chat, can't change things in the lobby, and can only exit the lobby by killing PA.exe. This happens even on smaller systems, just for less time.

I'd like to see some kind of multithreading solution worked out where, at the very least, the client is not totally unresponsive while loading.

This.

When I read the title I think:




Seriously though, I think a larger issue is mid-game disconnects. There needs to be an AI takeover like Civ.

I don't want to derail the thread but could we include game listing screen improvements into the list aswell as its kinda all related. @mikeyh done some great work with the faster server browser mod, it really improved the speed and perception of the game.

Oh yeah.
That gzip compression on the server list is such an easy fix to do. I am honestly a bit surprised Uber still has not fixed those issues, they have solutions presented to them and ignore them since month. And these issues very certainly have massive consequences, especially to people with bad internet. It's bad joke when you realize that having the list of games open eats gigabytes of bandwidth if you just have it somewhere in the background for a few hours.
GIGABYTES.

EDIT:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rip-faster-server-browser-mod.63947/page-3#post-1017489

A list of really easy fixes for the most part, tested in mods and verified to be super helpful. Really Uber please added them. The easier ones are like hours at most to implement, no joke. Like enabling gzip for example, it's as simple as passing a parameter to curl. Your backend quite happily goes "okay here is gzip compressed content" if you ask it for that, no changes required there.

@jables

Just turn on gzip on the connection layer would add additional workload on the server, depending on the number of clients you have. I'm not sure if this is a big issue, but when you use on central dictionary for all clients and you want to scale your system up to a real lot of clients, this may be an issue. Granted bandwidth will kill you soon or later, too.
The more robust version would be compressing the list once on application layer and transmitting this compressed list to every client that asks, but this would mean more work than just turn a flag on in curl. And when you are at this point you may as well consider delta updates.

TL;DR:
Solutions may sometimes seem simple from one side, but the truth is always somewhere else.

criz.

Last time I checked we are talking about a downstream of roughly 0.5 megabytes (of uncompressed json data) per second for the list of games.
gzip was able to cut that down to 1/3. Considering they are serving data streams of that size to a huge number of clients they have a CDN with multiple servers anyway (which is configured to serve gzip if asked for it). Somebody somewhere posted a link to that I think.
If the server is not capable of serving gzip here than they should rework this nevertheless on high priority, as it stands it creates massive "PA has such a laggy server list" issues.
Certainly the better solution would be to compress and filter the list in their backend, as 99% of the list is not even displayed most of the time.