Response time

[Bo_]

Hi there,

I'll make it short:

Good that you increased performance for the game and made it less laggy,
but 1 thing.
When playing battle doing micro is almost impossible because the responce time is way too long...
I rather have a game on only 20 fps where soldiers move imediatly in battle after giving them a command than
loosing all my knights because it took my knights 2 seconds to move.

Same with builders,
on the old release I you could manage your builders perfectly without them moving from 1 side to an other because the task you gave them was 2 seconds too late.
2 seconds may sound like nothing but in micro it realy is a lot.

Maybe I'm the only one who bothers this, it's nice to have a smoother game but if it reduces the ability of doing micro game then it's not necesary for me.

What do you think?

[Lewin]

The respond time is completely dependent on player pings, with lower pings you get a lower response time. The system is not perfect at the moment, it looks at the maximum ping from each player over the past 20 seconds so the response time is sometimes higher than necessary because it is taking the worst case scenario. This means if one player's ping spikes to 4000ms for 1 update, all players will increase their response time to 4 seconds for the next 20 seconds of game, which is obviously not a good situation if the 4000ms was a once off spike not the norm. This was very simple to implement, but I always had plans to improve it at some point.

I'd like to make the response time calculated between the clients by reporting to each other how good their response time is. For example client 1 might say to client 2 "I am receiving your command packets 4 ticks early, you can decrease your response time" or "I received that command packet late, please increase your response time". Of course it's not as simple as that because the players with the highest pings will denote the response time, and there are also random spikes in ping which should be ignored.

The changes in the RCs compared to r3392 is that we increased the base response time by about 0.1 seconds. In some cases we were having games where the whole game was running at about 5 FPS (instead of the normal 10 FPS of KaM) because packets were arriving too late. This seems to be fixed and all the games I've played have been very smooth.

It's not really a matter of balancing performance vs response time, we can only regain that 0.1 seconds that was added from that. The real problem is that the original system was kind of flawed, but I found the time to fix it.

On another note, it's impossible to make your soldiers move immediately after you click them. They can't move until all the players know that you told them to move, so the minimum time of that is the two highest pings added together and divided by two (the packet travels from you to the server, then from the server to the other player). So if you're in a server where everyone has 300ms ping, the minimum response time is 300ms. As I explained above this usually isn't the situation you get, and there appears to be other flaws in our networking code, we should really make it threaded to ensure maximum performance, but as with everything I just haven't found the time to do that...

[godest]

speaking of builders. I think it would be nice if there was a limit as to how many builders go to a new building to construct it, it feels kinda dumb that if you have 30 workers they all try to build that woodcutter hut instead of letting lets say 5-6 build it. Even more so when the second later another building can be built but all of them wants to finish the woodcutter which is really inefficent Is this somthing that can be added ?