Unplayable lags, good pings in BALANCE release

[pawel95]

Hey,

like i´ve mentioned many time before, there are now big lags or timing problems, when i send my archers back, they react after 2-5 seconds

This lags(with good ping) are only since last "official" release there.

Now, first time we wasted one hour and the game was unplayble in BALANCE Release, all pings were ok. no "waiting for player x" screen. Maybe you can see sth in replay. Players were: Me,Sreba,Tomixxx,bucek,freelancer,matwas,bercik,ironko.

I hope the replay can help you at sth, but i dont think soo.
If you need sth. pls tell me. Server doesnt crash, only it takes 30 seconds for one "real" game second. we could chat to each other and it was just after PT look at last 5 min of replay.

http://www.file-upload.net/download-690 ... P.rar.html

[Jeronimo]

I was told by Lewin that playing with less resolution or zoomed in was a way to minimize FPS (frames per second).
When you press F11 you can see your current FPS below... if it is under 10, then you are the one causing lags.

It happened in the first match Balance Candidate, the first game I shared with Lewin.
And yes, there are good pings... this matter is "solved" we dare to say.

[pawel95]

You mean the other way round haha yeah, this is normal like in all other games on the world.

When you have "bigger" resolution or zoom OUT, than your ping is smaller, because your GPU must render more things. However i havent done this

Although, thx for remember me on that thing, maybe someone zoomed out, maybe we should add sth. like max outzoom in multiplayer with more than 4 players??

[Lewin]

Nothing has changed regarding lag or performance in the balance release (compared to the public release) so the issues you were having are probably caused by one or more of the players you were playing with.

There are a two different issues here and it's important to distinguish between them:

1. Input delay: When you place an order it takes ages before it is carried out. This is mostly caused by a player having high ping, or having ping spikes. The input delay time is adjusted every 20 seconds so if the player's ping becomes better (and not spiking) the delay should go away. High ping is sometimes caused by the player's internet connection being congested, e.g. if somebody is watching youtube at his house and using up all the bandwidth. We might eventually improve the calculation so one ping spike won't cause the input delay time to be high for the next 20 seconds.

2. Slow motion lag: The game simulation appears to be in slow motion. This is mostly caused by one player getting <10 FPS, and since his computer can't run the game at normal speed (game logic updates 10 times per second), all other players are forced to see the game at his speed too.

Yesterday I made the game display ping and FPS side by side in game:

So when I zoom out too much you'll see something like this:

The color ranges are:
Green: >15
Yellow: 13-15
Orange: 10-12
Red <10
because in my tests they will only start to cause noticeable lag when they go under 10 FPS. So in the future you will be able to tell who is the cause of lag (where the game appears to be simulated in slow motion)

[pawel95]

Lol Lewin pls show at your Email account or tell met,that you have got my fixed maps

I dont understand the colors.
Is it really "FPS" so Frames per second or only a number,that shows if fps is too less?

Because normal games need a minimum fps for abou 28-30 pictures per second, so 30FPS. and Kam maybe little bit lesss, because it isnt a "smooth" game, so maybe 20 FPS.
However i dont understand than why 13-15 fps is also yellow, it is unplayable or is it KaM???

[Nissarin]

KaM is single threaded - one thread updates game state and screen, game state must be updated 10 times per seconds, so if FPS (screen updates) goes below 10 that also means that you can no longer update game state as frequently as required, therefore game slows down. So in that context yellow mean that you are already close to "danger zone".

[pawel95]

Well i know what yellow mean So KaM is that way that ugly^^ unsmotthy, because it has only 10 FPS??? i have tiped like the half, so maybe 30 fps, but only 10? Wouldnt our eyes think than,that these are only pictures and not moved objects?!

[Nissarin]

KaM is not a fast paced game so it doesn't really matter that much, it might look nicer though.

BTW: game logic in most shooters works at 20 FPS.

[Lewin]

@Pawel: Yes I got your emails, I haven't had time to look into it though.

KaM game logic updates 10 times per seconds, so actually all of the animations you see are at 10 FPS (e.g. serfs walking, flags moving, etc.). The only time you will notice FPS is in stuff like scrolling across the map. In fact if your computer is running the Remake at 10 FPS and you don't scroll (leave it still) then you won't be able to tell the difference compared to if it was running at 60 FPS since the animations are only changing 10 times per second anyway (unless you use speed up). Compare scrolling across the map in TPR to the KaM Remake, you'll see that the Remake is MUCH smoother.

The reason why we are showing the player's FPS to everyone in multiplayer is to indicate when that player is causing lag for the other players (it's not about the game looking smooth, it's about causing the game to run slowly). If his computer can't render the game 10 times per second, then it cannot update game logic at 10 times per second (since you can't update the game and render it at the same time) and therefore the game runs slowly, which means all other players have to run slowly too otherwise they will get ahead of that player in the game simulation. One way to improve this would be to make the game take a "snapshot" of its internal state and render that in a different thread (so it can render the game and update the game logic at the same time and waiting for the GPU will not cause the game logic updates to be delayed), but this would only improve performance for people who are GPU limited, and given that the Remake has very low GPU requirements it's probably not worth the large amount of work it would take (and it can make bugs more complicated/harder to fix). Although it would be good experience to implement a threaded rendering engine, so maybe we'll do it eventually.

Regarding the colours, in my tests the game does not lag at all at 10 FPS, but it becomes noticeable at <10 FPS. The reason why we have yellow/orange is to indicate that the player might cause lag if he looks at a busy part of the map or zooms out (putting additional load on his graphics card). It's basically a warning, and red means "this player IS causing lag".

[pawel95]

Well so the idea from someone to increase speed minimaly as a new option x1,2 or x1,8 for example, it would look really smoother and better, because I now know that there are only 10 frames per second. However like in TV 100 Hz is much better than 60, because also "slow" films will fill in with "between pictures".

Offtopic: Do you think that in 2-3 generations for the children KAM will look like pictures only?
I am asking, because the old people are saying(well not my grandparents, but others) that the films today are that fast and active and this is right, so maybe KAM with his 10 FPS will be a bad game in 2 generations,too only because of the 10 FPS, what do you think XD ?


pawel95

[Bence791]

Well so the idea from someone to increase speed minimaly as a new option x1,2 or x1,8 for example, it would look really smoother and better, because I now know that there are only 10 frames per second. However like in TV 100 Hz is much better than 60, because also "slow" films will fill in with "between pictures".

Offtopic: Do you think that in 2-3 generations for the children KAM will look like pictures only?
I am asking, because the old people are saying(well not my grandparents, but others) that the films today are that fast and active and this is right, so maybe KAM with his 10 FPS will be a bad game in 2 generations,too only because of the 10 FPS, what do you think XD ?


pawel95

KaM will never be a bad game... Maybe a game with bad graphics.. But graphics can be remade to look more modern, can't they?

[Ben]

If you play on x10 speed for a while, normal speed looks, as you say, like "pictures only"