Knights and Merchants.net Forum

!	MODBREAK: Split this off topic discussion from this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1315

Its offtopic but about the Lagging in online games. What do you think about an automative "restart" of zooming in online games? Because like you have told me some time ago,its the clear thing with the zoom,because the computer must render much more objects... So maybe when someone is zooming wide out in a online game, maybe that the game will "press" backspace, when for example the red area of fps is more than 4 seconds of some player?!



pawel95

@Pawel: That would be totally unexpected to a player. Game should not take control of players actions for no good reason. Besides, on a slow PC even 4 sec of lag is quite a lot.

what if we remove zoom function from multiplayer altogether?

Nooooooooo! Zoom function is a very neat feature! Hopefully showing the players' framerate will help a lot.

Haha no thats a good thing,thats the reason why i wanted a auto. restart of zooming,or maybe a warning: "Zoom back,you are the lagger of the game "

I split this discussion off into a new topic.

I really don't think we should remove zoom from multiplayer, it's very useful. We could put a maximum zoom out level, but I don't really like that idea either because you might like to take a screenshot of the entire map.

Hopefully with the FPS being shown for each player it will be easy to identify who is causing lag and tell them to zoom in/play on a smaller resolution. I guess we could make it flash up a warning "your framerate is too low, please adjust your zoom/graphics settings", but that means you can't take screenshots without seeing that warning. Maybe the warning could have an Ignore button to make it go away while you take a screenshot?

Long term the best solution would be to put game updating in a separate thread from the main thread used for rendering/GUI, since most of the framerate lag is just the CPU waiting for the GPU to finish rendering the frame, so there's probably no reason why one thread can't be updating the game while the other thread waits for the GPU to finish rendering.
But this will be a lot of work to implement and probably make bugs more complicated to identify/solve.

Just to clear things out - I was joking

Of course zoom became a good addition to the game and we would like to keep it

I think that the player who's zooming probably already understand that he's the cause of the lag,
sometimes they zoom out just to take a quick look, or a screenshot like Lewin said.
You (or at least not me) will never play completely zoomed out when giving commands to soldiers or placing buildings.
So even if it gives us 2-5 seconds of lag I don't really think it's a problem.
It is annoying yes but 90% of the lag is caused by internet connections, I can't imagine that it would improve gameplay.

Thanks that you have splitted it up.

Good that you have said it


@Mr Bo: I dont think that every player know that he is causing the lags. Mostly some new/young players don´t know about this. Also when he/she isnt that good on the technic level on computers. He won´t understand that this lags come only from zooming out

And other thing: Maybe its an unofficial new tactic,when you are just dead but your teammates still alive,to zoom out,that the enemy will be crazy XD³

So the idea,with the message is for me the best and I think it isn´t that hard to program it,is it? Like i have said before you can make a condition for each player, so when "players Fps-high" > 4 (seconds)= "put out message (x)" for example?!

My Suggestion: Max zoom out determined by Map size (which is determined in Editor by number of tiles).
Applies to all players so noone gets advantage being able to zoom out more than othes with lower PCs.

XS, unlimited (100%)
S, unlimited
M, 2/3 camera (66%)
L, 2/3 camera
XL, 1/3 camera (33%)
XXL, 1/3 camera

It's a simple "zoom regulation", must be easy to implement.
The game should run smoothly for everyone.

Well yeah,but like the posts before said, there are players,that want to make screens from there "beautiful city" or the whole map. So thats the problem with normal regulation.

@Pawel95: Save the moment you want to make "city screen" and later do the copy image.
When loading it through multiplayer, but there is no human players ingame (just the automatic serf delivery).

It's important to assure the "zoom out limited by map size" WHILE you play multiplayer with other human opponents.
As I recommend, save the city moment to make it later after game ends (just load save in lobby without other humans).
There you will be able to zoom out what you want.

Notice the "zoom out limit" is present only when other human players are detected (extra FPS considered).
You could play XXL map in singleplayer and still have the unlimited zoom out.

Yeah ok, havent thought about this simple thing However still,maybe someone needs the zooming out screen in game?

That sounds overly complicated and does not account for players PC performance, e.g. I can zoom out in Paradise Island and keep having 15fps, while someone can have 10fps on a M map when playing from notebook.

Using this feature to lag the game .. sounds quite impractical. I'd say we take no action on this one.

if the new release shows fps and someone is doing that you cn easily spot them anyway

I disagree, when I've had lag in games I've asked people to press F11 and check their FPS, and a few times there was a guy with <10 FPS who had no idea he was making the game lag. I think the FPS display for each player will really help with this. Mostly people with netbooks or no graphics card or a really old computer.

I don't think we should limit the maximum zoom because sometimes you want to take a screenshot or something, and as Krom said some computers can handle it.

Zooming out to cause lag is not a big issue IMO, plus you can see when somebody is doing it with the FPS display.