Hardcore Lag

[Anonymous]

Is anyone else encountering this problem, or would it be because I was on my first time actually loading up the game and starting to work through it?  Because it's almost ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

Ya its pretty darn laggy for me as well.Sometimes it goes away, sometimes it comes back and gets worse.

[Anonymous]

I had no visual lag, barely any server lag, if there was it was just for a few seconds which was fine because the game owns XD

[Anonymous]

only got some lag within the first 10 minutes when everyone was connecting. after that it was smooth a silk
i did however go through about 15 bugged missions, but that's beta for ya  

[Tbone]

At first I didn't get any lag. Now, however, the game seems very laggy for me. My comp is well equipped, but it seems to be visual lag. I'll have to look into what the problem could be...possibly all the new sounds...

[Anonymous]

fast for me at highest fps, but laggy at highest quality or whatever

[Anonymous]

Ya I seem to get loading type of lag, when I move further into an area, you can feel the massive loading....

[Anonymous]

Yeah, that's what I'm experiencing, and the buggy missions suck, I was down to my the end of the mission, but it never gave me the last waypoint, it stayed at the second to last, that sucked.

[Anonymous]

I only found lag in heavily crowded areas, but when I went to this random area with no one in it, there was no server lag for me anymore. I think it all depends on the load per area.

[Anonymous]

Logging in... i cant get my mouse to move... but im able to move the kouse randomly and highlight things... I managed to create my character that way.... any ideas on how to help my mousey problem?!

[Anonymous]

I think that it can depend on the area your at, if you move to a main area with lots of vendors, people etc you are quite likely to experience lag. Moving to a different area helped me a lot, although the worst lag I got was while getting chased by an agent, everyone run to restricted zones! lol but seriously agents are big pussies in this game, all they have is really good block.

[Anonymous]

dont forget that this is still beta, and that its all written in 5.5+GIGS! of raw code, that may cause slow load times if you have on cars and pigeons etc.
also i was talking to some mods about the server that we are testing on, and i was told that its not the "groundbreaking" new-tech server (the one that streams information as you walk), that we were told about in many of the interviews, and that they probably wont be using them until stress testing. which probably explains why we freeze up when entering new zones.
also alot of the game conflicts with itself when performing certain commands such as, the group photo area crash! when we managed to take down the whole central mara area except T and AP. w00t.
its actually not as bad as when i first started playing, i feel that they have fixed many of the crash issues.

[Anonymous]

Well yeah.  

Sure lag depends on the number of people in an area.  More people close to you means more info your game client needs to be aware of.  That in turn means that there's more stuff going down "the tube" to your client.

That is compounded by the fact that you are there too.  So what you're doing needs to be sent to other people too.

Some algebra now (I love this.  Can you tell ?)

If X is the average amount of Kbps that needs to be sent downstream to a client to let that client be aware of another character close by, then this follows.

If there are 2 characters in an area, the number of Kbps that the server sends to the two clients is 2 X Kbps.  X Kbps is sent to Person "A"'s client to inform it about Person "B"'s movements and another X Kbps is sent to Person "B"'s client to inform it of person "A"'s movements.

That is still a low number.

Imagine if there's 25 people in the same room.

The server has a lot more info to send in such a case.  It's not just 25 X Kbps.

The client of Person "1" needs to receive info about persons "2" through "25" movements.  That's 24 X Kbps.
Every other people's client needs info about every other people in that area too.

So total, 25 times 24 X Kbps is sent.  So as you can see this is exponential.  And there's certainly some more info that a server sends to each client.

If we're lucky, the guys at Monolith will try to keep "X" as low as possible.  They could also use a few tricks to reduce lag.  Like for instance, have the server only send movement that can be seen by a character's camera i.e. don't send information about characters that are not in your field of vision down the wire.  That is useless since you can't see them anyways.  That implies that the client sends its "field of vision" info to the server.

Anyways, I'm not an expert at this but that's my understanding of it.

[Anonymous]

in other words.. if the server tries to transfer too much information between a high number of clients performing actions within a specific area, it might cause lag due to the fact that its not stable enough to handle all of them.

and Core, it already doesnt transfer non local peer animations.

[Anonymous]

Once they get the "groundbreaking" servers up and running and possibly increase the bandwidth available for game communications, the lag will very probably be greatly reduced.

I wonder if poor client connections, such as a 56 Kbps modem, slows down the servers.  When a server is trying to "push" information through a slow client connection, does it impact the communications with other clients ?

Hopefully, the guys at Monolith thought of that and have a solution for it.

Anyways, I think the performance is pretty good in general for a beta.

As we all know, if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done.  So we can expect to see many good improvements in the last few weeks before the release.