Performance issues haunting us.

[prodromos]

So,
after about 7 years , the Setons and even the little Gap can become annoyingly unplayable, despite the improvements
on modern cpus.
If you think about it, having seen the creation of Seton's community, equals to a miracle, since most of the time at the beginning, the pinnacle of processing power was the reverent q6600.
I really like big maps, frankly do , but I can't stand the lag. It hypnotizes me; it's a fact I play at least 20-30% worse when this happens.
And we miss the possibility of enjoying other good maps, like Selkie Isle.


There was improvement in the quality of the gameplay; can't be denied. But instead of lagging at the 10-15th minute now you start lagging at the 20th-30th, which mainly reflects advancements in single threaded performance. And things can't be improved if after so many years there's the occasional enthusiast who will lag after the 40-45th minute.
(this can be expressed in total units in game too, which is more reliable. Numbers being from 2000-2500 to 3300-3800.
In a game of Seton's you will typically reach about 3000 units at the 30th minute...)

So, there you go, people of the industry. Acknowledge that without the contribution of games you can't advance(the same thing happens with the car industry, only that it is not called games, but racing). So, if you want your chips to be faster, take an ancient game like SC and make it run really faster and you will make a huge fortune.

[tatsu]

I agree that there is an issue, this is why i spend so much time looking (in vain, because all developers are blind for some reason) for a true heir to FA.

I believe as a community, we have the will and manpower to mod FA back into a hospitable engine.

Both PA and Ashes Of The Singularity have failed me thus far for different reasons (although since AOTS can yet still change there remains a sliver of hope)

but FA remains the best option for now so how do we work with what we got? "know thy enemy"

thy enemy is lag -> "know lag"

"lag" has two different forms in FA.

network lag and cpu lag.

Cpu lag will be noticed with the simspeed counter first and foremost :

• it is also easily discernible by the fact that everything is going ssssssslllllllllllllooowwwwwwwwwwmmmmmmmoooooooo
• say the number is -1 the game is running under regular speed at say about 1.5 times slower
• -2 then the game is running two times slower than normal speed, ect...
• the number after the "/" is your own potential speed (ex : if it is +10 you may run the game 10 times faster then real time (but won't because of game speed being locked to normal)
• unlocking game speed or locking it to an accelerated speed makes the game run slower, don't ask why I don't know why
• the game always runs at the speed of the slowest out of all the computers connected in the match. why? well because it is on the peer-to-peer model, this is advantageous because it means you don't need a server to play but disadvantageous because you don't have a server to send data to and receive data from. if it were the case it would be designated driver and let slow or bad connection computers writhe in their own filth without the need to slow the game down because of one. if you still don't understand why the P2P model requires everyone to run at the speed of the slowest ask yourself how the data could possibly be synchronous if people were at different stages of the same multiplayer game
• it is also possible to view other people's possible simspeed (and thus find the lagger) by opening up network stats (the only tool you ever need) you need to bind it first to a key on your keyboard by pressing "F1" it should show up under UI as show network stats. once opened it resembles a little window like this :

• "maxsp" is "maximum simspeed" it shows you if someone has a really bad cpu if you are capable of running the game at +10 at a given time but someone else in this list is only capable of running the game at -4 then that will be the speed the game runs at for everyone and the number that will show up in the area I circled in the player list menu.
• this brings us to network lag, network lag is the most noticeable of all : the game will stop and start and sometimes also bring up what people call "the F11 menu" which is the ping list. (the pings are often irrelevant unless above 1000, so pay no attention to them ... and don't kick)
• "behind" in the netstats list will fill up when there is a freeze for whomever is having really bad connection.
• all of the above will allow you to quickly tell if you are in the network lag case or the cpu lag case or both

all of this may seem useless to someone who wants to play a non-laggy game of FA but it can actually save lives. If you yourself have a 8MB/s internet connection or above and a 3.0Ghz cpu or above you have nothing to reproach about yourself.

and as many many people (really most) on FAF fit the above criteria you can attempt to play with only them.

unfortunately this requires enough patience to be able to go through a rehost or two, but ID-ing these problems rapidly as well as the culprit will allow you to leave the game well under the 4 minute mark and rehost where no score will be lost and the important information of who not to let in is gained.

a couple extra things to note :

• FA doesn't play well with sending packets of data to multiple different people at once through wifi. this is why 6+ player games on FA and on wifi will writhe in a corner in agony. make sure to be on ethernet cable connection straight to your router. also packet losses can cause desyncs ending the game on a disconnection screen, wifi's JOB is basically loosing packets if you want to dumb it down to the utmost, so keep that in mind
• World wide, internet is destributed to end-users as Asymmetric : this means higher download than capacity then upload (often a 10/1 ratio) why? to slow down piracy (it is effective at that) this is important because if you're running off of a 8MB/s connection (which is really okay) you have VERY little overhead to work with in terms of upload when playing an 8-player FA game. if you start streaming your screen or downloading a torrent (yes because torrent is P2P which means you must upload as much as you can to download (see how piracy found a way anyways?)) then your upload will be immediately saturated to 100% and FA will just not be able to send any data to your fellow players.
• this applies as well if you have anyone in the household saturating the UP bandwidth and your are on the same router as them.
• many programs use up bandwidth that we don't suspect. I don't exactly know how to quickly asses on Windows what programs are using up bandwidth to know which ones to close so I'll leave that to someone else to fill in.

this requires effort, but as you'll find in life, all levels of comfort do.

but to answer you in short the people of the industry have acknowledged this as they've opted generally in new mass scale RTS for the server-client model which just makes it not your problem anymore and just the person who is lagging (in terms of cpu or network) behind the server's problem

[KD7BCH]

I support this thread. You know who you are. Players joining 5v5 or 4v4 games who at 15 min are -4 SIM speed. It is time to UPGRADE FFS!

[ckitching]

Oh god, I can't breathe.

World wide, internet is destributed to end-users as asynchronous

You mean "Asymmetric", and are probably trying to talk about Asymmetric DSL (ADSL).

this means higher download than capacity then upload (often a 10/1 ratio) why? to slow down piracy (it is effective at that)

While ADSL does provide considerably more downlink than uplink, the reasons for this are chiefly technical, and secondly to do with marketing. This was definitely not implemented as a means to hinder privacy. I invite you to read through the "overview" section of the ADSL wikipedia page (it explains it all relatively well):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetri ... e#Overview

this is important because if you're running off of a 8MB/s connection (which is really okay) you have VERY little overhead to work with in terms of upload when playing an 8-player FA game.

Connections are generally described (and marketed) in this way using their downlink speed, so knowing that a connection is "8MB/s" really tells you absolutely nothing about how much uplink capacity the user may or may not have.

torrent is P2P which means you must upload as much as you can to download (see how piracy found a way anyways?)

That's simply not what P2P means, and you can (and people on ADSL connections routinely do) download much more rapidly than you upload.
People with poor uplink capacity don't make great seeders, but this doesn't matter to most torrent swarms since the majority of peers generally already have the entire file. This means that the amount of consumers of the available uplink bandwidth is much smaller than the number of people providing it, so even if all the seeders were on a heavily asymmetric connection there's enough trickles to provide a decent download speed to the new guy.
It has been shown that torrent swarms tend to benefit more from causing more peers to have more of the chunks than they do from trying to throttle "leeching".

If you're interested to know what P2P actually means, there's a pretty good wiki article, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

It's a much more general term, and really has nothing to do with piracy.

if you start streaming your screen or downloading a torrent (...) then your upload will be immediately saturated to 100% and FA will just not be able to send any data to your fellow players.

That's just not how IP works. Even if there is an excessive amount of traffic competing for the capacity, it is never the case that an application "will just not be able to send any data".
Neglecting absolutely all the subtleties and edgecases, packets are just queued up and sent in something approximating FIFO order with no preferential treatment, and dropped by intermediate devices if an input queue ever overflows.
While this means a flood of unrelated traffic soaking up the network capacity will make what you're interested in tend to be more delayed and experience a higher chance of being dropped, some will still get through.


In practice, the bulk amount of data the game needs to upload is really very small. Sufficiently so that essentially any remotely sane internet connection will have enough throughput: what we care about far more for avoiding lag is the latency.

[benikens]

Can I get more insight into the WiFi issue? Someone mentioned this to me the other day and I don't understand why it should behave better or worse on WiFi? Does having wireless AC help alleviate this problem? I ask because I play on WiFi always, I don't really have the option not to. I also have a wireless AC router and Wireless card. I've always attributed my networking issues to living in Australia and playing with people online but if it's actually because I play on WiFi I guess I could get a Ethernet over power adapter?

[ZLO_RD]

I don't have alot of knowlage on technical part, but talking about internet issues... I remember playing with 20kb/ per sec speed somewhere in 2007-2008
And not haveing alot of issues with game.
I think it all about stability not speed, i almost think as if we could just send all same data 2 times so it s less likely to loose any packets, or even 20 times... These days internet speeds are huge ...

And i also can double that question about wifi.
I don't understand how it could create issues and i never had any issues, tho i do not use it to often and wifi router is in next room and probably most important that others are almost never use this wifi.

[benikens]

I don't know that's it's possible to make FA work on multi-cores. One thing I did to boost my performance besides my hefty overclock is disable hyper threading which bumped my CPU score a little. I suppose that's only relevant for those of us on i3 or i7 processors.

[=M.V.K.=]

In reply to : benikens

How long have you been playing FA?

[benikens]

In reply to : benikens

How long have you been playing FA?

2-3 years? Not sure exactly a while though.

[=M.V.K.=]

k..Play on GPG??