Difference between revisions of "Lag"

Latest revision as of 02:13, 13 November 2008

Lag is when the speed of gameplay slows down. Sometimes it can even come to a halt for a brief period of time.

HAL elaborates on some current causes of lag, and the different types:

Server lag: Log in process is messed up and can cause the entire to server to halt while waiting for a DB read on someone's account info. Jeff is working on fixing that and it will probably be fixed before client 2. This is probably the most serious problem, as it affects everyone during the save.

Particle lag: When you have a lot of bullets & other particles flying around on your screen in the current client, it can cause a large FPS drop. The new graphics engine might fix this, but it might not. We'll have to see. We also planned on capping the number of particles for large damage hits so it doesn't cause the client to slow down when you hit someone with a lot of burst damage, but I don't know what ever happened to that.

Network lag: Currently there really isn't a whole lot of network lag, mostly because we only have at most a few hundred players logged in at any given time. The network code is pretty bad in terms of efficiency, and as the player base increases we'll probably have to do something about that. But for now, it really isn't much of an issue.

The biggest problem seems to be that some ISPs are slowing down or blocking our traffic altogether with traffic shaping policies, and since nobody on the dev team is an expert on low level networking code we don't really know where to begin to try to fix that. The good news is that Jeff may be considering hiring an expert back end network guru (or something like that) to fix the current issues. The networking is pretty much independent of the client though, so Client 2 most likely won't change anything.