observer lag

posted on December 4th, 2011, 3:02 pm

i noticed both in replays and 1 game i (tried to) observe that when many poeple are in a game it often creates lag. also i noticed comentators avoiding big declocking fleets and borg explosions and stuff to prevent lag.

I have no idea how it works but based on this i asume that every players data needs to get synchronized all the time, even the observers. while i would guess that for observers there is no synchronising neceserry their terminal only needs to recieve information and not send it.

so my idea/request is if it isn't posible to stop the observer terminals from synchronising with the rest but only recieve the data so observers will have no influence on the game lag and at worst recieve some lag for themselves? more like watching a video that stutters.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 12:31 am

This actually sounds like an excellent idea, but it would require digging much deeper into the game engine than I think the devs have gone so far.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 1:55 am

i noticed both in replays and 1 game i (tried to) observe that when many poeple are in a game it often creates lag. also i noticed comentators avoiding big declocking fleets and borg explosions and stuff to prevent lag.

I have no idea how it works but based on this i asume that every players data needs to get synchronized all the time, even the observers. while i would guess that for observers there is no synchronising neceserry their terminal only needs to recieve information and not send it.

so my idea/request is if it isn't posible to stop the observer terminals from synchronising with the rest but only recieve the data so observers will have no influence on the game lag and at worst recieve some lag for themselves? more like watching a video that stutters.

That's got nothing to do with the engine.
It lags like that because someone like the observer has a slower pc and the cloaked fleets or borg explosions causes his/her pc to lag while it handles all those textures ect.. and the game compensates for that person by lagging so everyone stays in sinc so your all playing the same game.

Not everone has the same pc specs and certain things cause their pc to lag.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 3:19 am

well, I think what he was saying is that the game could send information to the observer client without getting any reply or sync information, so that no matter how slow the observer computer gets it can't affect the players.

In effect, the observer would be watching a video rather than participating in the game without any ships.  You could even reduce the FPS of all observer clients to reduce the network load.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 3:31 am

The observer still has to render the game material with a video card etc however (and usually more at one time, since they can "see" everything) . MrXT seems to be correct as far as I know - if the observer did not synchronize any information, the observer would get out of sync with the other computers.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 8:24 am

well the way i think it would work (but again i don't know anything about it) is just send the observer the real time info, if the observer has a slow pc (but in the case of the lag i caused it was most likely not that but the internet conection) it can just skip part of it or even if the observer sees it a sec later it doesn't matter....

as it apears to me there just goes more information over the internet then is neceserry, especialy for observers

posted on December 5th, 2011, 12:00 pm

well the way i think it would work (but again i don't know anything about it) is just send the observer the real time info, if the observer has a slow pc (but in the case of the lag i caused it was most likely not that but the internet conection) it can just skip part of it or even if the observer sees it a sec later it doesn't matter....

as it apears to me there just goes more information over the internet then is neceserry, especialy for observers

That in my mind would require allot of meddling with the engine source code which the devs do not have, and i don't think its necessary anyway, most people who are observing and recording will have a decent enough pc to keep up with everyone else.

If your experiencing lag in game determine if someones internet is the problem and then start getting people to leave starting with the observer and see at which point it gets better by doing this you can see who is the problem and they can try and fix it if its a minor internet issue or get better hardware.

Remember that we are playing using a vpn, we are not using dedicated servers here so you are going to experience problems with some people because there is no server to take the slack, we just have to work around this.

posted on December 5th, 2011, 9:10 pm

i noticed both in replays and 1 game i (tried to) observe that when many poeple are in a game it often creates lag. also i noticed comentators avoiding big declocking fleets and borg explosions and stuff to prevent lag.

The cloaking effect is more of a performance lag rather then an internet connection lag, something to do with it being beefed up a bit too much.

I remember me and my mates trying to do a 2D simple space stuff and when it came to a simple phasing animation similar to the cloak the engine just couldn't handle the pileup of massive amounts of objects being rendered by the program...

You must understand that FO is a redo of the old armada and things are bound to not being perfect...