soltys
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Posted - 2003.09.15 11:17:00 -
[1]
Hmm, few remarks/questions:
1) Optimizing is one thing, but you can consider simple fix, that was suggested already in many forms: When you're in warp - freeze the ship inside warp tunnel and do/load all the stuff you need to display everything properly on the other side, without lag. But don't do/load this stuff when you exit warp and your ship is visible and ready to be locked "on the other side", when you have no control or anything.
This is much more important on "jump-in" points to system. In example, if there's blockade being run at such point, ships jumping in doesn't even have small invulnerability time.
2) Another thing that looks kinda strange to me - why there's no lag during actual action after jumping in ? Majority of the stuff you enumerate here, must be received by client during actual action as well, on regular basis. Of course, in times where containers were being dropped specifically to increase initial lag, it was understandable. But such things don't happen now - we have gate, few containers of destroyed ships.. that's all that basically don't need constant updating. The point is - I believe there're other reasons for that, not necessarily caused by net, gfx or cpu.
3) Next thing that puzzles me even more, is why UDP is not used at all. In realtime applications (here: fights), TCP is terrible choice. True, it's protocol that give realible connection, but it comes at big cost - if antyhing goes wrong with transmission, lag strikes (lost acks, lost normal packets, acks on high ping connections with small rcv, retransmissions, delaying of retransmissions, other things). Especially retransmissions - it's worst thing a game can do, because retransmitted packet is irrelevant to situation happening on screen (remember realtime ?). All those "pull-backs" when your ship is thrown few hundred meters back - they may be caused by tcp itself. This point is not releated directly to warp-lag problem, but to lag in general that can be observed in game.
4) Last thing that is very annoying - it looks like (judging on ctrl-alt-f12) net transmissions is (partially) dependent on rendering/game engine. Whatever you do - be it open items, receive something in chat, write something in chat, open trade chat, open charsheet, etc. - engine (all game) freezes for a moment, when net transmission is active. Honestly, EvE is the only online game I've seen, that suffers of such problem. Still, it would be very unusual for devs to code game in this way, so there may be other problems invloved here (similar to those from point (2)).
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