Discovery Gaming Community

Ok I have a few ideas for some fixes for discovery. They are a few small ideas and atm the only problems I see with the mod at all.


First Lag:
The main Discovery server is lag ridden and I have a simple solution to this. Remove Thrusters from all NPC ships. Being in a battle with NPC's and there being 10+ and 2(or more) players in one area begins to cause massive server lag. Removing the thrusters would greatly illeviate the lag due to the fact that the server would no longer have to freak out when sending out packet information containing random, erratic thruster bursts from NPC fighters.

Also for the Thruster issue, make an option on the mod for both server & client installs:
Enable NPC Thrusters? Yes/No
-Warning, may cause lag for busy servers.

Battleships:
Ok I have no idea how to do this due to the fact that I am only a novice modder. But Battleships have a major issue with being knocked around by smaller fighters, especially when in combat with several NPC ships. There were points where I was fighting a group of Xenos trying ot help my rep and my battleship would start spinning for 1-5 minutes at a time due to repeated ramming by the light fighters.

I've seen some ships in Evolutions that are almost completely invulnerable to this, an idea may be to raise the mass values on all the capital ships then adjust the rest of the manuvering and speed values to compensate. Just an idea.



More later.

I don't experience that much lag. Maybe its your computer or connection and not the server? Try disabling engine trails when you start up the game or something, also what connection do you have?

We have been trying to fix the battleship spinning, and it isn't easy, or else Igiss would have gotten it by now. Its likely that won't be fixed for a long time. That being after we find out HOW to.

At moment every time the server hits 15 + players there starts to be some lag, sometimes it's intermitten yellow, others it's yellow for a bit, then red then back to yellow, etc, etc.

It's been getting laggy like this for several people at different times, sometimes everyone seems to be getting it other times it's only a few.

As for the BS's spinning perhaps an answer would be seeing if we can stop low level NPCs from ramming player ships, they only seem to do it when they can't scratch the shield.

You get alot of them near planets so it can get annoying and worrying especially if your moving around, I'd hate to be rammed by a hawk or sometime and hit the blasted planet.

Are you sure that removing thrusters would help? I'm almost sure that not. If the game has to calcuate each shot, thruster on/off doesn't influence connection and server speed even in most minor way.

Evolution values won't work for Discovery. Many reasons here, I'm not intended to get deeper into this. Again, I spent countless hours trying to find a solution. But I never found one. Tried ship maneuverability values from many mods.

What I'm absolutely sure is that mass doesn't influence spinning in any way. Feels that it even gets worse if you raise the mass, but I have no proof. Mostly it's all the same.

Dab,Aug 16 2006, 10:33 AM Wrote:I don't experience that much lag. Maybe its your computer or connection and not the server? Try disabling engine trails when you start up the game or something, also what connection do you have?

We have been trying to fix the battleship spinning, and it isn't easy, or else Igiss would have gotten it by now. Its likely that won't be fixed for a long time. That being after we find out HOW to.

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I've already tested several things and it's not my PC or my connection, the lag takes place for everone on the server, but I'm only noticing lag at times when large amounts of NPC ships are near me, and constantly using thrusters (Trust me, the netcode can't handle the random intervals the thrusters fire at.)

Also I already have engine trails disabled because I don't like them.

What I want is the ability to disable Contrails, they are extremely unrealistic for space.

You can. I believe there is a way to in options, OR in C:/My games/Freelancer/preferences.

Igiss,Aug 16 2006, 11:07 AM Wrote:Are you sure that removing thrusters would help? I'm almost sure that not. If the game has to calcuate each shot, thruster on/off doesn't influence connection and server speed even in most minor way.

Evolution values won't work for Discovery. Many reasons here, I'm not intended to get deeper into this. Again, I spent countless hours trying to find a solution. But I never found one. Tried ship maneuverability values from many mods.

What I'm absolutely sure is that mass doesn't influence spinning in any way. Feels that it even gets worse if you raise the mass, but I have no proof. Mostly it's all the same.

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I am 1,000% sure that the thrusters are helping cause lag. Let me explain further.

Online gaming has had the most netcode issues when dealing with movement and speed in online gaming, be it console, PC or Hand-held gaming.

The NetCode in freelancer is designed based on the predictable behaviour of the NPCs. The code is alitle more lenient and well designed for player actions, thankfully. Unfortunately however, when you change things in the game (For instance a mod) things become much less predictable, making the netcode inefficient in most cases. Granted the thrusters may not be the cause of lag, however removing the thrusters from NPC ships will greatly reduce the lag. For Instance:


Chain of events:

I'm in battleship sitting still attacking Liberty Police
Liberty Police Beging returning fire
Liberty Police Read ship as being the size of a fighter and not a capital ship
Result: Police repeatedly ram ship (spinning problem)
Secondary Result: Police AI begins making thruster compensations for the oddity of the situation. Not only is the ship mis-sized, but it is sitting still (The AI in Freelancer is designed to combat moving targets) Alot of times this results in the AI circling the capital ship, making large numbers of pointless thrust manuvers.




Why Does Thrusting Cause Lag?

Thrusting causes lag due to the fact that when the AI continues to rapidly do it in extremely random patterns (Completely unlike player behaviour, which is much more conservative) the server has to try to compensate by sending out to every player in that system these jumps in distance and changes in direction. This causes lag because they are not constants. For example, if the NPC ship is moving within its minimum and max speeds that the game understands perfectly, there is no issue. However when you add a strange item that the AI is not equipped to handle (Capital ships) the AI responds to them in the forementioned way. This causes extra lag on the server, making latency worse.

I noticed this because every time I am in a fight with the AI (fighters specificly) and there is another person in the system, the server begins to lag once the fighters begin their "Thrust" compensation because they don't understand the dimensions of the ship I am in and the fact that I am sitting still.



My Current Remedy for this:
Currently to stop the lag (And this actually works) I have to start moving my battleship, once I begin moving all the fighters fall in behind me like they would a fighter that is moving and return to their normal AI coding which is predictable for the server and doesn't cause latency issues.



Fixes that don't force players to 'move':
Remove Thrusters
Completely ReCode the entire AI Process


Removing thrusters is definately the easier, and lesser of two evils.


I'll be more than happy to answer any questions.




EDIT:
Part of the thruster lag issue (main part I forgot to mention) is the fact that when the NPCs do this repeatedly, they move large distances in an extremely short amount of time (When server is lagging and you see NPC's warp all over and you can't hit them, that is what this is) and not every server is capable of handling that kind of load. Hence why I believe their should be a option to enable or disable thrusters for NPC's for the server. Trust me, there will be alot more happy people, and if nothing changes they can just toggle the thrusters back on.

Also, this kind of patch can simply be done with a server side "HotFix" so client updating would not be neccessary. A new "Server Side" download would be uploaded titled:

Discovery 4.80 Latency HotFix

Oh, Trust me on this.

I own the server, and I've been performance-monitoring this.

I was in a melee with about 50 Molly ships, all using thrusters. Guess what" NO LAG!!!!!!!

So your reasoning isn't exactly accurate. May lag for you, but it doesn't happen here.

The problem is possibly with a bad download of the client and/or a bottleneck on the server. I don't know for sure what part of the server it is that is causing the bottleneck so I'm kinda flying blind on that. I will explain in another post.

The Thruster thing is just a pipe dream. THAT is accurate according to all the testing i have done against the server.

Wolfpack98,Aug 16 2006, 04:35 PM Wrote:Oh, Trust me on this.

I own the server, and I've been performance-monitoring this.

I was in a melee with about 50 Molly ships, all using thrusters.  Guess what"  NO LAG!!!!!!!

So your reasoning isn't exactly accurate.  May lag for you, but it doesn't happen here.

The problem is possibly with a bad download of the client and/or a bottleneck on the server.  I don't know for sure what part of the server it is that is causing the bottleneck so I'm kinda flying blind on that.  I will explain in another post.

The Thruster thing is just a pipe dream.  THAT is accurate according to all the testing i have done against the server.

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How many players were present turing your testing? 2 or more players present + that amount of NPC ships engaging a player character battleship and an already high server load (which is a good thing, because it means we are popular, which we are) Try testing again during peak hours. That's when I experienced the above mentioned. Also, like I mentioned before it isn't a cause for the lag, but fixing it could assist in reducing the lag. Hence the suggestion.