1.2 online play...

By _Purgespam on November 9, 2009 2:38:35 AM from

_Purgespam

Join Date 04/2009

Online play. We’ve requested changes to make MP smoother on “laggy” connections. That said, the best thing you guys can do is make sure “stuff” isn’t being downloaded in the background. Every time we investigate specific cases it turns out someone has Windows update downloading stuff on another machine in their house, has bit torrent going on or is streaming something via their Xbox or Play Station. Basically, Ping tells you response time but it doesn’t tell you whether something else is eating your bandwidth.

Are you kidding me? I've had games where everyone is US under 100 ping, no one is downloading anything, nothing running in background and the game has been laggy to shit. There really needs to be some demigod netcode optimization going on here, not this lazy kind of answer. There isn't even a change there.... just a poor excuse for bad p2p netcode.

good ping doesnt always equal good bandwidth.

I would say you need atleast 1Mbit upload free for a 8 player game to run perfectly smooth.

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I would say you need atleast 1Mbit upload free for a 8v8 game to run perfectly smooth.

I had no idea Demigod supported 16 players.

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Quoting Sevenix,

reply 1

good ping doesnt always equal good bandwidth.

I would say you need atleast 1Mbit upload free for a 8 player game to run perfectly smooth.

you are totally wrong. watch your traffic when playing demigod. you don't even need anything close to 1MBit, even not for 5vs5. and btw. since when does demigod allow 8vs8?

i agree with the op. it's like a face palm hearing such words. it's definetly not the case that in the most lagging situation someone is downloading stuff. up till now i convinced several players to install a network monitor just to watch what traffic they have.

such answers and "excuses" does not show they are taking it/us serious.

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There are several reasons why lags could occur.

Insufficient Upload Bandwidth and thus choking the connection every x seconds
Generally unstable connections, caused by a number of things (packets delayed by hardware firewalls, routers, ISP, etc. or packets to one player simply take longer every x seconds)
Other network related applications interfering (software firewalls, antivirus, and more)
And of course a too high ping between at least 2 players. (In theory "too high" is above 350 ms, though I have had games with players that had a ping to me of over 400 and it was smooth.)

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Quoting Spooky__,

reply 4

or packets to one player simply take longer every x seconds)

this is the reason in most cases and THIS is what a good network code has to adress and even out. but to be able to do so you need to have the knowledge why this occurse and more important HOW to compensate for it.

in a server/host architecture you usually ignore that, thus people with bad connections to the server simply avoid the server. but in a p2p architecture you need to take mesure tor esolve that. and it is possible, in a similar way like they did proxiing...

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It's more about stability than speed; consistant pings produce smooth gameplay, regardless of the MS involved. Even jumping between 50ms and 100ms for the duration of a match will produce bouts of lag. In the handful of cases I've helped with, the most common problem was simply hardware related, however it's not always the case. You can optimise the netcode as much as you want, if you don't have a stable connection, you're going to get lag.

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I really don't think there are this many people with unstable connections trying to run this game. For the amount of online games I play with lag, you're saying that a large percentage of online demigod players either have torrents running in the background, unstable connections, etc... I'm just not buying it that there are this many players with horrible connections/connection problems/running 7 torrents in the background/etc....

And to be honest, I've noticed that game ping/connection/speed in other games as well as demigod is only affected if I'm uploading via a torrent. If I'm just downloading with no upload bandwidth being taken, either off the web or a torrent, it doesn't affect my gaming connections at all. Just throwing that out there as well, I don't game with downloads running but when I have thats' what I've noticed.

I just think the problem here is the p2p netcode and the way it was written, probably very poorly optimized and probably requiring too large of a bandwidth stream. I don't think there are as many people playing demigod with unstable connections as you think, or as stardock thinks. It's obvious, at least to me, that the game is at fault here as well.

If they're on wireless, the game will lag probably. When I tried wireless, I had ping spiking and it couldn't keep up, so if there are a lot of players running wireless then that could be a problem.

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I really don't think there are this many people with unstable connections trying to run this game.

It's not always about players having an unstable connection in general. It's about each individual connection from every player to every other player.

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Quoting Purgespam,

reply 7

For the amount of online games I play with lag, you're saying that a large percentage of online demigod players either have torrents running in the background, unstable connections, etc...

The bulk of your games are probably not peer-to-peer. I play several different online games at any one time and the vast majority are hosted by company servers. Also, most of my games are lag free, but it's the laggy ones that I remember. Just taking some random numbers, but if every fourth game is laggy and I am playing 3v3, then 1 out 21 people in those games had something funky going on with their connection.

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THe P2P conneciton was a good idea at start but there are advantages at a client-server connection.

1 is that if someone lags, it will only hurt himself. (think FPS for example.) the lagger with teleport everywhere in the map while all the other players play fine.

With P2P 1 lagger and it "screw" everyone fun. (big or many little pause every 5 sec...)

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Quoting Purgespam,

reply 7

It's obvious, at least to me, that the game is at fault here as well.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The game's Networking code is solid. I play over Hamachi every night of the week, and my friends and I simply don't have laggy games. Period. Some of them are international players, as well. If the Networking code was at fault, even in part, then it would show up for us as well. Because of the nature of P2P and how it operates, you're simply going to see flaws in people's setup that weren't visible operating under a client/server situation. This is why client/server is used; it removes a lot of the little problems and flaws.

I wonder if people will still insult P2P and blame it for the woes of the world when Modern Warfare 2 comes out, being as they are running a P2P connection system and dumping client/server in a bid to combat piracy as well as a bid to operate under synched conditions; no more "I shot him and he didn't die" because his connection to the server was faster.

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I'm sorry but I've had games lag with my old premade who all had stable connections. It's not solid... lol. It was screwed up when the game came out and they've been patching it up since... have they gotten it to where it should be yet? They haven't...

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Quoting Purgespam,

reply 12

I'm sorry but I've had games lag with my old premade who all had stable connections.

Then your groups connections weren't stable.

Quoting Purgespam,

reply 12

It was screwed up when the game came out and they've been patching it up since... have they gotten it to where it should be yet? They haven't...

No, the third party connection network wasn't up to the task and basically imploded, which was corrected when Stardock created their own network to replace it during the launch month. Apart from the initial online optimisations that have taken place to decrease the bandwidth requirements, there have been little to no changes in the way of Network code - this is because there is nothing wrong with Demigod's Networking code.

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Lol you're such a douche man. My group all had stable connections.

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Thanks

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It never ceases to amaze me how many people blame a game for their own inadequate understanding of (in this case) networking. Zehdon and Spooky have it absolutely right.

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I fully understand how p2p networking works, and how other client/server games work.

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So, much of this debate seems to center on people's beliefs and people's beliefs on other people's beliefs. That is to say.

Player A believes his connection to other players is good.

Player B believes that Player A has a connection that isn't good enough.

To make any headway, I would suggest finding some tools that would measure bandwith. Demigods has relatively large demands for bandwith. Not only does it need fast connections, it needs reliable connections and lots of bandwith. It might be the case that Player A's connection is fast, but low capacity and somewhat unreliable. It might be that Demigod is using more bandwith than expected. It might be that Player A's connection is being capped by their ISP. It might be that Player A's router is poor at handling the large quantity of information being transfered. So, I reiterate, does anyone know of good (free) programs that can do stress tests on internet connections? Something that can test the connection with a large amount of information over an extended period of time? Such a program should provide much information on wherein the fault lies.

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i would suggest to watch the traffic demigod generates during gameplay. it does NOT have a large demand on bandwidth!

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Being in purge's "premade" i can vouch that we all have good connections, heck im running 5 mbits up on fiber. In a 5v5 game network traffic is minimal and didn't even use 10% of my connection (used a bandwidth monitor). All of the guys in the premade have at least 1 mbit up.

In Purge's defense there are definitely issues with networking, however in Stardock's defense (I believe they assisted in the rewrite of the netcode) there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

Even in the best case scenarioss, sub 100 pings and 1mbit+ bandwidth & stable connections there are still issues out there on the internets that cause lag. One thing that I have noticed in the real world that cause the most problems are cable connections. They are inherently unstable and dropped packets are a norm. I'm not a network architect so i dont know what the causes are and what the solutions can be but i know that it is certainly challenging to be able to compensate for that network behavious in a mere game.

My company had a DSL connection at 1 office and a cable connection at the other office, pings were great (sub 40ms) upload bandwidth was acceptable but the connection between the two sucked. We had to install a software package on our exchange server just to be able to keep the connection from dropping every minute (literally). The cause was the cable connection, the solution was to get off of cable.

So i don't know who is to blame, bad netcode? or netcode that could be improved for adjustment for packet loss? perhaps, cable connection stability issues? im sure that adds to the problems.

For this type of game (I forget what Frogboy called it, but this type of game versus a traditional RTS) some sort of client server set-up probably would have made a more enjoyable experience in regards to the gameplay & lag. But there there is the significant added cost of hosting the servers, who host them, how can they be mainained to prevent exploitation etc.

On other notes, wireless almost always lags.

COD MW2 is not using the same networking system that demigod uses. It's not true "peer to peer" it's still a client server relationship with a 'capable' host and wont use dedicated servers.

I wonder how well the MW2 system will work, but alas i wont find out. My ass still hurts from the rogering the Infinity Ward has given us PC gamers so this will be the first COD that I haven't purchased and played religously. (COD3 doesn't count)

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So, here's a suggestion:

For all those that run regular games with people and say their connections are 'good' or 'bad' and games are 'smooth' or 'laggy'; have everyone run this tool and copy the results. You'll have to each pick a server close to each other to get a good idea (not perfect) and then we'll have a record of 'something' to base our discussions on.

Also keep in mind that some ISPs, like Rogers, have a practice of 'cripling' P2P connections during off hours (over night). I'm not sure if DG would get picked up by that because its kind of a gray area practice, but it does happen and if you play late at night, then this could affect a normally 'good' connection.

For example.. here I am going to New York: (from http://speedtest.net)

Alternative:

Someone come up with a set of tools and a set of configs and we run that in the background as we're playing. when an issue occurs, we dump the files somewhere and we can point SD to them and now we have impirical evidence of what's going on from which we can make constructive steps forward.

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[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][/URL]

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1.2 online play...

_Purgespam