[General] - Desync: Questions and maybe discussion

[Yoyoto]

Bug Submission:

Category: General

Issue Title: Desync: Questions and maybe discussion

Issue Description: I might be better off putting this in general discussion and if so I apologise for submitting it as a bug...

After quick run through of the first 5 pages on the bug tracker didn't bring up anything for "Sync" so I thought I'd try to discuss my experience with desync and maybe get some insight into the cause of it.

NOTE: I don't want it to seem like I'm complaining about it or not expecting things like this, I just want to have a better grasp of what is causing my lag. I understand this is a beta and things like this should be expected. We've changed our playstyle to be able to handle the desync (I like to think of it as a lovely addition to the pretty low difficulty level of the current build)

Steps to Reproduce: I've noticed my dsync happens most often when there are a large amount of enemies on screen. Most frequently when we go to take down 2+ tier 3 spider nests, or hang out with a pack of beefalo... This makes sense in my mind because pathfinding etc for multiple enemies would probably cause some issues.

When there's several items on the ground, especially after death I assume because so many items are dropped in a small area? Anyone else experiencing this one?

The big one... Meteors... If me or my partner walk into an area with meteors it becomes almost impossible for me to move, even if I'm miles away and it's just he (The host) running through. This makes logical sense to me considering the previous 2 instances we've dealt with... Large amounts of rocks etc on the ground as well as meteor "Entities"

I guess my main reason for posting this however is to find out if other people are experiencing this... since my buddy has an absolute piece of manure computer and it might simply be he can't handle rendering these things as quickly as I (the client) am able to? Or it could be his inconsistent internet.

[Yoyoto]

After some more testing it seems that it's mainly his computer. When I hosted we didn't have many desync problems... however we were unable to find meteors. 

[rezecib]

Yeah, the quality of the hosting computer is definitely the biggest impact on lag right now. The details on that, though, I'm a little unsure of-- I have a good processor (quad, 4ghz), but don't seem to be a great host. It might be that I'm running on integrated graphics at the moment, so I'll try to get a comparison when I finally replace my dead graphics card...

 

But yes, players being near things that have significantly different activity levels when awake vs asleep (game engine terminology, things are awake if a player is near) will definitely slow stuff down. Anything with a brain has a huge difference in activity when awake vs asleep, and meteors definitely have a difference, but I'm not sure how much it actually is. Other things that would probably induce slowdowns... walls, anything that involves detecting collision with lots of separate entities.

 

 

Edit: Tried the suggestion of running with a smaller window. It doesn't seem to help noticeably, but it might just be because my maze server has too much stuff going on.

[Yoyoto]

It really just seemed to turn out that he was a massively awful host since we haven't really had any issues since (Well except the time I spawned 500 taffy since he was whining that I kept draining his sanity) so I guess now I'm more curious how other people are finding the desync.

 

You're the maze server right? I didn't have any issues when I was messing around there.

[bizziboi]

@rezecib

 

>>It might be that I'm running on integrated graphics at the moment,

 

You can partially check if this is a source of the problem by running with the smallest window possible and see if your host improves. Integrated graphics cards tend to have fairly lousy fillrate. 

 

Not suggesting this as a solution of course, merely as a way to see if fillrate is your issue.