[Gameplay] - Elapsed Connection Time

[AgentNoodles]

Bug Submission: <br /><br />Category: Gameplay<br />Issue Title: Elapsed Connection Time<br />Issue Description: As the game progresses (even with only one other person), the "elapsed connection time" increases, causing the guest of the server to be multiple days behind the host. The guest also ends up having limited movement, occasionally jumping back and forth between a normal destination and wherever the host is. Before these often long periods of immobility, the guest also has delayed actions (probably relative to the elapsed connection time). <br />Steps to Reproduce: Simply connect to an endless server with a password (two players), although the details may be irrelevant to the situation. The elapsed time increases even before the guest chooses their character. <br />

[rezecib]

@AgentNoodles, You're talking about two separate things. The first is the day count; there are actually two types of Day Count in DST; one for the world, which you see by mousing over the clock, and one for each player, which you see normally. Most things go off server day, but some things (like number of hounds) go off of how long a given player has survived.

 

The second thing is lag. This is caused by a number of factors, but in DST there's a very significant component of lag caused by the server computer just not being fast enough. So if the person with the better computer hosts, the clients should have less lag. The snapping back to a previous location is a product of lag, usually called "rubberbanding". It's caused by action prediction, which is where clients try to smooth out the information from the server by showing what it predicts to be happening there, rather than waiting to hear back from the server. If lag is irregular, this can result in desychronization, where the player position on the client is significantly different from the position on the server-- when it gets too far, the server says "whoa, dude, you're actually way over there"-- and that's rubberbanding.

 

If you prefer, you can turn off action prediction by entering this on the console (exactly this, don't substitute "ThePlayer"):

ThePlayer:EnableMovementPrediction(false)

This will show you where your character is according to what the game heard last from the server, rather than having it smoothed out. This essentially replaces rubberbanding with visual delay, and sometimes a little choppiness, but personally I prefer it.