Politician Archive

Thread: Terrain and City Lag

DarrenBlackhawk
Wed Jan 28, 2004 8:22 am
#1


I'm putting this here because I'm not sure where else to put it.


I have two very important problems with player cities right now:
1) The lag in the player cities increases seemingly on a logarithmic scale as more structures are added. The loading of these structures seems to take up a good 20 or more seconds. Also, which is the most important, when structures are loaded, say a factory, the radial menus can take even 30 seconds to allow use. Another indication of exceeding lag is the 5 second delay when chatting thru spatial. Another issue related to this is that many times, while inside a player city, other people will disappear off my screen and the only way to fix it is to fully relog.


2) What is the reasoning behind not allowing structures to build easily on terrain. Right now you have to have almost near flat land to build anything larger than a small house. If you want to compare it to real life, this doesn't make sense. Dirt is shifted around to build structures on all types of terrain here on earth. I see it every day where I live. Why then, can this not follow true in the Star Wars Universe? Sure you shouldn't be building (at least easily) on the sides of mountains, but there has to be a threshold of what is considered a mountain. Rolling hills is not a mountain and still I cannot place medium or large houses on them. Why is it not possible to dynamically change the landscape as necessary to accomodate the building of structures? The developers stated that they were making structure building more lenient in terms of terrain, but I have yet to see any shred of leniency.



If this looks to be a rant, it's not. I think the player cities work real well all around, other than these two major issues. I would offer some constructive advice if this were a game mechanic. It's not, these are system/programming level issues, not a high level concept issue. Therefore since I do not know how the systems are setup I cannot offer any advice other than to make it possible to build on most types of terrain and find some way to load player cities faster. The major cities seem to load fairly quickly, at least when compared to player cities.


Thanks for reading this far.



Col. Darren Blackhawk

AmythestGH
Wed Jan 28, 2004 8:56 am
#2

I completely agree. A few patches ago, building on less-than-flat terrain was supposed to be taken care of. I believe it took care of the issue of building over small potholes in the ground, but it did not take care of building over shallow rolling hills. I have seen houses placed on crazy mountainous terrain, but for some reason you cannot place anything larger than a small house on a slightly rolling hill? This really doesn't make any sense. We moved our city FROM a mountainous area on Tatooine TO a flat area on Dantooine because of this very reason. We thought we'd be able to build in a nice neat grid, and have a pretty little city, but we didn't anticipate not being able to build large houses on a slight hill.


The lag issue I agree with too. I know there will always be lag on the servers, bla bla bla, but it is a little crazy to have insanely laggy spatial chat, crafting, and disappearing city members while I am in the city.


And don't try to tell me this is a server boundary issue either. I dealth with server boundary issues in our previous city on a minute-by-minute basis. This is just pure lag.





* Amythest *
~Elder Creature Handler, N00b Jedi~
aazatgrabya
Wed Jan 28, 2004 10:44 am
#3

Darren,


I completely agree with your second point. Camps seem to level ground perfectly well, so why can't smei-permenant structures like houses? Perhaps it's something to do with the terrain engine? Perhaps we can get some feedback on this Devs?


As to your second point, I have never found issues like your 30 second delay to the radial menu on Shadowfire (A US server which I log on to from the UK). My ping regularly settles around 168 or so, perhaps you have a connection issue with your ISP. You could check you speed with the net using one of the many on-line speed test sites. To be honest, I do see lag within busy, highly populated cities. Though not necessarily player created ones. But nothing more than say a 2 or 3 second delay in my radial menu for instance. I don't mean to brag, just to offer a suggestion that may well remedy your problem.


DarrenBlackhawk
Wed Jan 28, 2004 11:14 am
#4






aazatgrabya wrote:

Darren,


I completely agree with your second point. Camps seem to level ground perfectly well, so why can't smei-permenant structures like houses? Perhaps it's something to do with the terrain engine? Perhaps we can get some feedback on this Devs?


As to your second point, I have never found issues like your 30 second delay to the radial menu on Shadowfire (A US server which I log on to from the UK). My ping regularly settles around 168 or so, perhaps you have a connection issue with your ISP. You could check you speed with the net using one of the many on-line speed test sites. To be honest, I do see lag within busy, highly populated cities. Though not necessarily player created ones. But nothing more than say a 2 or 3 second delay in my radial menu for instance. I don't mean to brag, just to offer a suggestion that may well remedy your problem.









Thanks for the suggestion. I am on DSL at the moment. 1.5 Mbit/256 kbit connection and consistently have a 70 ms ping. My service provider is not the issue and the reason I believe this is because I'm not the only one who sees this happen. One of the reasons we moved our city was to try to alleviate this lag. There was no lag when we had a few structures in the city, but as it grew and is still growing it is increasing.


Also, our city is on Dantooine and if you or anyone else has been out there lately, Dantooine is suffering from more lag than ever before. I'm talking 1fps simply to load the mining outpost and it takes about 5-10 seconds to load. My system isn't the problem because I don't have any of these major lag issues elsewhere in the galaxy (plus I have a pretty high-end system). Sure Coronet and Theed are laggy, but most every other major city is fine. I consistently run at 20-29 fps depending on the location, even when on a vehicle.


If I was the only one seeing this I would dismiss it as something on my end or my ISPs end. If only one other person was agreeing with me I would dismiss it the same way as coincidence. But multiple people have agreed with me concerning player city lag. So I tend to believe it. Thanks again for the suggestions.




Col. Darren Blackhawk

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