This is how we played the game

The game is almost impossible to run normally under high latency, 5-10 seconds after clicking the mouse to fire.

By the way, my network condition is better than 80% of Chinese players.

Just recorded:

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None of our Australian players, who all have considerable pings, are reporting any problems remotely close to being as severe as this. Do you think this is just due to something with the Great Firewall?

Looks like a serious out of sync due to high ping and packet loss, may be related to this:

As Flavien mentions those issues are now fixed. Why would you suffer ping or packet loss higher than Australian players? They are still having an enjoyable playing experience. As far as I’m aware the only difference between you and Australians, who are even further away from our server, is the Great Firewall.

The difference is stability and packet drops.

Look at his latency / ping on the top-left corner of the screen. It goes from 100 ms to 300 ms to 500 ms then back to 150, all very randomly. I assume this is caused by throttling of the firewall of china.

Australian players can play with 200 ms, but their connection is stable and ping does not suddenly change by ± 50% with heavy packet drops.

Later on in the video it seems a lot more stable. The first few stutters he has all seem to stem from frame spikes. (See frame graph later on). Once he is farther from the station it looks more stable with a ping around 300 and only occasional error corrections.

@Freeman were you taking screenshots while recording this?

There’s only so much the game can hide behind client prediction. The server is authoritative, so any desyncs due to packets loss etc… cause error correction, which cause spikes and an unsmooth experience. You’re not going to get a good network experience with a ping > 150 ms and heavy packet drops, no matter what.

One thing that could help a bit is changing the input packet buffer size. Default is 2, which was tuned for around 100 ms. You might want to increase it if you have a higher ping and more packet drops.

In-game in the chatbox type: “/SetInputBufferSize 5” -> change 5 into a value between 2 and 10

… and see if that improves your experience.

At some point I’ll make it dynamically adapt to the network conditions, but it’s a bit out of scope for now.

The delay when firing is normal, as it’s purely server-synchronized, there’s no client predicition here. 5 to 10 secs sounds a bit extreme, unless there was an exceptionnal lag spike. In theory, for most of the game it should be similar to your ping, like 200-300 ms. It should fell a bit laggy but not unplayable. If 5-10 seconds of latency is frequent, something weird might be going on. It shouldn’t be possible in even in theory.

It seems so, the stutters & latency jumps around appears when (after) I fast approach an entity or in a station, with supreme input lag, I can’t control the ship, the ship collided in the space station again and again. (5-10 seconds of latency only happens in this scenario.)
If I do nothing in space (later in the video). the ping & frame goes stable.

I may press the screenshots button when I bring up the debug menu.

Bumping this topic. I have made considerable improvements to the stability of the networking under heavy packet loss / throttling conditions. I’m using a small network tool called “Clumsy” to simulate heavy network conditions. I first tested the game with poor network conditions, but not unrealistic or that horrible, really. And to my surprise, the game did indeed behave very poorly ( ~300 ms ping average and 5% packet loss ).

After my improvements, I can now go up to 400 ms ping average and 15% packet loss, and the game is relatively playable. By “relatively” I mean that you don’t lose ship control as frequently as before ( it feels relatively smooth ), but turbo boost still causes small random loss of control. Firing is still unreliable, but vastly improved. I was actually able to dogfight in interceptor vs interceptor in such bad network conditions, but hitting is less accurate than in good conditions.

In any case, those improvements will be available in the next patch, planned for the next limited beta week-end ( early december ). Please give it a try and if possible, record another video similar to the OP, so that I can see if the game has become playable or not. Thanks.

PS.: in order to get a better idea of the real network conditions from within china, I would like to have a more accurate idea of the average ping as well as the packet loss. This isn’t possible to test on our server, but if you could give a try to some random servers in US East ( not even necessarily azure ), getting some numbers to refine the tests would be useful.

PS2.: the loss of connection should also be fixed in this patch.

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Great to know, and Thanks!

How can I do that? just using ping? or other tools I can use?

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