Question: Is it possible to build a lag free setup?

[eartling]

Just curious,

Is it possible to build a rig that won't lag at the bigger 50-100 ppl events,
like sand king or the arkadian events? Or are the servers lagging anyway,
no matter how a badass-computer you have?

100 avatars on radar and 60 fps would be sweet, instead of my 9 fps.

 

[Kimmi]

Just curious,

Is it possible to build a rig that won't lag at the bigger 50-100 ppl events,
like sand king or the arkadian events? Or are the servers lagging anyway,
no matter how a badass-computer you have?

100 avatars on radar and 60 fps would be sweet, instead of my 9 fps.

you mean... and then donate it to MA so they can run the game on it... so there is no lag

 

[eartling]

Lol, that would be an idea..

Don't you have a pretty mean setup Kimmi? SLI and whutnut?

 

[Kimmi]

Lol, that would be an idea..

Don't you have a pretty mean setup Kimmi? SLI and whutnut?

I gave up gaming rigs few years back. Not that it wasnt fun to play on, but in the end it ended up with building the rig and buying new components then the gaming aspect of it.

So I just went little lower in cost and size. This my new "rig" as of today.

https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...asy-to-swap-Intel-mobile-processor&highlight=

 

[eartling]

Pretty slick! Up and running yet?

 

[Magyar_Republic]

Just curious,

Is it possible to build a rig that won't lag at the bigger 50-100 ppl events,
like sand king or the arkadian events? Or are the servers lagging anyway,
no matter how a badass-computer you have?

100 avatars on radar and 60 fps would be sweet, instead of my 9 fps.

No, it is not possible. MMORPG's are not optimized for this sort of thing. Even in games like Darkfall, which were optimized for massive Guild vs Guild sieges, you will get lag.

Ultimately its not your system. Its a networking issue. Our current level of technology cannot address that.

@Kimmi

I'd be concerned with that system overheating while playing a graphic intensive game. Not that a 'gaming system' is the way to go, but thats a HTPC. Those cases are generally not optimized for heat displacement.

For reference: I have a similar setup, power consumption wise. AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE 95W, AMD Radeon 7770 HD. The rest is pretty basic, RAM, PSU, some fans, a DVD RW drive.

My case is a well ventilated LAN Box, by Thermaltake. Again no frills, but plenty of ventilation. I generally run at about 59C while gaming, which is just 3 degrees shy of max for this CPU. I use premium thermal compound and keep my system dust free.

A similar system in a "gaming" case will run at 31C.

Just trying to be helpful, in case you didnt consider this. Heaven knows I've gotten a system before I thought would be really slick, and then hated it for its performance under pressure.

 

[aridash]

Ultimately its not your system. Its a networking issue. Our current level of technology cannot address that.

its a system issue. passing the information for the location and a dozen data points for 100 ppl is a pretty small amount of data to transfer. however, loading 1000 models and bitmaps and drawing them out in realtime, is.

what one can do to minimise lag is to turn down some of the fancy effects*, you wouldnt notice many anyway in busy firefight - do you want high frame rate or stuttering between high quality? turning down anti-aliasing will help a great deal. building a rig obvisously go for fat GFX, probably SLI/crossfire. but for entropia you *need* SSD, i saw substantial improvements just upgrading to SSD.

(* dont recall which give the biggest wins, if you dont know what it does, its a good candidate )

 

[eartling]

Thanks for the reply guys! Not gonna upgrade yet, since i have a decent setup.
But it's always good to do some research before I start spending monies

 

[RobBuona]

its a system issue. passing the information for the location and a dozen data points for 100 ppl is a pretty small amount of data to transfer. however, loading 1000 models and bitmaps and drawing them out in realtime, is.

what one can do to minimise lag is to turn down some of the fancy effects*, you wouldnt notice many anyway in busy firefight - do you want high frame rate or stuttering between high quality? turning down anti-aliasing will help a great deal. building a rig obvisously go for fat GFX, probably SLI/crossfire. but for entropia you *need* SSD, i saw substantial improvements just upgrading to SSD.

(* dont recall which give the biggest wins, if you dont know what it does, its a good candidate )

I'm skeptical. I just made a huge upgrade on my graphics card - from HD 5850 to GTX 780 - and saw no increase in smoothness in EU. You may want to say it's due to some bottleneck, i.e. the fact that I haven't upgraded my CPU, but I've always heard EU performance is more dependent on the GPU than the CPU.

 

[Svarog]

its a system issue. passing the information for the location and a dozen data points for 100 ppl is a pretty small amount of data to transfer. however, loading 1000 models and bitmaps and drawing them out in realtime, is.
...
but for entropia you *need* SSD, i saw substantial improvements just upgrading to SSD.

It's not the amount of data but the speed of its passing through all the intermediate networks and amount of servers on that route and speed of their reaction.

I have no problems participating in arkadians or other mass events, also don't suffer from notorious DC (never) and CTD (perhaps 4-5 crashes last year during the Feffox event) and my setup is 6 years old Mac Pro with 4 years old GTX285 for video and 6 years old Seagate for HDD (not SSD) and all that works decently enough at 1920x1200@High - hell, I even watch 1080p movies on the second display during monotonous grinding runs

And why not? Cryengine2 is 7 years old itself, while even modern games, all these Bioshock Infinite and Mass Effect 3 and whatnot, worked for me without problem. So the only potential bottleneck is networking, but I have 100mbit fiber with 50ms ping and 4-5 hops to MA servers.

 

[forgo]

I actually only lag when the MA servers need to que something like auction or loot or something on that order.

Graphics wise my new laptop runs it all without issue at ultra settings. Ark events I got booted from a couple times due to what seems to be a memory leak in the client, aside from that no issues.

Alienware 18 i7 4800 2.7gz laptop -dual gforce 770m gfx cards. -32 gb

not a cheap setup, but ah well, Entropia helped paid for it.

 

[Kimmi]

@Kimmi

I'd be concerned with that system overheating while playing a graphic intensive game. Not that a 'gaming system' is the way to go, but thats a HTPC. Those cases are generally not optimized for heat displacement.

For reference: I have a similar setup, power consumption wise. AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE 95W, AMD Radeon 7770 HD. The rest is pretty basic, RAM, PSU, some fans, a DVD RW drive.

My case is a well ventilated LAN Box, by Thermaltake. Again no frills, but plenty of ventilation. I generally run at about 59C while gaming, which is just 3 degrees shy of max for this CPU. I use premium thermal compound and keep my system dust free.

A similar system in a "gaming" case will run at 31C.

Just trying to be helpful, in case you didnt consider this. Heaven knows I've gotten a system before I thought would be really slick, and then hated it for its performance under pressure.

ty for your concerns, been good for 2 years straight, going for 2 more years.

 

[aridash]

It's not the amount of data but the speed of its passing through all the intermediate networks and amount of servers on that route and speed of their reaction.
...

And why not? Cryengine2 is 7 years old itself, while even modern games, all these Bioshock Infinite and Mass Effect 3 and whatnot, worked for me without problem. So the only potential bottleneck is networking, but I have 100mbit fiber with 50ms ping and 4-5 hops to MA servers.

i'm confused by this post, you do have a problem or not? you're using a mac?

anyway, first point, the speed of data is a function of the amount. shifting 2Mbps you can get 15MB every minute or 900MB in an hour. thats a CD of data every hour. thats an awful lot of data. the intermediate networks might create a bottleneck, but generally they are big fat pipe and the points of congestion are the game server end and your isp to you (contention with other users). so it could be these factors.

however, your last point seems to prove that its not the network. other games have far few models and maps to dynamically load, and can do so far more predictivly.

 

[Svarog]

i'm confused by this post, you do have a problem or not? you're using a mac?

No problems at all. Yes, it's a mac but I have a Windows 7 partition for Entropia (and occasionally other games).

 

[Neil Stockton]

anyway, first point, the speed of data is a function of the amount. shifting 2Mbps you can get 15MB every minute or 900MB in an hour. thats a CD of data every hour. thats an awful lot of data. the intermediate networks might create a bottleneck, but generally they are big fat pipe and the points of congestion are the game server end and your isp to you (contention with other users). so it could be these factors.

however, your last point seems to prove that its not the network. other games have far few models and maps to dynamically load, and can do so far more predictivly.

For lag (loot, terminal, etc) at events the bottleneck is not your particular bandwidth or your own ping time. It's the fact that the server has to wait on 100 other connections to client programs scattered across the world before it can tally up who did x % of damage to this mob etc. And of course none of those clients is connected directly to the server... the info has to be passed on through a dozen servers on its way across the internet before it actually reaches the client. So everyone at the event is limited to the speed of the person with the slowest connection to the server. Also each time an avatar moves or shoots, all that info has to be communicated out to those 100 clients in "real time". It's kind of amazing that the server can actually keep up with it all as fast as it does.

 

[aridash]

...the info has to be passed on through a dozen servers on its way across the internet before it actually reaches the client. So everyone at the event is limited to the speed of the person with the slowest connection to the server. Also each time an avatar moves or shoots, all that info has to be communicated out to those 100 clients in "real time". It's kind of amazing that the server can actually keep up with it all as fast as it does.

i should discount the validity of this comment for saying that the info passes through "dozens of servers across the internet"... but i'd rather make the point that if it was distributed information thats the issue, everyone would always experience lag. this is not the case. i've happily been lag free while others dont, and see forgo's and other comments above. yes, loot lag is server side, yes there are some network impact. general FPS (being discussed here) is not due to you waiting for a hit to be be calculated and transfered.

tl;dr - get a SSD.

 

[Neil Stockton]

i should discount the validity of this comment for saying that the info passes through "dozens of servers across the internet"... but i'd rather make the point that if it was distributed information thats the issue, everyone would always experience lag. this is not the case. i've happily been lag free while others dont, and see forgo's and other comments above. yes, loot lag is server side, yes there are some network impact. general FPS (being discussed here) is not due to you waiting for a hit to be be calculated and transfered.

tl;dr - get a SSD.

I said a DOZEN, not DOZENS, and if you notice, I was NOT talking about frames per second lag. Sheesh!

 

[kingofaces]

tl;dr - get a SSD.

I'm just curious, but how would this help things exactly? Loading maps, game startup, etc. would be helped out a bit, but I was always under the impression that once things were loaded you aren't particularly using your hard drive that much. Maybe I'm wrong though.

 

[Magyar_Republic]

i should discount the validity of this comment for saying that the info passes through "dozens of servers across the internet"... but i'd rather make the point that if it was distributed information thats the issue, everyone would always experience lag. this is not the case. i've happily been lag free while others dont, and see forgo's and other comments above. yes, loot lag is server side, yes there are some network impact. general FPS (being discussed here) is not due to you waiting for a hit to be be calculated and transfered.

tl;dr - get a SSD.

Incorrect. See the picture below.

 

[aridash]

Incorrect. See the picture below.

you've just listed a series of routers, and for some odd reason decided they are servers. servers are end points, the only server there is possibly the gateway ( if a proxy server, though it more likley a router). the other end will be a load balancer or such like device, google isnt presenting servers nakid on the public internet.

I'm just curious, but how would this help things exactly? Loading maps, game startup, etc. would be helped out a bit, but I was always under the impression that once things were loaded you aren't particularly using your hard drive that much. Maybe I'm wrong though.

generally yeah, but EU has alot of stuff to load, and do so dynamically. often i get laggy when i tp into an area, but after few seconds its fine. try this by tp-ing round lots of places one after other, after a half dozen you'l see lag increasing and probably get virtual memory errors.

 

[Magyar_Republic]

you've just listed a series of routers, and for some odd reason decided they are servers. servers are end points, the only server there is possibly the gateway ( if a proxy server, though it more likley a router). the other end will be a load balancer or such like device, google isnt presenting servers nakid on the public internet.

Well I decided they are servers because the hop outside of any single hard wired facility is not just some Cisco box sitting on a flagpole. It is a real, physical facility where network traffic arrives and is redirected using a multitude of different hardware and software tools, of which a local server is generally one of them. Labeling this a router and dismissing it is completely wrong. If my nomenclature offends you, well, tough luck. At least I didnt advise the fellow to get an SSD to cure internet lag.

For the record, the gateway is my cable modem. Definitely not a server. The next hop on that chain definitely is a datacenter though. Lots of servers there helping to manage the traffic.

 

[aridash]

If my nomenclature offends you, well, tough luck. At least I didnt advise the fellow to get an SSD to cure internet lag.

i wasnt suggesting SSD cures internet lag, i was suggesting internet lag isnt the main problem in EU and SSD will cure the graphics lag we do get alot of with high populations.

sorry, but your nomenclature is plain wrong. servers by definition serve, providing a service. routers route. they are dedicated to getting data forwarded as fast as possible, while a server will process and respond to the client. two very different roles.

 

[Svarog]

routers route. they are dedicated to getting data forwarded as fast as possible,

Yes, and "fast" doesn't happen if there's a great latency at each hop. Say, there are 20 hops between you and MA servers with 250+ ms latency at most of them (and for many Americans, not to mention Aussies, there are much more, with much more latency) - that's over 10 seconds for the signal to go there and back, and that's your lag. You press a key and wait for 10 seconds for the result (in reality, the game client tries to extrapolate the lacking data, causing rubberbanding and all kinds of visual glitches).

Above I described my ancient hardware-wise but lag free, thanks to low latency networking, system but you brushed it off as not fitting to your belief

 

[aridash]

Yes, and "fast" doesn't happen if there's a great latency at each hop. Say, there are 20 hops between you and MA servers with 250+ ms latency at most of them (and for many Americans, not to mention Aussies, there are much more, with much more latency) - that's over 10 seconds for the signal to go there and back, and that's your lag.

ok, common mis-understanding. the latency is round trip to each hop, its *not* cumulative. try this: tracert to a server and note the times. then ping to the same server. the ping will be the same, give or take a bit, as the *last* hop shown on the tracert.

 

[Svarog]

ok, common mis-understanding. the latency is round trip to each hop, its *not* cumulative.

Ok, you're right. Still, even 300ms vs 50ms makes a big difference when there are hundreds of avatars and mobs run around you and the server tries to update your client on their locations and actions.