Shroud dps lag test.

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Originally Posted by Yuhjn

You appear to be claiming this is network lag? I dont think so.

there is lag where you're literrally a few seconds behind everyone else. Imagine a pipe between turbine and your computer which UDP packets go down - each packet containing 1 piece of information such as '10 pts of holy damage' or '0 points of acid damage'. The pipe gets blocked on some people's net connections (unknown reason, perhaps bandwidth - since I don't get it personally) and they end up being delayed.

The same thing happens when you are disconnected from the server momentarily and then reconnect (e.g. to simulate this at home unplug your internet and plug it back in, this only works if you have a static IP address - if you reconnect on a different IP then you get disconnected from the server, also only works if the host running DDO is unaware of the disconnect so unplugging network from PC won't work) you will find the action going at hyperspeed catching up to real time as all the packets come down the pipe.

Reducing the number of packets that have to be sent down the pipe - e.g. using damage coalescing such as making all effects on a weapon go in one packet, will make this less likely to happen, I can assume that's what Phax and his crew have already done?

Purely speculating here, YMMV - but this is what I've seen myself.

I think using plain transmuting will reduce lag only because there are fewer weapon effects being transmitted but I have yet to persuade my friends to run this

Garth

[SableShadow]

Originally Posted by willphase

the The pipe gets blocked on some people's net connections (unknown reason, perhaps bandwidth

It seems extremely (as in never happen) unlikely that simple text, in the quantities we're talking about, would take up all the bandwidth on a high speed connection...or even a dialup.

I lean toward "something else going on".

Side question: You never see DPS Lag on your system?

[Phax]

Hey all,

Quick update. First, thanks for all your contributions to this thread and for taking the initiative to test this stuff! It did help.

After some more internal testing yesterday we're pretty confident we've located the issue as a graphics problem on the client (likely with particle effects).

I'll try and keep you informed as things progressed.

Thanks again!

[Zenako]

Originally Posted by Phax

Hey all,

Quick update. First, thanks for all your contributions to this thread and for taking the initiative to test this stuff! It did help.

After some more internal testing yesterday we're pretty confident we've located the issue as a graphics problem on the client (likely with particle effects).

I'll try and keep you informed as things progressed.

Thanks again!

Thank makes some sense given that the degree to which it affects people seems to vary, so something client side would be FAR more likely to be variable than anything server side would be.

[BlueBadger]

Originally Posted by Phax

Hey all,

Quick update. First, thanks for all your contributions to this thread and for taking the initiative to test this stuff! It did help.

After some more internal testing yesterday we're pretty confident we've located the issue as a graphics problem on the client (likely with particle effects).

I'll try and keep you informed as things progressed.

Thanks again!

cool, so I was sorta on the right track with thinking it's more of a client side problem....

so what you're saying is that if I'm healing in shroud part 4, I'm better off to just face the wall so I don't have to draw any crazy particle effects or anything and I shouldn't have any lag when I just watch health bars and keep people alive?

[Newtons_Apple]

Originally Posted by BlueBadger

cool, so I was sorta on the right track with thinking it's more of a client side problem....

so what you're saying is that if I'm healing in shroud part 4, I'm better off to just face the wall so I don't have to draw any crazy particle effects or anything and I shouldn't have any lag when I just watch health bars and keep people alive?

Interesting thought...

[Phax]

Originally Posted by BlueBadger

cool, so I was sorta on the right track with thinking it's more of a client side problem....

so what you're saying is that if I'm healing in shroud part 4, I'm better off to just face the wall so I don't have to draw any crazy particle effects or anything and I shouldn't have any lag when I just watch health bars and keep people alive?

We're still not 100% on this but I think it's worth a try.

[BlackSteel]

I've noticed that alot already on my cleric, the amount of lag I get in part 4 is dependent on how far away from the action I am.

But then again I'm not playing with alot of the higher graphic funtions enabled, so the my pc only starts to draw alot of stuff when its practically on me. I didnt even know there was distant scenery in the Vale until looking at other peoples screenshots

[SableShadow]

Originally Posted by Phax

We're still not 100% on this but I think it's worth a try.

Shouldn't just cranking down the graphics settings do something extremely similar? That's the classic gamer response to "too many particle effects"...unless the cause is a setting we don't have access to.

[Phax]

Originally Posted by SableShadow

Shouldn't just cranking down the graphics settings do something extremely similar? That's the classic gamer response to "too many particle effects"...unless the cause is a setting we don't have access to.

Yes, it should help, but I don't think it'll help enough. From my very limited testing, even on the lowest settings (Very Low) while it improved (~10fps), I was still in lagville during the intense parts. I can only imagine what people with less impressive specs see.

[SableShadow]

Originally Posted by Phax

Yes, it should help, but I don't think it'll help enough. From my very limited testing, even on the lowest settings (Very Low) while it improved (~10fps), I was still in lagville during the intense parts. I can only imagine what people with less impressive specs see.

Thanks!

"You must spread rep around some more yadda yadda".

[RTN]

Originally Posted by Phax

After some more internal testing yesterday we're pretty confident we've located the issue as a graphics problem on the client (likely with particle effects).

Maybe this is the time for me to repeat my request for the ability to turn off all the fancy visual weapon effects. You're talking about the stuff coming off the weapons, right? I've always thought the weapon graphics seen while climbing a ladder or swimming (i.e., the effect on the blade itself) look the best and would probably reduce the graphics overhead. I'd love for the option to turn off the graphical effects coming off weapons.

[Big-Dex]

Originally Posted by Phax

Yes, it should help, but I don't think it'll help enough. From my very limited testing, even on the lowest settings (Very Low) while it improved (~10fps), I was still in lagville during the intense parts. I can only imagine what people with less impressive specs see.

Thanks for the feedback Phax.

While I can see the reality of client side LAG here, I find it difficult to believe that is all that is going on. My system is not state of the art, but it is well above and beyond the average system and so are the systems of many of my guildees.

What kind of FPS should someone be pulling in order not to see LAG here???

Dex was here.

[Zenako]

Originally Posted by Phax

Yes, it should help, but I don't think it'll help enough. From my very limited testing, even on the lowest settings (Very Low) while it improved (~10fps), I was still in lagville during the intense parts. I can only imagine what people with less impressive specs see.

Thats it, I am sure any number of users have "ahem" vintage systems that could be used to see how "lees than impressive specs" perform under load...

Some of the worst cases I have seen mean that improving by 10 fps would now mean they see an 11 fps display which is still almost unplayable

[Lucian_Navarro]

This "LAG" is a tricky beast...

I have a "Main" who is well outfitted and I get lag everytime.

I have "Alts", one of which never gets lag and the others sometime gets lag but never as bad as my main.

So I know from my situation that it is Not Computer Hardware or Internet Connection because I use the same each time.

My "Hypothesys" is that I must be an item(s) I am wearing/weilding causing the slowdown.

[Big-Dex]

On second thought, it might not be the a player's computer system that is the problem, so much as the way the client actually handles the information it is decoding coming from the servers, particularly regarding particle effects.

The reason I say this is because buying a bigger/badder system has not eliminated the LAG for folks. I know this for certain.

Dex was here.

[Scribbler]

Originally Posted by BlueBadger

so what you're saying is that if I'm healing in shroud part 4, I'm better off to just face the wall so I don't have to draw any crazy particle effects or anything and I shouldn't have any lag when I just watch health bars and keep people alive?

Because it's possible for a player to spin 180 degrees with an instantaneous flick of the mouse, 3d game software generally has to do most of the work of updating particle effects regardless of if you are facing towards them, just to be ready for the possibility that you'll look over there.

[SableShadow]

Originally Posted by BlueBadger

cool, so I was sorta on the right track with thinking it's more of a client side problem....

so what you're saying is that if I'm healing in shroud part 4, I'm better off to just face the wall so I don't have to draw any crazy particle effects or anything and I shouldn't have any lag when I just watch health bars and keep people alive?

"Never turn your back on the ocean."

[akla_thornfist]

Originally Posted by Phax

Hey all,

Quick update. First, thanks for all your contributions to this thread and for taking the initiative to test this stuff! It did help.

After some more internal testing yesterday we're pretty confident we've located the issue as a graphics problem on the client (likely with particle effects).

I'll try and keep you informed as things progressed.

Thanks again!

i dont believe its client side lag because ive tried differant settings in the shroud a few months ago, i started at high res got lots of dps lag in part 4 then went to medium next run and it was the same and for the last run i went to very low didnt help a bit. maybe its part of the problem but not the core.

[Jastron]

Last year, while trying to debug it on the live servers, I tried restricting my bandwidth down using the settings in DDO. That certainly made the problem much worse when limited to say 64 KB, and I only noticed that in the Shroud, not in normal quests. So you may also want to look into how much data is being moved between client and server in the Shroud. Haven't tested this on Lamannia yet.