Lag and Broken Shores

[Ghandalf]

128MB graphic card
1024 DDR ram
2.0 GHZ P4
ISDN dialup

usually no lag anywhere except from when the servers are very busy.

[_________shaquaneeva]

Originally posted by Glarawyn / Lilredhot
System:

Why? Forming a team of 6 is hard enough. Forming a team of 6 that will last through more than one mission is near impossible. .....

Players don't like 400 mob missions.

she speaks wisdom! all designers should send her their leet dolls.

[Spluggorth]

Well nowdays BS is pretty empty, Teaming occurse elsewhere and lag is still pretty great at times.
yes i dont have a uber machine but other areas work just fine.

as a 3d Modeler and Texture artist this is what i have to say about BS.

Remove the bluish fancy pancy lightning comming from the ground lamps at certain points, This light shines on the textures making them more than Twice the load weight.
Edit the Textures used in BS,. they are way to heavy. sure they are nice but so is Tir and Tir isnt half that laggy even with a whole horde of people.

I guess i dont have to tell ya about polycount, but that doesnt seem to be the problem. As i see it the solution is:
Lightning ( dynamic? )
Texture weight. Number of Texture patches. REUSE as much as possible..to lessen load.
As it is today many people have to relog and reboot after entering their missions to clear memory since BS city of home itself is loaded within Memoryspots

[____________Kelloran]

BS is BS.... the water damn i hate the runing lag, when you think your over you get "warped" into the lake.

Cant you just drain the sea, and make Home a zone, so you dont get to load all the wilderness stuff to,
or make 2 grids, one exit inside the grid, but you end up in 2 random places in BS, since BS is all about geting to save and into the mission. I meen who the hell trade in that place, since when your in a trade and get LD its 99% chance of you losing the stuff, i have lost way to many uber backpacks becouse of LD trades.

[ntrox1]

I like 400 mob missions. I only tend to mission with guild teams, and the longer the mission (at high level) the more chance of a ding. I think it would be sensible to have smaller missions (100 mob) as saving is an issue in huge missions.

[toytd]

This is a major issue that I have experienced while soloing missions in BS:

When you are in a mission and have to zone out because of too many MOB's, and you don't line up with the door, for eg. exiting from the corner, you will get ....

shot, shot, shot, shot... music... Reclaim Term !! This is the same exact issue that was supposed to have been fixed awhile back.

This has happened to me almost everytime I don't line up with the door and have lost over 5mil of xp.

ARK had no clue what I was talking about cause they weren't around pre 13.X

Please have a look at this...

P4 1.4 - Geforce 3 64meg - 512 meg ram - Winxp Pro

[ntrox1]

A team of 4 guildies doing a mission in BS for XP, we were getting the crappy "lost teammate" graphics issues, lag damage, no-casting issues, pets not healing/attacking, you name it. Oh, and once you hit reclaim, it took about 3 minutes for screen control to resume.

No, PC is not slow, 512MB RAM, decent Athlon, decent GF3Ti500, ADSL. Same for the other 3.

BS sucks, always will. Horrendous lag at the grid exit, 2 minutes sometimes to resume control.

[FR23890]

BS lags really badly.
Near grid and near wompa even inside missions we get lots of invisible mobs.


Athlon XP1700+ 512Mo DDR 2700
gf4ti4400 128Mo
SB Live player
Cable 512/256

[_______________Dhuan]

QDI Mother Board, VIA chipset
ADM 1.25 ghz
1GB Ram,
20GB AT100 Hard drive,
ATI RADEON 7500
Windows ME.

Some information for you guys who are suffering from Lag issues….

Another element that seems to affect the performance of the game is the design of the client. I have run some tests on the AO client, as any good computer scientist would, and have come up with some strange results.

1)There appears to a memory leak. When you rezone your memory usage seems to increase. This is for only new zones, if you zone into an area you have already visited your usage remains constant. This indicates to me that certain constructs are not being cleared from memory between zones.

2)The client seems to render polygons on the fly, such that every time a building or other player comes into view the textures and polygons are re-rendered, this also seems to impact on memory usage as we would expect, however there is a HUGE inefficiency here as if the same player walks past your view any number of times the client seems to re-render the graphics from scratch, thus pounding the CUP time.

3)As each zone visited seems to create a legacy in your RAM why is it that each item, no matter how often encountered, is re-rendered by the client? I would have imagined such items to be stored and then re-used by the system.

These are observations and I may well be wrong. Texture heavy areas will cause slowdown but the degree of slowdown is what bothers me as it demonstrates there is an underlying problem with the way the client works.

Also, for those of you with ATI cards and Windows ME who are thinking of increasing their ram to 1GM. Please note that if you do upgrade you will need to address the VCACHE issue. Windows ME will steal all the memory and put it into its cache, thus leaving nothing for your AGP drivers to load into. This stops the graphics card from working properly. Please see the ATI website for instructions, unless of course Microsoft has fixed this little problem. This only seems to apply for RAM when it reaches 1GB and ATI, but may well effect other cards also.

Areas of lag in AO seem to be everywhere, and it has gotten worse I think for our European members. Given data load across the pond I would not be surprised if the lag was exacerbated by other traffic. Maybe AO could to some better load balancing or increase the throughput for the busy servers.

Hope this info helps.

----------------------------------
Live long and procrastinate.

[paperjockey]

I am running 1 gig and an ATI 9000 Pro 128.. does this problem happen in 2k also? I know anytime I go to BS/Home and go to a mission I usually LD now upon entering mission. No other zone does this to me. Also seems to not release memory and after awhile my entire game slows down.

[Belce]

I had lag trouble in Home when I was using a P3 1GHz, but when I upgraded to a P4 2.5Ghz with 512MB of Rdram it was just fine. My connection is dsl and I use WinXP for my OS and a Geforce 4600. What seems to be an issue is the system requirements for good performance here is well beyond what many want or can have.

[______________Ramzie]

Broken Shores, Clon****, 2h0, Avalon, Camelot. all give bad lag to me for some strange reason.

1.67mhz athelon processor
512mb DDR Ram
32mb SDR TNT2
DSL internet connection.

[_______________Vyker]

Broken Shores, 20k, 2h0, Camelot here.

1.4GHz AMD
1Gb Ram
128mb GeForce4 Ti4600
1.5/768 dsl connection

[Majikall]

I'm running the game on the following machine:

AMD XP2000+, 512Mb DDR, Geforce 3 Ti500, 5.1 Sound MB Integrated, Cable Modem.

The game runs pretty much fine at 1024x768x32 in a window, though I do think the graphics engine needs some serious work. I see no reason why I spend the first few seconds watching the surroundings being drawn, makes no sense whatsoever when you look at every other game on the market. Quake, Unreal, NOLF, Everquest, etc, you enter an area and the graphics are there, they shouldn't take time to draw.

The only problem I do have is when moving through an area and another player appears. Theres a sudden judder as it loads in their data and draws them on screen, before it starts moving normally again. This gets really bad when theres a lot of people suddenly appearing, sometimes the game stops for up to 5 seconds if theres a lot, before moving again. It might allow a slight move, perhaps that happens when its switching to another persons data, I don't know. Whatever it is, its horrible. Introduce your programmers to the word 'multi-tasking' please.

I'm with everyone else too, the area of Broken Shores - Home is very bad. The drawing thing I mentioned above takes a lot longer, because theres so much to draw. It runs fine after that, but as theres a lot of players in that area, moving around afterwards is also a pain.

All I can say is fix the graphics engine, that seems to be the major cause of the problems. When the juddering/drawing starts, my ping sometimes jumps up to 2000+ from a regular 100.

[___________Tyrathect]

Athalon 1.2 Ghz
Geforce 4 TI4200
512 MB of ram
133 HDD speed
SB Live!
Cable w/ cable router (not shure of the stats)
WinXP

I find lag in most high populated places, BS is bad when you zone in and in missions, mobs not dieing right away and poofing from one place to another, actions not happening etc.. Clon**** was bad, tho I have not gone back in a while. NL can be bad tho I think thats from so many people. 20K can be bad at times. Ent and traid have always been bad but thats mainly people I think.

I don't get mad at the lag in most cases cuz I play at full setings for everything and expect a bit of lag. Its a bit anoying to have lag in missions for no real reason that I can see other than maybe loading graphics for NPCs(?). The ones that get me are the ones that just 'happen' for no reason and stick around for a long time causing you to zone where you don't want to or the like.

- on a side note that I addressed in reply to another post (I think) was about graphic swaping and poly cout. I figured I could bring this idia up here tho I might be wrong if so I am sorry. How about holding a vote on some "defaults" for all the breeds. Using a raidious system you could load the "defaults" outside the range to still show that players are their but you can't see their equipment and styles etc. Perhaps even using grid tryangels for realy low end systems even further out? Maybe selective removeal of animations on characters outside a range? the "defaults" could just be the naked character look, and mark it as always loaded. Could help the client side out some anyway and let people see characters further out if they want.

Could use those 'defaults' before you draw the actual player when they pop into existance? As mentioned above.

[_______________Nikki]

I run a p3, 733, geforce4, on 56k (small town)

When I enter Home I always make sure to mute all channels and turn off all unnecessary graphical and text features. I also lower my settings to their minimums, except for of course character view and draw distance (because seeing nothing is not what I want either) those are at 10, and 5% or less.

Before the patch (14.7) I lagged there like something awful. Going in there with settings higher than I mentioned meant that I had no chance of movement. But it seemed to work okay with the settings that way... I mean, I could get to my missions. Something to note - mornings (10am EST//3pmGMT), the time when less people are online, seemed much better, which tells me that the problem is primarily the excess of people *who loiter* (or just lag to a standstill)

Anyway, since the patch, I have been subject to extended zoning attempts. I do not exaggerate when I say that every time I have tried to zone since the patch it has taken more than 15 minutes. Most of the time resulting in a crash! My FPS is ALWAYS less than 2, and I have yet to reach any destination via Home or in Home. Basically gridding to BS is suicide.

What can you do to fix Home? :
~ Add multiple (random exit) grid terminals in Home. More than 2, considering the BS population.
~ CHANGE the textures (especially the stone on the buildings) to something much more simple to render
~ Un-Clutter the place! E.g. Move the buildings farther apart, don't stack massive buildings sky high. That way there's less to draw in a concentrated area
~ Mute/Disable Nano Programs in the areas of the grids... multiple people chain-casting nano programs is a lot to render when zoning.
~ New weather report. No more storming period. It's not really a "nice touch" if it creates massive lag
~ Remove all mission terminals and banks (stores too if there are any). Features of the town that might give people a reason to loiter make it worse!

Of course, one more idea is to make it like the grid... simple, uniform textures. No unique armor or hairstyle or weird stone textures. man that would make me happy to see.

side note : I lag in Newland City too, but it's a different thing. freezing for 20 seconds at a time, rather than a difficulty in zoning/loading, or low FPS. My FPS in NLC is completely normal when I'm not frozen. I believe it may have something to do with the advertisements changing, in combination with the whompah's being so close to the center of town.

[_____________Jankkar]

Takes me 3-7 mins to grid or whompa into BS

[ntrox1]

BS is now quite fast for me. Combination of upgraded PC and less ppl in Home (due to NW and outdoor hunting XP).

[Floozi]

athlon 2600+
gig of pc3200 ddr ram
gf4 4600
isdn 128k

i rubberband in bs missions regulary also lag when moving outside the mission
have had 4 black door incidents since it was 'fixed'
i ld anytime i enter nlc if its busy

apart from that its not too bad

[Mortalbane]

athlon xp 2100
768MB 333MHZ ram
60 gig 7200 hd
Radeon 64 DDR vivo
Sound blaster live!
1Meg ADSL

Lag is terrible in missions, every time a door opens, the ground jitters. BS is bad as usual. Warping seems to have been added to the game recently. Zoning takes much much longer.