Omni-Trade needs help.

[______________Dkaarn]

I'm a pretty long time player (since late august 2001 with a few month-or-two breaks).

In that time I have seen the lag in certain key areas of the game change from good to bad, and bad to decent, dynamically.

Since 14.7 I have noticed a much longer load time when zoning to Omni-Trade than ever before, and this is since the moving of the grid terminal from the center park. It doesn't matter which way I zone to Trade be it from another zone (harrys, Ent, HQ, ICC), or from a backyard or store in Trade its self.

I'm not sure what has caused this extra load time, but makes having so many stores and mission areas for low level players in the zone, very frustrating.

I'd like to qualify by stating that many high traffic (and notoriously laggy) zones are easier to load currently than Trade. Newland City for example at 8pm EST the other evening loaded from "changing area" to "entering newland city" and to "green" in 5 seconds. Meanwhile at 2am EST Omni Trade took 45 seconds to load "entering omni-trade" and an additional 15 to achieve "green"... Something is not right!

Omni-Entertainment loads right next to the Bronto Burger and loads fine, so it isnt the people... Omni HQ has a lot of buildings and texture maps, so it isn't that.. Perhaps the scenery in the sky of Trade is causing an issue? I don't know.

I hope it gets looked in to.








PS: My system is not the problem

PPS: This is not a disgruntled post , just asking for Omni-Trade to be looked at.

PPPS: Do clanners experience similar problems in Athen? ( Omni-2, not the dust farm part of Athen.. )

PPPPS: Does anyone read PS's?

[Icedsun]

Having same problem, even character freezes while running around in trade, but also in BS and NLC...

[Nival]

if you look back you remember you could see you were zoning into a place i remember seeing "transfering" on the Credits it looks like funcom made it all to load before you can see anything now that might be the problem.

[Unit99]

Yes they added that exessive zone into Trade feature a while back. They also added the pause every two steps feture I guess so we wouldn't run across Trade to quickly. I've given up thinking fc employs people smart enough to fix things they break though. Just a few more months and the big boys come to town with a decent game to play.

[Toxinator]

Yep, they seemed to have nerfed trade =/

*sigh* please fix!

[cov186]

I'll add my voice to this.

For me, Omni-Trade is now a place to avoid. It's a shame since it has a great collection of shops at all QLs in close proximity.

The only way I've been able to survive in trade is to wait about three-five minutes after trying to enter. It takes about a minute or two to load, and then another minute or two for something to "catch up" ... otherwise, merely spinning in place freezes my computer for anywhere from a few seconds to never-never-land.

I've seen the same result on dial-up and DSL, both before and after a complete reformat of my computer (incidental, not due to this problem).

[______________Damian]

No, to have this many people (I hear it in game as well in ooc and all the other channels) its obviously a game issue and not all those sytems different people have..even if it was..maybe fixing the issue is a good idea if all those sytems have issues.

Another place i have extream rubber banding is when trying to run from the outpost to 8x8 (hackers)..crossing the river is almost a never ending bounce.

[secondkenlon]

Huh. I have very little problem as far as lag goes in O-Trade, and I'm certainly not on a super computer.
(PIII 600, Geforce 2 MX, 384 megs RAM, SB Live and Win XP).

One thing I did notice: I turned down hardware acceleration one notch on my audio and everything got much smoother. Creative's XP Live drivers SUCK.

[Toxinator]

Just got a new computer, and now i zone into trade in like less then a second.

[Nugget]

i can't even zone into trade without getting stuck in a LD loop

[______________Dkaarn]

Ah ha! You guys DONT read PS's! HAH!

Ok ,

I said it is not my system because I run a lot of ram (768), a 1.2 proc, and 128 ti 4600. I have absolutely no troubles at all anywhere at all in the entire world of AO except.................. Omni-trade.

So, it obviously is not the system, connection, ect ect ect Or it would manifest in Newland, Broken Shores, Missions, Bronto Burger Ent, and everyfickenwhere else. Been playing since a loooooong time ago, and it was never this bad.


Once again I restate: Omni-Trade Only. Nowhere else. Just Omni-Trade.. Capice`?

[_________Lord Jammer]

same here, its freezing even if there is noone else in Trade.
As soon as i walk about 5 meters south from the grid its freezing for 5-10 secs.

*BUMP* for old Bank & Grid in Trade
*BUMP* for longer zoning & smooth movement in Trade !

[__________Soulmartyr]

Ok, we all know Trade is having some probs.

Here's what I noticed over the course of a week.

The first day, I was playing between 3-4AM MST. I had no real problems when zoning into Trade, or out of Trade.

The second day, I was playing around 11AM. I zoned into Trade from ICC, but didn't have any real problems. The Trade Statue was packed with people! My my, the idea that too many folks near the whompa or grid terminal doesn't seem to hold true. What was unique (actually similar) about all the folks in Trade near the statue is that they were almost all members of 95th Rifles, which if you may notice, most members of the 95th Rifles where similar armor/equipment (hence, almost all the same textures are used).

Day three, around 10AM. I zoned into Trade via the whompa from ICC again. LAG LAG LAG! Or what appeared to be lag. I kept an eye on my ping, and it stayed around 90-100 green. Ok, so my connection isn't being bogged down, and the server is playing nice, so what gives? The difference I saw was that there were a ton of folks near the Trade Statue, which is no different from Day two, except for one thing. All the folks near the Trade Statue were mostly low level characters, a couple yalms and kodiaks, even a Manta (ooooo, pretty).

So what I have been able to ascertain from this is that, at least in my experience in this example, is that it was the overwhelming number of different textures needed for all the different armor/equipment that was being loaded (Day three).

The ping was good/green, and never changed. My theory is that this is a flaw in the memory management for textures being used. To support this, I always have a small monitor running in the background that will tell me how much system memory is being used vs. how much video memory is being used. What I noticed from my logs for day two and day three is that my video memory usage didn't change by a significant amount, but, the system memory jumped in usage by about 1326 kilobytes. This indicates to me that the graphics engine isn't taking full capability of the video card, and that somewhere in the engine where the determination of which type of memory is to be used for textures, the engine is being told to store some textures in the system memory, which is a bad programming mistake, especially in DirectX. The problem with this is that even if the textures are stored in the system memory, there is a lot of overhead that is performed because pointers and handles are going to be flung back and forth between the video card, northbridge, CPU, and the system memory. This wastes a lot of clock cycles! A properly designed engine shouldn't have this problem (but let's not forget who designed the engine).

The system I have running is the following:
1> Athlon XP 1800+
2> Corsair XMS PC2700 333MHz Memory
3> Asus A7V333 running the latest BIOS/VIA Drivers
4> Gainward Ti4200 128MB 4x AGP
5> Maxtor 80GB 7200 RPM ATA133 HD
6> Creative Labs 52x CDROM
7> CMEDIA 8738 6-Channel 5.1 Onboard Sound
8> Gigabit LAN NIC by 3COM
9> Creative Labs 5.1 Surround Sound Speakers

My system isn't exactly a speed demon when compared to a hardcore UT2003 system, but it is not average (at least for another 2 minutes when another advancement in technology is made).

Hope this overkill analysis/idea helps! (Of course, the odds of Cz using this info to improve the graphics engine is lower than my chance of never having to file income tax again!)

-Soulmartyr

[Dharshar]

The long Load time issue is present in ALL areas that house a large amount of people. This isn't just confined to Omni-1 Trade. Its the same in Athens, Tir, Tir County (Tir South Gate in particular), BS, Newland, Borealis (Believe it or not) and most other City areas reachable by Whompah nodes. So it isnt just you Omni's that have a problem. Its all of Rubi-Ka.

/Dharshar

[_________Lord Jammer]

Did you read my post ?
Trade was EMPTY (RK-3 )
Its ALWAYS freezing as soon as i proceed to the center.
Nothing like that in other zones.

Long loading times are not THAT bad, freezing sucks !

[Skyhigh]

Take me 15 sec to log in the game, each time i log a char in Omni-Trade is takes 3 minutes instead of 15 sec. Something is wrong with that zone.

[______________Dkaarn]

Originally posted by Dharshar
The long Load time issue is present in ALL areas that house a large amount of people. This isn't just confined to Omni-1 Trade. Its the same in Athens, Tir, Tir County (Tir South Gate in particular), BS, Newland, Borealis (Believe it or not) and most other City areas reachable by Whompah nodes. So it isnt just you Omni's that have a problem. Its all of Rubi-Ka.

/Dharshar

AGAIN I will state for the reading impared... I travel all over Rubika frequently, Omni-Trade is the ONLY area that exhibits this problem to this degree.

I zone to BS and Newland in no time at all at peak hours. However, Omni-Trade at very off hours still has a very long load time.