View Full Version : Why are we experiencing game stopping lag in an old game that uses low polygon count.
fatherpirate
10-11-2015, 08:05 PM
Skip all the 'you just need to do this or that ****'.
My machine is sweet, I play SEVERAL mmo's and even WILDSTAR with a huge drop and going F2P for the first time has a fraction of the lag DDO has. with 'currently' far more players online.
Time to stop milking the cash cow and reinvest in the game.
Your servers are ****
game graphic quality, to include polygon figures were ok in the day but are now ****.
It pains me to play a game with such low quality graphics that somehow finds a way to have huge lag spikes and generally high lag conditions.
Do you do any maintenance at all?
I like D+D, but I hate poor quality versions of it.
Get your house in order.
HastyPudding
10-11-2015, 08:34 PM
Lack of optimization server-side, I'm guessing.
Also, the whole D20 system is probably a computing nightmare just due to the sheer quantity of information coming in with even a single swipe of a weapon; attack speed, weapon procs, stacking stat types, critical multipliers, critical range, attack confirmations, AC rolls, dodge rolls, incorporeal rolls, etc etc etc. And not just one player, it's sometimes up to a dozen people in one instance.
UurlockYgmeov
10-11-2015, 08:36 PM
FYI - new servers (brand spanking new) coming later in November (ish). This is a definite because they are moving data centers. :cool:
dontmater
10-11-2015, 10:51 PM
keep inmind they keep on adding direct x stuff, and my guess is they aren't optimized direct x stuff
dunklezhan
10-12-2015, 03:41 AM
FYI - new servers (brand spanking new) coming later in November (ish). This is a definite because they are moving data centers. :cool:
Not going to help much if the code is wonky. Our infrastructure guys keep telling our devs that but no, chuck more memory and processor power at it. Odd how it never works for very long.
/sigh.
I certainly hope the data centre shift helps with any hardware related lag (network connectivity and IOPs), but if the code is truly as messy as rumour has it, then it won't make a huge amount of difference to any lag that side of things.
Still, I take exception to the OPs point. The only game I know of to keep getting GFX overhauls to bring it up to modern standards is WoW. And they have meeellions of subscribers feeding the beast.
I still think the DDO graphics look good. Good compared to modern games? No. But if it looked good in 06 you can't say it doesn't look good now (and vice versa)*. It just doesn't look as good comparitively. If you look closely you spot old-school issues, like character hands, but the scenery and lighting is really very nice especially in newer content - which will be a question of the art resources in use. Think of the scale of the work to go back and revisit all the old resources, then think of how they're having to trickle out the balance pass. A GFX overhaul is completely out of the question.So I dont' buy this 'DDO doesn't look good' stuff. Its not true. People are just spoiled by things like Elder Scrolls and brand new games built on brand new engines. The game is nine years old and was in development several years before that. What exactly do you expect Turbine to do about the games looks? They'd have to essentially build DDO2. Which I'd love, but realistically not going to happen.
However, I would agree that I would personally like to see more time being put into bug fixes and optimisation than new content and needless class/race additions like warlocks or gnomes.
*like fashion, or special effects. I don't care what decade we're in for example, flares look ridiculous and always have. Or let's take the CGI of Terminator 2- this did not look good when it came out, it is and was awful, I said so at the time and I was only about 14 I think. But it did look better than the last CGI movie attempt which was The Last Starfighter or Tron, and the non-CGI effects were brilliant so everyone said it was amazing. IMO CGI didn't get 'good' till the matrix and then LOTR. Yet Star Trek Nect Gen and Babylon 5 (after season 3 and 2, respectively), did look good, despite poor CGI, because they looked good where it counted and their style shone through. DDO looks fine. Manage your expectations better on that front (but not the lag front, that is something Turbine are clearly aware of and working on as best they can with the resources they have).
FYI - new servers (brand spanking new) coming later in November (ish). This is a definite because they are moving data centers. :cool:
Fixing software issues by throwing better hardware at it, is never a good idea. But depending on how old their current hardware is, whatever helps.
Darkmits
10-12-2015, 03:56 AM
Because polygon count doesn't have anything to do with latency. It's the spaggheti code that's the problem. Also, good graphics don't mean a game is good.
nibel
10-12-2015, 04:18 AM
It pains me to play a game with such low quality graphics that somehow finds a way to have huge lag spikes and generally high lag conditions.
Hint: The server do not care much about the game graphics. That is mostly on your side (eg, that awful lake on Black Loch, or pink haze on WGU). What matter for the server is the data packages, and that is another unrelated beast that tends to grow more complex as the game gets more data.
Just a little hint, compared to the game at launch, those are the little things that the server didn't had to care about before F2P, and have to care about now:
Doublestrike/Doubleshot
Melee Power/Ranged Power
Off-hand strike chance
Hundreds of conditional enhancements running full time (Defensive Stance, Killer, Thrill of the Hunt, Ninja Spy poison, Swashbuckling, Eldritch Aura, etc)
Changes to basic character type/race (includes Undead Form, Wild Shape, Tree Form)
Spell Power (although we had some spell multipliers, so maybe spellpower is easier server-side?)
etc, etc, ,etc. This list is not complete.
Basically, what happens in an MMO is the following*: You (and everyone else in the same instance) do an action on your keyboard/mouse/joystick and send this information to the server. The server receives your data (and everyone else's data), and returns to your PC what everyone else in the instance is doing, you included. Then the result appear on your screen. Lag happens when the timing between you making your input and the server returning the data is high enough that you notice the time gap between them. And that is handled by data size (code optimization) and response time (server/connection bootleneck).
When the devs do things like removing light effects from the game (http://ddowiki.com/page/Update_22_Release_Notes#Spells), it is to reduce data size. Because when you threw a fireball that would create a light source, the new light source itself needed to be sent on the data, so that the other member of your party would also see the bright explosion of your fireball. Changing the way TWF works (http://ddowiki.com/page/Update_5_Release_Notes#Combat) was also made to skip a physics check on the server, so that you didn't had to calculate and send two or three results of a single swing. How effective changes like that are is up to debate, but the devs are always in a fine balance between "things give something nice to the players" and "things are efficient".
*This is just an abridged version of how things work. In reality, part of the work is done client-sided too.
stoerm
10-12-2015, 04:39 AM
As mentioned above, client side graphics are irrelevant. Polygons, textures, shaders etc are handled on your PC. DDO has active combat that is way more complex than even new games being released today.
You are entitled to demand more quality from a product you pay for. I am with you there.
Dragavon
10-12-2015, 04:52 AM
What DDO needs is a complete rewrite / optimization of the code. Until we get that then problems with lag will become worse, no matter how good the hardware is.
If they do not do a rewrite then some time someone will change something that breaks the game completely.
Algreg
10-12-2015, 05:20 AM
it is probably neither servers nor "active combat" (really, every bigger new MMORPG has been starting out with that in the last 4 years). Turbine and their quickly changing dev teams probably used the piled higher and deeper method (not the least due to being understaffed I suspect) when expanding and changing the game in recent years, so the code is probably a mess that can barely be handled by now. Such a mess tends to perform poorly.
UurlockYgmeov
10-12-2015, 05:30 AM
Fixing software issues by throwing better hardware at it, is never a good idea. But depending on how old their current hardware is, whatever helps.
agree - the improved hw is a side affect of the data center change.
what everyone is forgetting that they (Devs) are quietly and constantly upgrading / de-spaghetti-izing the existing code. This moderization of the code has been on going and IMHO quite all encompassing. Lag is MUCH better than it was 2 or more years ago, and not-withstanding the occasional backsteps, has been experiencing Keizoku-teki kaizen.
and example of Keisoku-teki kaizen will be the cannith crafting / random loot pass and a better example will be when they 'de-scriptify' handwraps so that handwraps are considered weapons. All that custom scripting can go bye-bye for a much more streamlined, code that will be so much easier to update and maintain.
Knobull
10-12-2015, 05:45 AM
It was not gradual. It was sudden. This is where it happened, this is where it all went bad, right here:
In preparation for the upcoming Expansion, updates and improvements have been made to the DDO animation and physics engine. Update 13 Patch 2 Official (https://www.ddo.com/en/game/release-notes/update-13-patch-2-official)
We did not have this problem in 2009. The MoTU/Shadowfell era absolutely destroyed the code quality of the product, both server and client.
Lorianus
10-12-2015, 05:57 AM
agree - the improved hw is a side affect of the data center change.
what everyone is forgetting that they (Devs) are quietly and constantly upgrading / de-spaghetti-izing the existing code. This moderization of the code has been on going and IMHO quite all encompassing. Lag is MUCH better than it was 2 or more years ago, and not-withstanding the occasional backsteps, has been experiencing Keizoku-teki kaizen.
and example of Keisoku-teki kaizen will be the cannith crafting / random loot pass and a better example will be when they 'de-scriptify' handwraps so that handwraps are considered weapons. All that custom scripting can go bye-bye for a much more streamlined, code that will be so much easier to update and maintain.
Do you actually know Turbine is using Kaizen/Continual Improvement or a successor technique or is this something you brought up on your own for whatever reason? Because I sincerely hope Turbine has a more advanced QM and engineering approach. Online games aren’t made on assembly lines and with “plan-do-check-act” you will be always dragging behind. Is this outdated stuff still around in nowadays curriculums? Nice for a history lesson but not for actual software development.
Knobull
10-12-2015, 06:10 AM
what everyone is forgetting that they (Devs) are quietly and constantly upgrading / de-spaghetti-izing the existing code. This moderization of the code has been on going and IMHO quite all encompassing.
... and this is in fact the cause of all the problems. What gets called spaghetti code I suspect is good old fashioned do-it-yourself functional programming that does not rely on black-box libraries. Such code was extremely efficient. The new kids get confused by anything that is not object-oriented for its own sake with easy button libraries.
Lag is MUCH better than it was 2 or more years ago, and not-withstanding the occasional backsteps, has been experiencing Keizoku-teki kaizen.
No, it is much worse. Prior to update 13 patch 2 it hardly existed in DDO at all. What was labelled "updates and improvements" in 2012 was in fact a mangling.
Want to fix DDO? Revert to pre-MoTU code.
kmoustakas
10-12-2015, 06:21 AM
it's upload lag, it has nothing to do with polygon or client side
Dendrix
10-12-2015, 08:04 AM
Pre-MOTU there was plenty of lag in DDO. We experienced it often in many raids and occasionally in quests.
Having one single person log off to desktop and then log back in often fixed this lag.
It's a clear reflection loop where the updates to/from 1 person are failing and that bounces back and forth amongst everyone.
1 person logging off forces the server/clients to reevaluate stuff and ends up clearing out the message bounce that is paralysing the clients.
Holymunchkin
10-12-2015, 08:18 AM
it's upload lag, it has nothing to do with polygon or client side
go on?
Spookyaction
10-12-2015, 08:58 AM
Why are we experiencing game stopping lag in an old game that uses low polygon count.
The reason we haven't commented is we have correlated some of the reported lag to issues with major carriers, and some with a hardware failure with one of our switches. We don't usually comment on that sort of behind the scenes analysis, but it has added time and complexity to gathering server metrics.
Sev~
They don't seem to know what's causing the problem, makes it hard to fix when you have no clue what you're ment to be fixing.
stoerm
10-12-2015, 09:23 AM
They don't seem to know what's causing the problem, makes it hard to fix when you have no clue what you're ment to be fixing.
There is no single "the" problem you can "fix" and then everything becomes unicorns and rainbows. That has been said by devs multiple times (at least on DDOCast). What you perceive as "lag" can be something different and caused by something else than you forum buddy experiences. The same effect can be caused by different things: server side code, server HW, server OS, network capacity, network HW, ISP, Internet routing, your ISP, your PC, client side code...
You may want to believe there is just one issue and it hasn't been fixed simply because the devs are clueless, that's OK.
There is no single "the" problem you can "fix" and then everything becomes unicorns and rainbows. That has been said by devs multiple times (at least on DDOCast). What you perceive as "lag" can be something different and caused by something else than you forum buddy experiences. The same effect can be caused by different things: server side code, server HW, server OS, network capacity, network HW, ISP, Internet routing, your ISP, your PC, client side code...
You may want to believe there is just one issue and it hasn't been fixed simply because the devs are clueless, that's OK.
Im willing to bet, 99.9% sure, that the lag freeze which waits for all characters in the zone to die, then allows all to move again, is the same/similar cause each time.
Its not about "forum buddies" its about me and 11 other people in the same zone with the exact same symptoms.
They fixed the lag when they removed light sources in game.
Or did they?
Hmm maybe they should bring back light sources since that fix was for nothing.
LightBear
10-12-2015, 02:51 PM
My two cents on what causes lag is:
- Mobs not being removed from the playboard when killed;
- The tracking of "your effects" on mobs;
What I don't understand is that other peeps are sometimes still in the mids of a fight while the rest of the party is long gone.
bartharok
10-13-2015, 01:17 AM
Im willing to bet, 99.9% sure, that the lag freeze which waits for all characters in the zone to die, then allows all to move again, is the same/similar cause each time.
Its not about "forum buddies" its about me and 11 other people in the same zone with the exact same symptoms.
Several things can cause the same symptoms in the same area, in rl at least. So it does not necessarily follow that the cause is the same, even if the symptoms are.
Darkmits
10-13-2015, 02:31 AM
They could reduce lag by reducing the number of mobs in any given area and increasing the hp of the remaining ones so that it takes the same time to kill them.
Spookyaction
10-13-2015, 02:49 AM
There is no single "the" problem you can "fix" and then everything becomes unicorns and rainbows. That has been said by devs multiple times (at least on DDOCast). What you perceive as "lag" can be something different and caused by something else than you forum buddy experiences. The same effect can be caused by different things: server side code, server HW, server OS, network capacity, network HW, ISP, Internet routing, your ISP, your PC, client side code...
You may want to believe there is just one issue and it hasn't been fixed simply because the devs are clueless, that's OK.
When I say "the promlem" I mean whole party freezing (game stopping) lag, not every type of lag, just the big one that wipes raids. This is what Sev is refering to in the quote I posted. They have no clue what is causing this and therefore have no way to start a fix.
According to a recent study low polygons can cause cancer. Should switch to voxel graphic.
Pnumbra
10-13-2015, 11:17 AM
According to a recent study low polygons can cause cancer. Should switch to voxel graphic.
Awesome!
Strider1963
10-13-2015, 01:20 PM
Pre-MOTU there was plenty of lag in DDO. We experienced it often in many raids and occasionally in quests.
Having one single person log off to desktop and then log back in often fixed this lag.
It's a clear reflection loop where the updates to/from 1 person are failing and that bounces back and forth amongst everyone.
1 person logging off forces the server/clients to reevaluate stuff and ends up clearing out the message bounce that is paralysing the clients.
Very true, I remember being in a Tempest Spine raid (Pre MOTU), and while running to kill fire, we got the most awful lag I ever saw in the game, complete wipe...
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