Graphics Problem lag -what's the culprit?

S

squintz

Pirate Lord
I have had lag issues from day one. Windows 7 sp1. Mostly without fail when more than 3 pirates are on my screen.
Also with mobs when in motion.
The worst has always been boarding flag ships, alone or with other pirates.
Just now, my lag was so bad I was jailed because I couldn't even change my weapon in time. I just stand still and watch frame by frame go by. Thing is, the enemies damage to me isn't slow. The other enemies seem to be operating in almost real time while I watch them kill me.
I can also tell any time I enter a cave or area that other pirates are present on the map without seeing them.
Always. My pirate will stop and start, stutter and skip. This has been constant no matter where in the world I'm at.
I have tried windowed mode, full screen, reduced graphics, everything people on this forum say to do.

I refuse to believe it's my system or connection. I will NOT do anything to my system that isn't a problem with no other game installed on it. I will not reinstall graphic drivers. I will not adjust a thing on my end because tlopo is having trouble. I understand the people involved with tlopo are unpaid, under appreciated maybe, but It be nice if in reality tlopo servers are behind the eightball, perhaps not running up to date server code or something that they acknowledge a lag possibility or admit there's going to be lag issues. No one on tlopo has seemed to take this issue on alone. Yes, it's a beta I get that. But at least add to the mix that lag is also a known problem with tlopo and don't go jacking your system around when you don't need to.

I'm dealing with it, I've always dealt with it and accept it. Will someone admit that it's tlopo and not our computers?
 
The issues you are describing all lead back to having to do with your FPS so I honestly doubt that it has to do anything with lag.

Are you sure that it's not your FPS?
 
squintz said:
I'm dealing with it, I've always dealt with it and accept it. Will someone admit that it's tlopo and not our computers?
Click to expand...
I have little to no lag on my decent much newer laptop, but on my ten year old windows 7 desktop I get basically what you get. It has a lot to do with how powerful the computer you have is.
The biggest problem is the very old game engine that TLOPO is compelled to use, Panda3D. They have been optimizing the game the best they can. Back in Alpha the lag was incredibly bad and it has improved quite a bit.

Millington said:
The issues you are describing all lead back to having to do with your FPS so I honestly doubt that it has to do anything with lag.
Click to expand...
Lag causes a decrease in framerate.
 
PrivateRiley said:
I have little to no lag on my decent much newer laptop, but on my ten year old windows 7 desktop I get basically what you get. It has a lot to do with how powerful the computer you have is.
The biggest problem is the very old game engine that TLOPO is compelled to use, Panda3D. They have been optimizing the game the best they can. Back in Alpha the lag was incredibly bad and it has improved quite a bit.


Lag causes a decrease in framerate.
Click to expand...
And there you go -" The biggest problem is the very old game engine that TLOPO is compelled to use, Panda3D. They have been optimizing the game the best they can. Back in Alpha the lag was incredibly bad and it has improved quite a bit."
Thank you. Has nothing to do with how big my computer is or fast. Considering I can run WOW, while watching uboob and reading facebook all at the same time without lag anywhere. The answer is Panda3d. Also why we have to use openGL. Ironically, OpenGL is still thought of being a better graphic format for games than directx. Guess I'll just chug along until something else comes along.

And since windows wrapped itself around directx completely, no other graphics platform is going to run well. I always believed microsoft does this purposely. The game seems smoother on my mac, except for the right mouse glitch which makes my style of playing impossible to enjoy.
 
Millington said:
The issues you are describing all lead back to having to do with your FPS so I honestly doubt that it has to do anything with lag.

Are you sure that it's not your FPS?
Click to expand...
When you are on a game map by yourself getting 30fps and then 2 others show up and you instantly drop to 7fps, that is lag.
That is usually server side, or if it's client side, it still a problem with the structure of the game.
I can run steam games without lag or game slowness, wow with no game slowness or fps drop, Battlefield with no fps drop or slowness and then in the same connection session jump on tlopo and stand still with 4 people on the map.

It's not me. It's tlopo forced to run an outdated format and having to be creative keeping it going. If they haven't replaced that, at some point it's just going to stop working as all of us update other things ongoing as users. What we have for windows in 2011? Windows95-98/XP?
I actually know some people who still have win98 on their kitchen computers. It don't do much, but it's running.

And I didn't know about tlopo limited choice of software. That just opened a whole new level of respect for the dev's making that work.
 
Squintz, my friend has tried playing recently on her mac laptop running highsierra and the game does not run smoothly for her at all! Is that your OS? Any recommendations for her would be appreciated as tlopo support is slow in responding.
 
I run an avg of 48 fps , due to instable servers and bugs it won't get much better til the dozens of added bugs are fixed from updates !! Potco I avg 56 fps but then again they failed to fix bugs before adding new content !
 
Game Dev here.

There's a lot of ambiguous use of the term "lag" here, and I just want to clarify some stuff.
Strictly speaking, lag should be used as an internet/latency/packet term, as @Tiim does. However, in the gaming community, lag is often used for everything from client side rendering to server side physics desync, packet loss, and everything in between.

As a result, I usually call the client side version "frames lag" and the internet related stuff regular lag.

PrivateRiley said:
Lag causes a decrease in framerate.
Click to expand...

It should never do that.

The sad part is, it still does sometimes, for some games. If this is happening, this is a case of poor programming practice. Typically, networking code is on a separate "thread" than the rest of the program. It's like delegating another person to watch for something, so the rest of the team can focus on other stuff. When done properly, this means the thread watching for network issues is almost separated from the rest of the program, so when there's problems with the network issues the only part of the program that "freezes" or "locks up" is that one thread - the rest of the game can continue as normal.

However, if the game isn't threaded properly, you see cases where missed packets or high latency results in framerate drops. That's because an unthreaded program has to do everything one at a time in a linear fashion, and it must complete each step before moving onto the next one. So if the computer is expecting to see a network message, but it's not finding one (and this isn't handled properly), the whole game will freeze. Again, this is incredibly bad practice, and no competent developer should be making his game this way.

As a result, I doubt this is the problem. TLOPO is too large a project to have such bad practice running amok - the game would run like trash all the time for everyone. If this is the problem, well, we have some very big concerns. So let's assume that in this case, no, lag does not cause a decrease in framerate.

squintz said:
When you are on a game map by yourself getting 30fps and then 2 others show up and you instantly drop to 7fps, that is lag.
That is usually server side, or if it's client side, it still a problem with the structure of the game.
Click to expand...

That's not lag, that's more likely a case of other players being extremely resource intensive on the client side compared to other elements of the game (which is definitely something that should be looked into). If it's temporary (ie the lag goes away even if the players stick around) it's likely due to their instantiation. If it's constant while they're around, it's likely because there's too much data being sent to synchronize them, such as an overwhelming amount of position update packets.

Though there's plenty of other reasons why they might have too much overhead on the client side.

If the server is struggling, you shouldn't experience frame drops - you should just be seeing the other players teleport around while your own player moves just fine - since player movement is client side.

Most of what I've said so far becomes irrelevant if you have threading issues though, in which case yes lag would result in a drop in framerate. There's also other more niche situations where this could be true too.

squintz said:
Thank you. Has nothing to do with how big my computer is or fast. Considering I can run WOW, while watching uboob and reading facebook all at the same time without lag anywhere. The answer is Panda3d.
Click to expand...

I understand really wanting it to not be your own computer, but it's important to note that there are literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players that aren't experiencing your issues. There's only two differences between you and everyone else - your computer, and your internet provider/plan. I'd wager it's not your internet's fault if you can watch youtube while playing another MMO.

You can't compare games on a purely visual level. Not anymore. Especially network games. Though WoW and TLOPO may have similar age and even graphic levels, that means very little in terms of performance now. Especially when you consider that WoW likely has an entire paid team dedicated just to making sure it performs as optimal as possible, while our TLOPO team is a small handful of volunteers!
 
Wehttamwulf said:
Squintz, my friend has tried playing recently on her mac laptop running highsierra and the game does not run smoothly for her at all! Is that your OS? Any recommendations for her would be appreciated as tlopo support is slow in responding.
Click to expand...
From this forum, It has been advised to remove and install the latest mac version now. Just recently, tlopo stated they have updated and addressed the Sierra issues. If she recently did that, then ask her to go back and make sure everything was uninstalled completely. And try again.
gl
 
Sky Kiwi said:
Game Dev here.

There's a lot of ambiguous use of the term "lag" here, and I just want to clarify some stuff.
Strictly speaking, lag should be used as an internet/latency/packet term, as @Tiim does. However, in the gaming community, lag is often used for everything from client side rendering to server side physics desync, packet loss, and everything in between.

As a result, I usually call the client side version "frames lag" and the internet related stuff regular lag.



It should never do that.

The sad part is, it still does sometimes, for some games. If this is happening, this is a case of poor programming practice. Typically, networking code is on a separate "thread" than the rest of the program. It's like delegating another person to watch for something, so the rest of the team can focus on other stuff. When done properly, this means the thread watching for network issues is almost separated from the rest of the program, so when there's problems with the network issues the only part of the program that "freezes" or "locks up" is that one thread - the rest of the game can continue as normal.

However, if the game isn't threaded properly, you see cases where missed packets or high latency results in framerate drops. That's because an unthreaded program has to do everything one at a time in a linear fashion, and it must complete each step before moving onto the next one. So if the computer is expecting to see a network message, but it's not finding one (and this isn't handled properly), the whole game will freeze. Again, this is incredibly bad practice, and no competent developer should be making his game this way.

As a result, I doubt this is the problem. TLOPO is too large a project to have such bad practice running amok - the game would run like trash all the time for everyone. If this is the problem, well, we have some very big concerns. So let's assume that in this case, no, lag does not cause a decrease in framerate.



That's not lag, that's more likely a case of other players being extremely resource intensive on the client side compared to other elements of the game (which is definitely something that should be looked into). If it's temporary (ie the lag goes away even if the players stick around) it's likely due to their instantiation. If it's constant while they're around, it's likely because there's too much data being sent to synchronize them, such as an overwhelming amount of position update packets.

Though there's plenty of other reasons why they might have too much overhead on the client side.

If the server is struggling, you shouldn't experience frame drops - you should just be seeing the other players teleport around while your own player moves just fine - since player movement is client side.

Most of what I've said so far becomes irrelevant if you have threading issues though, in which case yes lag would result in a drop in framerate. There's also other more niche situations where this could be true too.



I understand really wanting it to not be your own computer, but it's important to note that there are literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players that aren't experiencing your issues. There's only two differences between you and everyone else - your computer, and your internet provider/plan. I'd wager it's not your internet's fault if you can watch youtube while playing another MMO.

You can't compare games on a purely visual level. Not anymore. Especially network games. Though WoW and TLOPO may have similar age and even graphic levels, that means very little in terms of performance now. Especially when you consider that WoW likely has an entire paid team dedicated just to making sure it performs as optimal as possible, while our TLOPO team is a small handful of volunteers!
Click to expand...
Thank you, that was a great read. And yes, lag is used too interchangeably, basically so the non dev people like us can get a basic grasp of gaming. But in my case, I liken it to running a browser where you go to this site forum and it flows fairly well and refreshes quickly and then go to another similiar forum and it runs like crap. Yes, I know it also has to do with ads and such, but I've not made any changes to my computer. Well, that may not be a good example actually. Okay, gaming. I run valve counterstrike, 50fps, no players teleporting or skipping around, instant hit returns. I run battlefield 2,3,4 whatever, again high fps, no screen tearing, no blipping out players. Wow, 25 player instances with 20 enemies and a zillion effects, I almost drop 3 frames sometimes in big instances.
Get on tlopo and first, takes 30 seconds or more to log in, on low server 30 or less players I watch other players blip around, run like jolly on a peg leg and as soon as two or three pirates show up everything is delayed and jumpy. I get on a boarded ship and the mob attacks and it's a slide show - every time.
And I'm supposed to believe it's my system, isp or graphics card? I've also on other games experience the choking of your game when other people are running cheats, which will look just like threading problems.
I think since tlopo is forced to use panda, which is an api that is another layer trying work with direct x and opengl and not a native api from the start is most of the challenge and problems which we deal with.

But I also feel your estimate of thousands of people run tlopo perfectly or without trouble is way off and optimistic. Based on my opinion that if 10% of the 1000 people post to this forum and 60% have complaints like mine, then that number can be extrapolated out to better than 50% of players are not seeing a satisfactory game experience. But then again, it's a beta, it's not supposed to be
running perfect yet.

There's really nothing that can be done on our end, it's a beta with perhaps legal issues as well. I'm satisfied also in that panda was brought up because it answered many of my frustrations beta testing and why things are. Through you and others clarifying on issues like this, I'm also glad the devs are working such as they are to bring the game into present day systems.

This thread wasn't so much as a complaint, but to get some answers as to why things are. I also discovered the developers threads which are very informative. That is a very nice thing to see here.

Also, I think it's a sign of good work on the game as well, as I find myself getting into the world play and forget to take notes of issues and such. Sometimes only when I get kicked or something does it snap me out of my game mode.
 
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squintz said:
Thank you, that was a great read. And yes, lag is used too interchangeably, basically so the non dev people like us can get a basic grasp of gaming. But in my case, I liken it to running a browser where you go to this site forum and it flows fairly well and refreshes quickly and then go to another similiar forum and it runs like crap. Yes, I know it also has to do with ads and such, but I've not made any changes to my computer. Well, that may not be a good example actually. Okay, gaming. I run valve counterstrike, 50fps, no players teleporting or skipping around, instant hit returns. I run battlefield 2,3,4 whatever, again high fps, no screen tearing, no blipping out players. Wow, 25 player instances with 20 enemies and a zillion effects, I almost drop 3 frames sometimes in big instances.
Get on tlopo and first, takes 30 seconds or more to log in, on low server 30 or less players I watch other players blip around, run like jolly on a peg leg and as soon as two or three pirates show up everything is delayed and jumpy. I get on a boarded ship and the mob attacks and it's a slide show - every time.
And I'm supposed to believe it's my system, isp or graphics card? I've also on other games experience the choking of your game when other people are running cheats, which will look just like threading problems.
I think since tlopo is forced to use panda, which is an api that is another layer trying work with direct x and opengl and not a native api from the start is most of the challenge and problems which we deal with.

But I also feel your estimate of thousands of people run tlopo perfectly or without trouble is way off and optimistic. Based on my opinion that if 10% of the 1000 people post to this forum and 60% have complaints like mine, then that number can be extrapolated out to better than 50% of players are not seeing a satisfactory game experience. But then again, it's a beta, it's not supposed to be
running perfect yet.

There's really nothing that can be done on our end, it's a beta with perhaps legal issues as well. I'm satisfied also in that panda was brought up because it answered many of my frustrations beta testing and why things are. Through you and others clarifying on issues like this, I'm also glad the devs are working such as they are to bring the game into present day systems.

This thread wasn't so much as a complaint, but to get some answers as to why things are. I also discovered the developers threads which are very informative. That is a very nice thing to see here.

Also, I think it's a sign of good work on the game as well, as I find myself getting into the world play and forget to take notes of issues and such. Sometimes only when I get kicked or something does it snap me out of my game mode.
Click to expand...

TLOPO has 100,000 registered accounts. Are you saying 50,000 of them struggle to run the game? That seems ridiculous to me.
And yeah I realize some people will have multiple accounts. Let's estimate each player has 4 accounts (which is absurdly high imo), that's still 25,000 players. You also need to consider that the people who are running the game just fine aren't making posts about it - you're only seeing the feedback from those who can't play the game properly.

And your browser/game comparison, with the whole "one thing works but others don't", that's just the nature of games. A computer that can play Mario isn't guaranteed to be able to play Battlefield 1, Battlefield requires way way more resources. You might say "well Battlefield is a much more beautiful and modern game", but that point is the one I was arguing against in my previous post about comparing WoW to TLOPO - the truth is, no matter how a game looks, sometimes they require more resources than another that seems like it should be the same. This can be due to poor optimization, which is the game's fault yes, but if your computer can't handle it and you're struggling that's like saying "my car only goes 30mph. I should still be able to use the highways because it's not my fault the speed limit is 55mph!". Yeah it's not your fault, but your car simply isn't good enough to use the highways.

There are a lot of problems on the game's end, yes, but the point is a better computer effectively solves all these issues. It's a bandaid solution, sure, but unless you can hire an optimization team (or a team to move the game to a whole new engine!) it's the best we have.

I agree with most else of what you've said though!
 
Sky Kiwi said:
TLOPO has 100,000 registered accounts. Are you saying 50,000 of them struggle to run the game? That seems ridiculous to me.
And yeah I realize some people will have multiple accounts. Let's estimate each player has 4 accounts (which is absurdly high imo), that's still 25,000 players. You also need to consider that the people who are running the game just fine aren't making posts about it - you're only seeing the feedback from those who can't play the game properly.

And your browser/game comparison, with the whole "one thing works but others don't", that's just the nature of games. A computer that can play Mario isn't guaranteed to be able to play Battlefield 1, Battlefield requires way way more resources. You might say "well Battlefield is a much more beautiful and modern game", but that point is the one I was arguing against in my previous post about comparing WoW to TLOPO - the truth is, no matter how a game looks, sometimes they require more resources than another that seems like it should be the same. This can be due to poor optimization, which is the game's fault yes, but if your computer can't handle it and you're struggling that's like saying "my car only goes 30mph. I should still be able to use the highways because it's not my fault the speed limit is 55mph!". Yeah it's not your fault, but your car simply isn't good enough to use the highways.

There are a lot of problems on the game's end, yes, but the point is a better computer effectively solves all these issues. It's a bandaid solution, sure, but unless you can hire an optimization team (or a team to move the game to a whole new engine!) it's the best we have.

I agree with most else of what you've said though!
Click to expand...
Well, couple of different points here. For one, I'm not sure about the 100K account thing. When tlopo just made a announcement of a 1000 player milestone, are we to believe only less than 1% are active? Doesn't make sense.
And I wasn't talking about looks. I run tlopo bare boring bones. The browser was a bad example. The only similar is they both use the internet and hand shake. Was commenting on game flow and game activity. I get it that there's many levels of operation to a game.
There's nothing here about my computer solving tlopo issues. Maybe a couple of frame numbers if I boost gpu timings.

But like I said, my questions have basically been answered and most if not all issues will need to be cured by tlopo, not me.
I understand your points about the players system. But if you have 10 games and 9 all run well but one chuggs, it's outside of my computer and isp. But I'm okay with that and hope one day tlopo will run like other games.

gl
 
Most of this is above my "pay grade" but I would like to say that since usually there are only 300--600 people at any time when I am on I would most likely use that as a number to compare the percentage of complaints instead of anything remotely close to the number of accounts. As a veteran POTCO player I would say most people do not take the time to complain about the "lag" of whatever the issue is. I was accustomed to "putting" up with it. I have changed settings before early in Beta and it helped me get into the catacombs and El Sud when before I was crashing (that and increasing virtual ram and also manually clearing my cache before porting or entering those areas). I do not bother with the cache clearing anymore except at the end of the game. Where I usually expect to still experience it, as Squintz mentioned, boarding a ship. I keep my finger poised above the tonic key hoping I don't take a ton of damage before I can draw a weapon. Also, I try to avoid getting into the middle of the major material scrums. Staying on the outside seems to help. Things have improved- I rarely crash porting now for instance.

However, my Mac friend still can not play. She tried to log in several times tonight and can not. She uninstalled the game tonight, rebooted her computer, and then reinstalled (she has high sierra). She was able to get on but could not tp to me, could not move, I could not tp to her. She still has not heard from support. It would possibly be helpful if all Mac postings were in a separate thread.

I also agree with a comment someone else made earlier. I appreciate that the developers are trying to bring in all the content from POTCO and implementing new content however I think the playability of the game should be optimized before additional content is brought online which generally is fairly buggy. I think this just complicates the matter. I wish the developers all the luck in the world and best wishes. BTW I'm currently playing on an HP laptop, Win 7, i5 (M560 @2.67 GHz, 2GB RAM, NIVIDIA NVS 3100M and people with far better computers than this have more issues than me for some reason. Also using a wireless connection which I will say if I revert to my old connection I can expect to get dc'd with the "lost internet connection message" but I now use our new Spectrum connection and that happens much less.
 
What I know is that there are several issues affecting game play, fps and lag. Latency, packet issues etc are big culprits as we know. The game is rendered in tech from the early 2000s and is not exactly compatible with many newer systems.
But as I recall, even in the days of potco there were issues with lag with what were then state of the art systems at the time.
What I notice now is that I have to down-clock my processor to under 3400MHz in order to play properly with minimal issues. If it runs at native 4200MHz, the game simply explodes, crashes and burns. Overclocking might actually burn the entire west coast, so I'd never try it, for humanity's sake, of course.
The same with my graphics cards. I have an older card dedicated for tlopo (and minecraft), as the newer cards will also smoke it.
So if you have multiple slots on your motherboard and are not using them all, you might want to pick up an older card on ebay for pennies and dedicate it for older games.
I use an older NVIDIA EVGA GTX 560 Ti with clocking for the game, where the card is slowed waaay down. I got it for $24 on ebay last year for the game (when these cards were new they went for several $100s, lol).
Running the game in windows 7 compatibility mode is also an option that improves performance for many players on higher os.
Sadly, I still get some lag at times, and usually only on Tortuga Abassa, but it's more than livable with tweaked settings.
 
This (Crashalot's posting) might be the most relevant posting on the topic yet. As I noted in my posting my subpar, older laptop seemed to be working far better than people with newer, faster computers.
 
I dont have a stock Acer R11 - pretty low specs, but it plays like my beef computer. I mean almost 0 difference. TLOPO is a crazy game man.

(highest frames i get are about 20-25)
 
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