I'm writing this post to help us help you help us! What lag means to one person often means something entirely different to another person. I'm going to try and help explain what the various forms of latency(Lag) mean from a coders viewpoint in Vanguard. See this definition of Lag as a reference. Internet Lag is generally caused by two things. The time it takes for information to reach our servers from your home computer, and the time it takes to process your request. In the case of activating an ability in Vanguard, when you click your hot bar, a message is generated and placed in a command queue. The next frame(FPS) that command is interpreted and a message is sent from your client to our servers. This part of the trip is called one-way latency. Once the Vanguard zone receives this packet, it is processed(I.E. I cast magic missile). The time it takes to pull this packet off the socket, processes it in game, and then add the response to a sending queue can vary depending on server load. The next frame, all data in the sending queue is sent back out from our servers to it's destination, your client. The total latency for this will be both of the one way trips plus the processing time of the packet on our server. Framerate Lag or general FPS issues can be caused by a large number of things. FPS is not affected by internet latency(see above). Your client FPS is dependent on the hardware of your computer and the complexity of the scene that you are rendering. Here are some examples of things caused by a combination of the game and hardware that will affect your client FPS. Hard drive: Because Vanguard doesn't utilize asynchronous loading the best it can, clients can see reduced FPS when new game packages need to be loaded for the first time. Large loads can actually induce complete FPS stalls or hitching for short periods of time. Smaller loads will generally just cause minor FPS dips. A faster hard drive will help significantly in removing or reducing this form of latency.Memory: If there is not enough system memory for Vanguard to run in, the operating system will attempt to free up more by swapping some of it to a swap file on your hard drive. See lag caused by hard drive. The more system memory you have, the less likely this is to happen.CPU: Vanguard does not utilize multi-core processors as best as it could. Because of this, Vanguard will probably run faster on higher clock dual-core processor than a slower clock quad-core processor. The game clients main processing thread handles the majority of the work and as a result any slow down in this thread will reduce your client FPS. This can happen when looking at complex scenes with a large number of characters or complex geometry.Video Card: Vanguard uses are large number of large textures and also has some fairly complex shaders. Running low on video memory or loading new shaders can cause the main game thread to block, reducing your FPS. This can happen when viewing complex scenes.When communication your Lag issues on the forumns, please take into consideration what type of Lag you are experiencing and explicitly tell us what type. This will help us to identify issues and resolve them.
Whenever I get get lag (and it's not that often really) it comes out of nowhere... Ur fighting a mob with ur group say.. Named in KDQ or a mob in POTA .. And everyone freezes at the same time.. And we're all in vent saying Lagspike... It holds for 3-5 seconds .. Then releases and battle commences.. In last nights Lagspike the shaman lost her life to furious hehe The only other lag, is when rifting into a populated area ie khal, and my machine is doing whatever it needs to to read all of the renderings of the chunk.. I assume not much u can do there.. But it barely slows me down. Those on lesser comps must hitch quite a bit. Keep up the good work Hobart .. Perhaps one day my 6core can run optimally on this 6year old game hehe. I play mostly on max/max everything, setfog 999999, and clipping slider all the way up. Except for raiding.. Cause I wouldn't be able to hit the mobs let alone hold Agro
the two lag types most commonly reported by players in game (as well as on forums) are: Everyone in an encounter stops doing anything for several seconds. ping rates go to 9999 . Since everyone in the encounter is experiencing this, it is highly unlikely that it is tied to any provider or personal equipment. Even others not in the encounter can experience this form of lag by just being nearby. The second lag type we hear most often is slow chunking followed by sluggish or hitchy movement. When I was helping people on IOD at the launch of f2p we could actually find spots where this lag was occurring. There were specific places in the temple where this would happen, but not affect everyone, just certain people. Even though some experienced it worse than others (equipment, isp) the fact that we could isolate lag spots tells me there was something in game that was the issue. In addition, any time a populated area fills with multiple players crafting, doing diplos, and engaging nearby mobs the entire chunk experiences slowdowns and occasional crashes. This is most common in Khal, Tanvu, and sometimes Veskals exchange. hope this recap is of some use.
As Leawiz described it is the type of lag I'm receiving. I admittedly have a mediocre Internet connection, but Internet lag is far from my concern playing the game. The Framerate lag is so bad, that it makes the game completely unplayable for me in any populated areas. If I pay attention to the ping indicator I notice huge momentary spikes in places like Khal,and when it occurs it brings my avatar to a complete stand still. I was able to correct most of the lag I received in less populated areas,. by replacing an older Sound Blaster audio DLL in my vanguard folder.
The Lag we have all been bit**ing about has been the first type of lag described. Ping times Jump to 99999 and everyone freezes, once it passes its back to business as normal. There may be other spikes as well depending upon what we are doing, and could be multiple mid to horrible spikes throughout a raid encounter. (Alagan is bad for this when you have a person changing into dragon form). As for the second type of Lag, after you get the first one kicked in the butt, it would be great if the game could be optimized to better utilize multi core processors, Personally even running a SSD I still get 'hitching'/FPS lag running through spots, or If I have particles turned up and to many people are around casting a bunch of stuff.
I just wanted to say: This is probably EXACTLY why the dev made their post. I'm not saying this to harass you or anything, but I wanted to point this out: Basically what you're saying is you are having bad framerate- so first and foremost, that's not network lag, which many people are complaining about in raid situations. But so many people just say "lag." And when someone says "I have lots of lag when raiding" and someone else has a cruddy connection ten zones away or their Audio drivers are screwing up something, then they go "YEAH I'M LAGGING TOO UGH GEEZE" but it's entirely unrelated issues. If you are lagging heavily in populated areas, then you may need to adjust settings, update drivers, upgrade components, all the usual stuff. Vanguard is a bit of a resource hog, but it runs pretty smoothly, even in populated areas, on powerful systems. Hobart's code adjustments likely won't affect that, and information you provide about that issue won't assist in his adjustments. The dev was basically saying that you need to pay attention to the TYPE of lag and not just say 'lag.' If the game is animating and moving smoothly, but buttons aren't responding and attacks aren't happening, network lag. If it's the inverse, hardware lag. Just saying "Lag" over and over and complaining very well may be obfuscating the underlying issues and will only slow down any potential fixes. So yeah - replacing a soundblaster DLL and having issues with framerate are an entirely different beast. Also, if you pay heed to the description of FPS being tied to latency and how the game sends/receives information, it's worth pointing out that a jump in ping or the like can artificially result from a spike of hardware lag due to the way the information is delivered. I know everyone is all gung ho and impatient for fixes to happen, but every post that just says "blah blah blah LAG blah blah" just plain isn't helpful. Devs need information and specifics, plain and simple. And sure there's always the same "I already reported this seven years ago waah waah" type posts, but that's really just a sad story - it still doesn't help get anything fixed. You can post information, be specific, and help fix the game, or you can complain endlessly, but only one of those will help fix anything faster.
No.. on raids its ping spikes, not frame rate.. fps.. the ping jumps to 999999 and stays there anywhere from 3-30 seconds or Longer sometimes... its not choppy video lag
its pretty easy to reproduce the lag that a lot of us have been complaining about. take a raid force and engage a raid target that has a lot of scripted events to it. every time a specific event is suppose to occur, the whole raid force freezes for a few seconds. an example that comes to mind is the aLAGon encounter: when its time for a tank to click the dead dragon corpse and change forms, the whole raid will experience a fun pause.
Here's my take on it. My husband works from home and runs one of his companies servers out of our house, because of this his company pays for us to have top of the line business class internet service. Also, even though my comp is a year and a half old hand me down it is still top notch (for what I use it for) Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 950 @ 4.0GHz Memory: 12288MB G.Skill RAM Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Hard Drive: 2, 1 TB WD Caviar Black @ Raid 0 So, when I lag, it is highly doubtful that it is my ISP or computer. Although it isn't impossible. When I crash while chunking..? Or while attempting to trade around my chat tabs..? That isn't my computer. SOE is doing good for VG to update the coding and engine, as in my personal opinion that is where the real issues lie with this game. I cant wait to see performance after it is done.
1. Lag/FPS called Hitching. This is when you turn to fast sometimes the game just dies. Usually in Khal. 2. After a chunk game sometimes takes a while to work itself out.
SSD helps a lot wit first one. Second is network related and hopefully gets fixed when new netcode comes.
Allright seems i missed this thread for a bit, but here goes. First and foremost at this point what is bothering us ingame during raid but also randomly standing in khal doing nothing, is the network lag. Ping goes up to 5k 7k 10k in bad cases after returning to its normal 250 for me. everyone in the same chunk expiereinces this at the same time, raid mobs usually dont attack when this happens, but buff timers like qj do keep ticking. Secondly, Fps When Raiding in vanguard, for some reason, my fps goes down the drain, on zodifin i avarage around 20-25 fps, some the changed you guys made have improved this from the 15 fps it was before. The weird thing is, i dont think its on my end. I use an ati 6950 i7 2600k and 16 gb over mem, pci-e ssd, all overclockek. But when i look at my system usage, my gpu doesnt spin up over 40% in, my main vg cpu thread doesnt get anywhere near 50%, and vg seems to have a cap on how much memory it can use. People have tried various things in the past to improve several aspects, some of these would be extremely easy to implement. 1. Replace the audio openall files with new ones, playing without audio gives you like 5-10 more fps, which is weird on a system whats running under 50% capacity 2. (was gona suggest increasing cache size megs, but noticed its defaulted to 256 already) 3. Increase the maximum amount of memory vanguard can use. the lastly, perhaps figure out why our systems are not being taxed harder, in order to render more frames. I seriously believe this is because of some game settings, or the server being stressed more than our client side hardware. The only time my gpu starts sweating some is if i stand inside the particle beam near the PoTA entrane with all particles maxed.
My question regarding the -9999 ping raid wide type of lag is this: Are the scripts that are checking for event triggers being run on a cyclical timer (i.e. check script runs every 500ms) while an encounter is active, are the check scripts themselves being triggered by a relevant bit change, or is it a combination of the two? I may be out of my league here as my experience comes from industrial GUI and automation logic programming, but within the operating systems I work on using the wrong type of event trigger detection for a particular scenario has been known to cause large spikes in system resource usage on the server side resulting in what a gamer might consider "lag". I wouldn't ever mean to imply poorly written code as I am unfamiliar with programming in the gaming realm, it is just something I have personally seen cause issues I would relate to this "-9999 ping" lag players (myself included) have been witnessing.
Not sure how your cache size default is 256 megs, my default is: [Engine.GameEngine] CacheSizeMegs=32 from my sysconfig.ini file. This file is always replaced each time I load the launcher and setting needs to be changed before actually selecting play. I tried it again just after reading your post, hoping they changed it and didn't say anything. Most have seen a huge improvement from this small change, some see problems with a higher value. Devs, please make: [Engine.GameEngine] CacheSizeMegs=256 happen.
So why has lag pertaining to DB issues been completely ignored? Is the DB not an issue? Is there no contention, no IO issues? Is cache being used? When a DB locks up, that will kill things and spike lag just as fast as anything code and network related. Is there a DBA involved? Are we dealing with an old MySQL, SQL, NoSQL? Has it ever been optimized? When these lag spikes occur, what does the the DB look like? How long are queries taking? Dealing with RDB issues is a very common place issue with games.
Hard drive: Because Vanguard doesn't utilize asynchronous loading the best it can, clients can see reduced FPS when new game packages need to be loaded for the first time. Now there's an understatement!
We don't ignore the database. Because the DB is "behind" the Server in terms of what the player can see, there's no way a user to distinguish between "DB lag" and "Server Process Lag". Whichever one is happening, it is still going to appear to the user to simply be the server. As such, it's not exactly pertinent for this thread which is aimed at helping players identify what sort of lag they are experiencing when they experience it. Obviously not all your questions can be answered (a dev team has to keep some secrets =P ), but we do keep an eye on DB access time and performance. In fact, the way some game data is looked up and stored has recently been optimized as part of the ongoing optimizations being made to the game.
I have noticed so little "lag" in my experience since I started using an SSD. I think the majority of solo gameplay is really not network or server lag but rather the inability of any computer's platter hard drive to give sustained reads. It my opinion that if the devs simply changed the sysconfig ini's cache to something realistic, such as 256 megabytes much of it would go away. Presently the ini cache is set to 32 (?). I don't participate in raids so that could be an entirely different issue.
Yeah raids is where it gets really bad. For Example, last night on the War Golem I clicked my racial, which is a 35second duration, and I literally watched it tick form 30 to 0 while the game stood still.
