Flimgoblin
It's my birthday today!
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2003
- Messages
- 8,324
There are several different types of "lag" or "daoc not responding".
Since people grumble about lag it helps to know what kind of lag you're dealing with so you know who to whinge at and what to say.
1. Frame rate lag.
Causes:
This is what happens when you're standing outside a new shiny keep in the new frontiers and 20 mids come along. Your computer tries to load them all in at once and the HD makes some noise. Depending on how good a computer you have or not this may slow you down.
Symptoms:
Third green circle on the performance-monitor (shift-p) turns to a yellow triangle or a red square.
It's hard to move your character around - looking around is sluggish, pressing buttons on your screen is very unresponsive - sometimes the wrong buttons fire (if you click then move the mouse).
Sometimes the first two performance monitor icons will turn red (this is possibly due to network card drivers not allowing the network card to run well when the cpu is under load) or you may experience a linkdead. This will only happen _after_ the initial fps square turns red.
Solution:
Turn down the graphics stuff in the game - switch off shiny water, turn off shadows. Turn on precaching of armour skins. Reduce the level of detail limit (though this may impact your RvR playing) . Turn off spell effects (/effects self).
If you experience link death problems from this - upgrade your network card drivers. This also solves crashes caused by using portal/djinn stones.
Avoid large groups of enemies.
Avoid new frontiers till you get a better machine - NF with all the fancy keeps etc. is very laggy. ToA havens are also similarly laggy - imagine one of them with people lobbing trebuchets and firing aoes - that's NF.
Upgrade your computer - not always the cheapest of options but if you're looking for a quick fix make sure you've got at least half a gig of ram if you want to play in New Frontiers. It really does chug with less (more than half a gig is good but can cause problems if you're running windows 98 beware).
2. Server lag
Causes:
This sometimes happens when the server is very busy. It used to be the 4.2 encounter (Fortress of Storms) would lag the server to death (this has been relieved somewhat by recent patches). Having 500 people all dancing in the same zone having a tea-party also has similar effect.
Symptoms:
Unresponsive to actions. Your character moves around fine on the server, you can look around without any problems everything is nice and smooth. But when you say something it takes 10 or 20 seconds to process. Sometimes the server goes boom and you get booted from the game with a "Server has reported an error" message.
Note that the performance monitor (shift-p) will show a green circle for the first two icons in this case (the third one is purely about your fps - see above). If either of these two are showing red then it's not likely to be server lag - it's more likely to be connection lag - see type 3.
Solution:
Don't take 500 people to a tea party
New patches improve server stability, fix overly stressful encounters.
New hardware makes it harder for the server to crash/able to cope with more people in the one place.
None of these are simple solutions unfortunately.
3. Connection lag
Causes:
This is what happens when something on the lines between you and the servers breaks down. e.g. ISP has problems, flakey router on opentransit, etc.
Symptoms:
Things are unresponsive much like type 2. You can look around with no problems, press buttons etc. but it takes a long time for any messages to get through.
Solution:
Run traceroutes/pingplotter to find out where the problem is - might be your ISP is sucking, if so whinge to them. Opentransit recently has had some problems - take a pingplotter graph and send it to RightNow which they can then pass on.
In the past there have been network configurations at GOA causing intermittent problems - a pingplot will also show this up so sending it to RightNow helps.
Sometimes it's just your ISP having a sucky day and everything will be back to normal after an hour or so (have had my cable modem go down for half a day at a time before - thankfully not often).
Since people grumble about lag it helps to know what kind of lag you're dealing with so you know who to whinge at and what to say.
1. Frame rate lag.
Causes:
This is what happens when you're standing outside a new shiny keep in the new frontiers and 20 mids come along. Your computer tries to load them all in at once and the HD makes some noise. Depending on how good a computer you have or not this may slow you down.
Symptoms:
Third green circle on the performance-monitor (shift-p) turns to a yellow triangle or a red square.
It's hard to move your character around - looking around is sluggish, pressing buttons on your screen is very unresponsive - sometimes the wrong buttons fire (if you click then move the mouse).
Sometimes the first two performance monitor icons will turn red (this is possibly due to network card drivers not allowing the network card to run well when the cpu is under load) or you may experience a linkdead. This will only happen _after_ the initial fps square turns red.
Solution:
Turn down the graphics stuff in the game - switch off shiny water, turn off shadows. Turn on precaching of armour skins. Reduce the level of detail limit (though this may impact your RvR playing) . Turn off spell effects (/effects self).
If you experience link death problems from this - upgrade your network card drivers. This also solves crashes caused by using portal/djinn stones.
Avoid large groups of enemies.
Avoid new frontiers till you get a better machine - NF with all the fancy keeps etc. is very laggy. ToA havens are also similarly laggy - imagine one of them with people lobbing trebuchets and firing aoes - that's NF.
Upgrade your computer - not always the cheapest of options but if you're looking for a quick fix make sure you've got at least half a gig of ram if you want to play in New Frontiers. It really does chug with less (more than half a gig is good but can cause problems if you're running windows 98 beware).
2. Server lag
Causes:
This sometimes happens when the server is very busy. It used to be the 4.2 encounter (Fortress of Storms) would lag the server to death (this has been relieved somewhat by recent patches). Having 500 people all dancing in the same zone having a tea-party also has similar effect.
Symptoms:
Unresponsive to actions. Your character moves around fine on the server, you can look around without any problems everything is nice and smooth. But when you say something it takes 10 or 20 seconds to process. Sometimes the server goes boom and you get booted from the game with a "Server has reported an error" message.
Note that the performance monitor (shift-p) will show a green circle for the first two icons in this case (the third one is purely about your fps - see above). If either of these two are showing red then it's not likely to be server lag - it's more likely to be connection lag - see type 3.
Solution:
Don't take 500 people to a tea party
New patches improve server stability, fix overly stressful encounters.
New hardware makes it harder for the server to crash/able to cope with more people in the one place.
None of these are simple solutions unfortunately.
3. Connection lag
Causes:
This is what happens when something on the lines between you and the servers breaks down. e.g. ISP has problems, flakey router on opentransit, etc.
Symptoms:
Things are unresponsive much like type 2. You can look around with no problems, press buttons etc. but it takes a long time for any messages to get through.
Solution:
Run traceroutes/pingplotter to find out where the problem is - might be your ISP is sucking, if so whinge to them. Opentransit recently has had some problems - take a pingplotter graph and send it to RightNow which they can then pass on.
In the past there have been network configurations at GOA causing intermittent problems - a pingplot will also show this up so sending it to RightNow helps.
Sometimes it's just your ISP having a sucky day and everything will be back to normal after an hour or so (have had my cable modem go down for half a day at a time before - thankfully not often).
