So finally bought in. I have been watching the game for a while and really excited for the future of it.
However I am constantly plagued by Slow connection notice, rubber-banding, and other latency related issues.
I am no stranger to Early access games and such, so I do realize this will get better as development continues.
I am just curious if it is as bad as I am experiencing for others.
I get a Slow Connection notice at least once every 5 min or so. Usually more often. Occasionally getting rubber-banding locked in place for a minute.
I am going to continue playing with settings but my machine is beefy enough I should not be having issues locally.
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Where are you based, and what internet connection do you have? Pressing ‘.’ shows some debug information including the latency your getting.
Playing servers closest to you should be better in general.
I am in the Midwest of the US and sticking to the US East worlds. Internet is a 5mbs connection. Slow connection notices were ranging from 400 up to thousands of ms pings.
After a bit more tinkering with settings some of it did seem to be local (probably a memory leak that is accelerated by higher settings.) However, I did still get fairly regular slow connection notices.
I will get on again today and try to go over the debug info a bit more. Also I believe someone else may have been streaming a video on my network last night. I should be able to test without any other traffic on my network today.
Out of curiosity, Where is the US East data centers located?
I have rubber banding problems too.
If someone else what using your connection for streaming a film then a 5mbs connection will struggle as the game does download quiet a lot when you move to a new world or far around the current world.
To reduce data load the main thing is to lower the ‘Draw Distance’ and the ‘Terrain Detail’ quality so the game has to send over less information.
The servers for US East are in North Virginia (Amazon’s).
Yeah, reducing Draw distance and Foliage seemed to have the greatest impact so far. (not really a fan of the way the Foliage blocks look anyway but they do add a LOT to the load. (Maybe something worth looking into?){From both a performance and an artistic viewpoint.}
I do realize this is a pre-Alpha and there are tons of optimizations to come. These issues should get better with future releases.
Will report back later after some more testing. I do have a few side programs that may help aid and will check some of those out as well.
The foliage does not use extra network bandwidth. If that is a big win then you may be GPU limited. What graphics card do you have?
AMD FX 8350 (8 cores)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 (MSI)
16 GB RAM
I do expect that the Foliage was more of a local impact. Combined with a larger Draw Distance it was having a bigger impact.
Also has anyone looked at the impact of Torches and their particle effects? Some of the areas I have had some issues have had a lot of torches about. Some people seem fond of just plastering them all over the place randomly or using an insanely dense row to mark a path. (one spot I found had a 2 block wide path with torches in every block along the way for hundreds of blocks)
Did a bit more testing. Ran game with CPUCores (forces comp to use cores more efficiently and limit OS and Browsers and such to specific cores, running game in others) on and game loaded into DimmDrive (creates a Drive in RAM and runs game files from there instead of HDD.)
Latency was more stable. No other traffic on network and did not receive any slow connection notices.
I did keep up the debug console while playing. After staying in a certain region for a while and things were mostly stable.
What I did notice was that all the numbers in the top right of the debug console (top 5-6 lines) all took a hit under a couple situations.
1, Placing blocks. Almost no impact while breaking or when broke, but moderate impact when placing. Both when dropping 1 block at a time slowly and when placing several in rapid succession. This did resolve quickly and resolve in a more balanced state.
2, Opening Esc menu and Tab interface. Significant hit to all lines mentioned above. Including when switching between inventory and crafting tabs.
I did experience a bit of random latency but there were several other players about. So that may have been a factor. Also all of this was on Lapas.
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There are some stalling in the game we know of. Placing/editing does cause a stall, especially on some Nvidia cards and the GUI, especially the inventory.