So, I’ve now lost about a full stack of ruby grapples (one or two at a time, as well as innumerable gold/copper hammers) virtually entirely to poor lag prediction/latency prediction period.
It’s really getting exasperating.
What I mean by this is that, for example, if I were to tap a button for 1/5th of a second, and a lag-spike/latency-spike were to strike during this, and my ping shoots to, say, 500ms (half a second) or even worse, 2,000-3,000ms (2-3 seconds) the server-side programming “pretends” that I held that button down for the entire duration. This is horrible because (as far as I can tell from other games/the decent amount of networking knowledge I possess) it’s totally avoidable from a programming standpoint.
Simply put, the solution to this is to program the server-side code so that it assumes no actions taken (including continued walking/running, etc.) if it loses connection momentarily. This will still result in the occasional death (sliding down a mountain during heavy spikes/etc) but it would, as far as I can ascertain, be far superior to the current system, where spikes are virtually guaranteed to “drive” or “drag” you off of nearby cliffs/drops or into lava.
An even better system would freeze your character in place completely during loss of connections, and possibly make your character immune to all forms of damage for the duration (I’ve almost drowned several times due to particularly nasty lag spikes). This would avoid deaths due to spikes during grapple use (or more accurately, the moment when you’ve just disconnected a grapple in midair and are about to reposition it) and climbing steep and/or icy mountains as well. The damage-immunity should NOT apply to PvP scenarios, to avoid switchers abusing the system.
I had initially thought that the update that added the “return to Sanctum upon spikes/etc.” feature had also added something like this, which is the only reason I hadn’t mentioned it earlier. Over the last two days, two full ruby grapples (100-0) have taught me rather thoroughly otherwise.
40mbps fibre from South Africa. The line is solid. The country’s infrastructure is… not. Intermittent latency spikes and lost packets are more the norm than not. They overload the exchanges and do other silly stuff.
That being said, most games handle it extremely well. My little sister is gold/diamond in LoL season after season, PoE & Diablo are seamless, Overwatch works without a hitch, etc, etc. Occasionally some oddity of a game (like Albion) struggles due to it - but most have implementations that handle it just fine.
When the network is solid Boundless is solid. When I lose a single packet Boundless does a little dance (literally, 1 lost packet becomes a point of view switch and the start of meditation with a quick switch back). If I get a little spike of lag farming rubies I will likely die (not jumping and building walls in front of me before moving closer to the edge helps but it is tedious). Playing with Copper tools is currently my safety net for most evenings - not that bad when I lose them due to a spike sending me into a lava pit.
I’ve played with it set to minimum and set to maximum. My line easily handles maximum. Been playing with it set it Min (1Mbit) the past few days - but that doesn’t help against latency spikes. The game isn’t causing the spikes - it just deals with external spikes very badly. The changes AzureHelios suggest like changing the simulation logic a bit when the client is not continuously streaming to you in the expected manner - would improve things a ton.
Instead of the current key up/down only logic, just implement it with up (repeat send every x ms) and then down. This way a spike/loss cannot cause more than x ms of movement which is much less likely to kill the unfortunate oortian at the other end of the line.
I honestly don’t think I have an issue with chunk download myself. Most of the time the game isn’t laggy at all (except perhaps for about a second immediately after going through several portals in a row). I seem to have “periods” of low latency that last for hours where I have no issues at all, then sometimes I’ll have solid chunks of hours where I’m getting “lag-drag” and overshoot and return to sanctum flickers every few seconds, even while not moving around and after the entire (viewable) world is already loaded at max detail.
These aren’t even associated with being in specific places, as far as I can tell, so I really doubt it has to do with my chunk rate. I’m not saying that the game (either client or server side) is at fault for the spikes, (probably people’s netflix habits, if I had to guess) I’m just saying that the game doesn’t deal with them very well when they happen.
hey azurehelios add me on steam i play boundless too and by the way i stuck in your base the one with a blue corridor with blue lights going down it portals says locked so it wont let me out been stuck in there for 2 hour i cant go back to sanctum and warp home cause i have no coins so could you add me at : armytargets2000
i didnt know where to put this so i put it too your latest comment
oh and my steam say game over dude
And if you can’t afford that it should still let you - assuming you’re warping to the world with your home Beacon on. This is the only case we allow you to go negative.