Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

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Bushdoctor
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Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

Post by Bushdoctor »

Good day,

I have got a problem that I don't understand. Perhaps somebody knows what's going on.
Every so often during multiplayer games, my character freezes in place but the map itself stays active. I can still see everything moving, all players are still doing their thing, etc. but my character almost doesn't react to anything anymore. It almost seems as if the batteries in my keyboard have died, but I can still get into my options (not that it helps) and when trying to get into my inventory, it quickly opens up, and then closes again. I can also still open the chat and type there, but my text doesn't reach the game. Sometimes this frozen period takes several minutes and then I return to normal, but more often it seems to freeze indefinitely and I end up quitting the game.

I'm playing on a somewhat older machine (i5) but when doing a check, it shows that I'm not even getting close to maxing out my CPU or Ram. My internet speed should be quite sufficient. I'm usually downloading MP maps with 2-3mb/s.
I noticed that recently when connecting to an MP game, the Catching Up phase can take a very very long time, and sometimes the green bar even goes backward,
does the game perhaps try to 'catch me up' when I'm already active in an MP game?

Thank you.


Zavian
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Re: Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

Post by Zavian »

Also read viewtopic.php?f=7&t=51319 because the symptoms you describe sound like they might be caused by your computer struggling to keep up witht he server.

Bushdoctor
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Re: Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

Post by Bushdoctor »

Zavian wrote:Also read viewtopic.php?f=7&t=51319 because the symptoms you describe sound like they might be caused by your computer struggling to keep up witht he server.
Let me start out by saying that I am familiar with all those files that both of you linked for me. Still: thanks for those. The problem, in this case, is that those files are all very generic.
Yes, they speak about server lag and server freezes and crashes, but from my point of view I am not suffering from any of those problems. Apart from an occasional stutter I don't seem to be bothered by lag too much and to me, as a laymen in this area, it doesn't seem like the server is freezing or crashing because I can see others still moving around for longer periods of time.

I was hoping that someone would either tell me "Dude, what you described is exactly how it looks like when the server is freezing" OR someone would tell me that my description doesn't sound regular and requires more investigation in which case I will be happy to upload any necessary log or zip file. Nevertheless, thank you for your replies.

Loewchen
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Re: Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

Post by Loewchen »

Bushdoctor wrote:
Zavian wrote:I was hoping that someone would either tell me "Dude, what you described is exactly how it looks like when the server is freezing"
What you described sounds exactly like the issue described in the performance issue section in the second link I provided, if you want to know details you need to provide the info requested in the "Further reading..." link in that section.

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Re: Freezing in MP game while rest of players is doing fine.

Post by torne »

Your computer isn't fast enough to keep up with the game, for sure: the behaviour of "catching up" is the big hint there.

When you connect to the server, the game makes a save and sends it to you, and by the time you've finished downloading that save (even if it only takes a couple of seconds) the save is out of date: the server has still been running for that time, so now you are a couple of seconds (or however long the download took) behind everyone else. This means that your copy of the game now has to run at faster than 100% speed to catch up: while every other player is simulating 60 updates per second, your computer needs to go faster to close the gap. If your machine can only manage to go at, say, 66 UPS, then you're only catching up by 1/10 of a second per second, and if you are five seconds behind due to the download, it will take 50 seconds to catch up before you can play. If the catching up bar goes backward, that means you're getting further behind, because your computer isn't managing to exceed the speed the server is running at.

The same kind of thing happens during the game: once you're caught up and everyone is running at 60 UPS together, everything will be fine, but if, say, there's a large biter attack causing a lot of activity to happen, then the game may slow down due to the additional simulation work, and it will slow down *more* for people with slower computers. So, if the server slows down to 55 UPS, and your computer slows down to 50 UPS, then you'll start to fall behind again, and if you fall behind too much you can't interact with the game any more because anything that you sent to the other players would be "too late".

So, yes, your computer is the bottleneck. Factorio runs the simulation code on a single thread, so the fact that your CPU isn't maxed out unfortunately doesn't mean much - it can only make use of one core for this work, so if even one of your cores is maxed out then that's enough. You can reduce the problem by slowing the game down for everyone: if the admin runs "/c game.speed=0.9" then the game will run at 90% speed for everybody, and that may be enough that your computer no longer falls behind. Alternatively, you could host the game on your computer: if the slowest computer is hosting the game then everyone else will automatically slow down to match it whenever UPS drops below 60, but when things are simple enough for the slow machine to run at 60 UPS everyone will run at that speed. (yes, in factorio it's beneficial for the *least* powerful machine to be the server!)

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