Choppy multiplayer

[Oillamp]

Hello,
I have recently bought the game and very quickly opened a multiplayer game to play with two of my friends - this seemed to work flawlessly until a third one joined. Ever since, the server has been choppy / laggy on and off and I have no idea how to fix it.

So as background, I have of course opened the right port, and my firewall is off. I play with 3 different people of different ping (2 of them had around 127ms when they pinged my IP, while the last one comes from Australia and had 380-390ms). As such, I set the latency to 400 when creating my game. I do not have peer to peer active, as there's a high ping difference, which I think is the right thing to do? We do seem to have more troubles when the girl from Australia is on the server, however it's not exclusive to when she is there,
Either way, it seems very confusing to me that it would make the entire server laggy if one person has high ping - if that is indeed the problem.

I have not found a way to increase the CPU allocation, and as such I cannot see if that is the problem. As a test, I completely disabled autosaves, and it seemed to help a little bit, albeit I cannot be too sure of that since the lagginess was inconsistent in general - might just have been luck. Somebody suggested that I should change the "max_threads=" in the config file to be equal to the number of cores I have, which would be 4 for me. This however was already right by default. If relevant, here are my basic specs:

Code: Select all

------------------
System Information
------------------
Time of this report: 3/25/2016, 02:58:36
       Machine name: GETLOST-PC
   Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.160211-0600)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
       System Model: Z97MX-Gaming 5
               BIOS: BIOS Date: 09/18/15 16:57:17 Ver: 04.06.05
          Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690 CPU @ 3.50GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.5GHz
             Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16246MB RAM
          Page File: 5066MB used, 27422MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\Windows
    DirectX Version: DirectX 11
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
   User DPI Setting: Using System DPI
 System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
    DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
     DxDiag Version: 6.01.7601.17514 64bit Unicode

I am quite confused as to what to do to improve it, if it is at all possible, since it's making the game a little bit less than enjoyable to play, and it would make me very sad to have to refund it, since I do like it a lot As such, any help would be greatly appreciated.

PS: I realised I didnt explain the lagginess/choppiness at all: Basically, it's either a constant "slow-motion" feeling, coupled with slight jerkiness, or a less steady and more random spiking that happens in between relatively smooth periods. I haven't been able to see a particular pattern depending on who is connected.

[Koub]

I would bet your problem comes from the australian mate indeed. As I've understood, the game doesn't run its onwn speed, letting high ping people behind. To maintain coherence between all players, it synchronizes everything for everyone almost real time. There is a mechanism of latency hiding that helps ... well hiding this latency, by assuming locally that one action you did was already synchronized with all clients until it actually is (for actions that have very little chance of not being able to get synchronized). But you basicallly are trying to synchronize four people around the world. There's not much that can be done against that at the moment.

[Oillamp]

Thanks for the reply, Koub. I must admit that's pretty disappointing to hear - I'll try messing with the latency a little bit more, in the hope that some magical number will make it more playable. If that's not the case, Ill unfortunately have to drop the game : (

Either way, I appreciate your help ^^

[roy7]

If you press F5 you can see how many recent packets were "slow" and from which other players. Those are packets that took longer to arrive than the Latency setting when you started the multiplayer session. When packets are slower than the latency chosen, it makes the game stutter/lag since everyone has to wait for those packets to show up.