Do you mind lag?

[bigyihsuan]

Obviously, no one likes lag, and I was even griefed, kicked, and banned from a server in the span of 5 minutes for "causing lag". (Looking at you)

So, do you mind some lag on servers? Or do you hate it with a passion?
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I don't mind the lag. Sure it's frustrating, but it's still playable. I don't know why people hate lag so much they ban people for causing it.

But then if people complain and people with low-end computers get banned because of lag, then something or someone is definitely doing something wrong.

[ssilk]

Their server, their rules. Sorry, world is unfair.

[AutoMcD]

depends if you are driving a tank near things you don't want to hit..

[keyboardhack]

Yes i hate lag and would prefer that people that lag a server leave the server so others can play without lag.
If you lag a server then find another server that you don't lag. There is lots of choices and there is no reason that you have to lag a server to play with other people.

Usually with lag a long download time follows and it's very annoying to have to wait > 2min for a person to join the server as that can happen fairly often. When you wait for 3 different people wanting to join the server for 15min, which prevents you from playing in the mean time, then you will be very annoyed aswell.
Laggy players also tend to disconnect more often which just makes the above issue worse.

[taiiat]

just like any other Multiplayer game - if you're located incredibly far away from the Server or something, and playing on that Server causes significant issues for everyone - then you definitely don't belong there. there's many other people you could play with, that are located closer or have a more favorable connectivity situation to.

for the Battlefield Servers i've run for my Clan - i definitely didn't feel bad about having a Script that Kicked people with very high Latency to the Server. it's nothing personal, just please go play on a Server that's in your Country / region of the world.


in the distant future when the entire world is lined with Fibre Optic for data transmission, this problem will all but go away, but that time is not today.

[Kewlhotrod]

butthurt because you where kicked because you was ruining the experience for other people?

[SyncViews]

Lag in Factorio creates a very bad experience, and Ive found that generally its a lot worse than a lot of other games when playing with the same people, because the developers are currently as I understand using a perfect-sync deterministic model, and that just does not scale.

When I play say Minecraft with those same people, and say they are hosting so I have up to 400ms ping (almost other side of world) its generally pretty much fine. But I know I can de-sync my local client by doing certain things. e.g. with something like changing a powered rail with a lever as a minecart passes over it, locally it will work, but by the time the server gets my input the minecart has passed. It takes MC a moment to notice and it will then "teleport" my minecart to its correct server position. There are some other glitches I've noticed, but overall its pretty rare and the experience is good (e.g. try to place a block, the server "rejects" it and it vanishes a moment later on my client).

Factorio on the other hand seems to set a delay to compensate for the slowest player on the entire server so actions can be applied in perfect sync to start with, so not only does the 400ms person get practically unusable delay for vehicles, and irritating delay for generally object interaction, it seems all the other people on the server did as well (who have sub-100ms to each other / server box). So I can very much understand why no-body wants the high latency player.
Computers that cant keep up and run the game at its 60 updates per second also cause problems, that is harder to solve though (cant recall what other recent games are doing, never been the cause of that problem and most games are light on CPU).
I tried driving a tank once in such a game and ended up flattening an outpost cause the road was not a mile wide



I think the download time issue is somewhat separate to lag though. There seems to be some bugs in the transfer code giving very poor transfer speeds (compared to what I got with TCP based transfers between the same computers), and hopefully in the future they will eliminate the pause.

Ill give the devs a lot of credit though. This sort of real time network programming is some of the most challenging programming work I have ever done, and I was doing it on a smaller scale than Factorio.
A lot of this could be better, but time is limited and we also want a game that is playable not just a network lag-elimination demo

[BlakeMW]

in the distant future when the entire world is lined with Fibre Optic for data transmission, this problem will all but go away, but that time is not today.

The speed of light is actually a significant limitation in latency, to the point a halfway round the world trip will take about 70ms just due to the speed of light. Of course the cables will hardly ever be the shortest path from A to B, so make that at least 100-150ms due to the light taking somewhat zig-zagged paths to get from one side of the world to the other. Those numbers are doubled if a response is needed. High pings to the other side of the world are here to stay. There may be improvements, but we can never expect inter-continental pings of like 20ms

[taiiat]

The speed of light

the Speed of Light is MUCH faster than what much of the world is running on now.
the Latency involved with Fibre Optic will be low enough for people in Eastern Europe to play games with people from America. even people from Russia would still be within playable ranges.

and, if the world can keep profiteering from getting involved to screw it up, Server Networks would almost entirely eliminate Latency all together.
i don't know if it was ever tried anywhere else, but i approved of a small Multiplayer games'(Mod but w/e) Community experimenting with Server Networks, and finding that networking all of the Servers that had been running separate matches in different countries together - even with today's copper still allowed people from across an ocean from each other to have significantly reduced Latency.
the European Players had reported that it was then like playing on a Server located in the same County as they were, rather than the previous across an ocean that it was located. which resulted that things were according to them, very smooth and didn't feel 'laggy' at all.


mix the two, and we'll have basically solved Latency issues for the majority of the world.
obviously Fibre Optics doesn't mean everything is actually instantaneous. but it's a huge step up from Copper, and that will make a big impact. eventually.


(since Networking is not my primary area of expertise, if this doesn't make sense - what i'm referring to is clusters of Servers located at different locations, which Clients then connect to, the Server the Client has the fastest connection to is automatically chosen as the one to use - all networking data is sent to that server, and that Server communicates with other Server(s) that share the Networking data in their own private Network, as the transmission speeds between the Servers is much faster than from a Client to the distant Server.)


this is pretty off topic though.

[BlakeMW]

the Speed of Light is MUCH faster than what much of the world is running on now.

Well the major trunklines already are fibre optics. But the distances around the world are just so great. The flight distance from Europe to America goes from about 6000km to 12000km and the speed of light is 300,000km/s, but in fiber optic glass it's only 200,000km/s which means the minimum one-way latency is 30-60ms due to the speed of light, with a round trip time (ping) of 60-120ms. I'm in central Europe in a city with excellent internet and when I ping a server in the near coast of america 8000km away I get about 120ms - the speed of light makes the absolute minimum 80ms and that assumes a perfectly straight cable.

I know there are still large parts of the world where poor local infrastructure adds dozens or hundreds of ms (or in case of satellite, nearly 1000ms), but at least for me my ping to america is already mostly limited by the speed of light in glass, and even the theoretical limit of 80ms is still a poor latency for gaming, enough to detract from the experience.

We're used to the speed of light being such a big number that it isn't relevant to anything, but in reality IT is bumping up hard against it.

[AutoMcD]

I'd be willing to bet that most of the delay is in the transceivers and repeaters, the cables do have resistance and every time there's a break in the cable, there's a piece of equipment associated with it. Every few miles.

I think the fastest route is to bounce off sats, that way you only have 1 or 2 points for the signal to pass through. Obviously a longer path, but much simpler.

[raidho36]

I think the fastest route is to bounce off sats, that way you only have 1 or 2 points for the signal to pass through. Obviously a longer path, but much simpler.

Except satellite connection is known for having absolute worst lag of all, it may be hard to believe but it lags even harder than dial-up connection on 56k modem. Satellites are residing in geostationary orbits, meaning that it will take at least ~250 milliseconds for your signal just to travel one way, full round trip will take at least twice as long. In practice there's many additional sources of lag, making it go as high as 1-2 seconds, and even higher than that sometimes. Oh and, it will only work good in clear sky, overcast makes connection quality plummet and it may not work altogether in rain or snow.

In other games, large lag manifested as update latency and occasional objects' jerkiness. In this game it's manifested as slowdown of the whole server and unbearable horrible stutter.

So no, I don't mind lag. I mind that kind of poor game behaviour in other than perfect network conditions.

[taiiat]

Well the major trunklines already are fibre optics.

yes, but the main conduits aren't what peoples' homes are connected to.

there's still a lot of copper and copper related equipment between the pipelines and the end Client.
and that's the slow stuff.