Technical Question about Multiplayer

[jacob814]

Let me preface and say I don't need an answer as to why the root issue is occurring, just clarification on a point someone is trying to make.

My dedicated multiplayer server is randomly lagging and stuttering without taking up full server resources and I'm currently getting help from the dedicated server's support team. They claim that when multiple clients are connected, the slowest among the clients can cause the server to lag and stutter if the client has a poor connection to the server. I don't know of a single other game that supposedly has this type of issue, is this true?

I would have thought the buffering and catchup features Factorio adds to multiplayer directly negates an issue like this, but my knowledge of how this game works is being called into question so clarification would be helpful, thanks.

TLDR: Does the slowest client connected to a dedicated server impact performance of other players? or is this untrue?

[Loewchen]

TLDR: Does the slowest client connected to a dedicated server impact performance of other players?

No. If you want to know what the actual issue is, follow 68653.

[jacob814]

TLDR: Does the slowest client connected to a dedicated server impact performance of other players?

No. If you want to know what the actual issue is, follow 68653.

Just to clarify, is what the dedicated server staff say is true or false? Your response isn't terribly clear. If what they say is false, do you have some sort of proof that explains how the actually multiplayer works?

Thank you regardless for the info, I appreciate your time.

[Loewchen]

I cleared it up.

[Rseding91]

TLDR: Does the slowest client connected to a dedicated server impact performance of other players?

No. If a client is too slow to keep up with the server the server will drop the client with a message "*player-name*'s computer or network could not keep up with the server, so they have been disconnected."

BUT! before that happens the client that is too slow will do everything it can to try to keep up. First it will start dropping frames; the FPS will start going down as the client tries to update the game without having to render anything. Eventually the FPS bottoms out at 3-5~ and if that isn't enough to catch up the client starts to get dropped from the server.

That means if you're getting FPS drops and or intermittent FPS drop while playing in multiplayer *you* may be the one that can't keep up with the server. You can check this by pressing F4 and enabling the "show-multiplayer-statistics" option. As you start falling behind the server the numbers shown will start getting larger until it's too much and you get dropped.

The server runs the full game simulation and the more players there are the more the players are likely to be doing causing more things to need to be handled per game update.

If you're at a point where you or other players can't keep up with the server you can lower the game speed with console commands:

90% game speed:

Code: Select all

/c game.speed = 0.9

80% game speed:

Code: Select all

/c game.speed = 0.8