Latency: the curse

[DarkOne the Drow]

I see the devs mentioned the issues of latency in this week's blog I Fell into a Burning Ring of Fire.

I would like to know how the devs are planning to handle the issue of latency for all the non-USA based players considering their is only going to be 1 server (cluster) for PFO. If the server was in Europe, I would suffer only about 500 ms lag, in comparison to the typical lag of 1000 ms to 2000 ms for a USA server.

Playing on USA servers for games is suicidal, even worse with PvP, and generally not fun at all constantly dying because of bad lag.

[echilda]

I too am concerned about this. I mentioned lag before on the Kickstarter comments and Ryan told me that it is less of an issue for MMOs, but I still think this is going to be an issue with the PVP aspect fo the game.

[Bringslite]

What can be done? I doubt that GW will have the resources to open European servers for some time. Piazo might but how much are they putting into PFO themselves.

Maybe you can get a kickstarter going for support in Europe or get them to do so. Our brothers and sisters in your part of the world should have support too. It would only make the game stronger and thus It's survival more likely.

[Ryan Dancey]

Latency is not just a ping time. Latency involves a lot of server and client side issues as well as the length of the route between two points.

An FPS needs a very low latency because the decision loop is measured In fractions of a second and at that speed, ping time is meaningful. MMO decision loops are measured in whole seconds. It's highly unlikely that your ping time to the server will materially affect your ability to be competitive unless your route is absolutely horrible.

You're much more likely to be affected by the speed of your video card than your IP route.

[theStormWeaver]

I really hope you've misunderstood your latency DarkOne, because 500ms means that everything happening on your screen is half a second in the past. That would be... unplayable, in many games. Doesn't sound like a very long delay, but 60 frames per second is about 18ms/frame and with practice people can tell the difference in just a few frames difference. That amounts to a handful of ms.

[Dario]

theStormWeaver wrote:

I really hope you've misunderstood your latency DarkOne, because 500ms means that everything happening on your screen is half a second in the past. That would be... unplayable, in many games. Doesn't sound like a very long delay, but 60 frames per second is about 18ms/frame and with practice people can tell the difference in just a few frames difference. That amounts to a handful of ms.

It's obnoxious, but not unplayable. I've run with 1-1.5 second ping when I could even get internet in Afghanistan, and I was able to play several different MMOs. At least until they patched the games. That download was never going to happen.

[DarkOne the Drow]

Frame rate is definitely not an issues at 60+ frames per second with all effects switched on, and high resolution textures are being used. Now if I drop effects and textures resolutions, I easily have frame rates over 160 frames per second.

I talking about the actual latency of the route between client and server. If one sea cable is 150 ms on it's own, adding all the routers, and additional sea cables to get to USA, and land cables at both ends and between sea cables, the latency quickly adds up big time. Just between Europe and USA the sea cable link is roughly 100 ms depending which cable is used, excluding routers and land cables.

When something goes crazy along the route, lag can quickly rise to 10 sec.

[Being]

We have Russians, Swedes, Germans, and Australians playing all the time in Mechwarrior online and combat there requires instantaneous timing. The Europeans and Aussies don't seem particularly disadvantaged. One of the Germans I drop with is one of the finest light mech pilots there is, and Light Mechs are extremely fast and squirrelly.

You should be fine. They are talking 6 second pulses.

[theStormWeaver]

I think it is my eternal fate to be misunderstood.

I only used frame-rates as an example, a point of reference if you will, to illustrate how 500ms is actually a really long time from human perception (and its an eternity to a modern computer).

[DeciusBrutus]

Oddly enough, I only get ~50ms ping times going across the pond, and ~90ms going west across the country (From the US east coast). If you are getting 500ms to local destinations and 2000 ms to anywhere, it's an infrastructure issue.

[Ryan Dancey]

Yah - somewhere between you and the server is an overloaded router.

[Jiminy]

Or a lot of unnecessary routing/hops. Each hop to and from adds a few ms of latency and it all adds up. All depends on your ISP and how they route nationally and internationally.

[Xeen]

Ive dont plenty of PVP in Eve... played around most of the world. The only time latency becomes an issue is when there are well over 500 people in a fight. Things start to slow down a bit. It gets real nasty when there are much more.

What they did to solve those kinds of large battles is slow down time in the system in question to allow the latency to catch up... PFO will not have this problem for a long time. Battles of this scale will take years to develop. Eh but who knows, the game may become huge.

[Bluddwolf]

I have issues with loading the website / forums sometimes. I know this may be unrelated, but I hope it is not an indication of what is to come.

[Being]

Sometimes the forums are woefully slow for me too, Bluddwolf.

[DarkOne the Drow]

I guess total of 10 Tb sea cables out of country is not enough at the moment.

Anyway, forums are normally not put on powerful servers, and I noticed when the forums get slow for Paizo, database errors occurs. So it means the server for the database is the issue, and not powerful enough to handle the load, or bad database software is being used.

[Xeen]

Yeah, I wouldnt worry about the forums. PFO will have its own dedicated server with some Horse Power.