Multiplayer really laggy

[liq3]

Alright, I've tried to play with 3 people so far. Everyone I played with lagged. I think it's because I'm in Australia.

Anyway, can't really say much else. Really sad, because I want to play co-op, but it's not very fun when it lags so much.

[Darkreaver1980]

I realy love the game but so far, multiplayer is a pain to play because of the heavy lag.

I'm from Germany, when i play against US people that its allmost unplayable. I allways get "Wait" on all players, it rarely goes away (blinking).

I have DSL 2000 and i use no firewall and all my router ports are open (not kidding ) :

Modem Status Connected
DownStream Connection Speed 2304 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 448 kbps

When i play against someone from europe than i still get the "wait" state. It flashes up around 2-3 times per second so the game is still running slower than usuall which takes some fun away.

so far i was only able to play a allmost lagfree (wait state only flashed once per second up) game once and i tried severall people (20+, just quick test games)

[liq3]

oh yes, if you want to know, my speeds are...

4mbyte/ps down
100kbyte/ps up.

So, nothing to do with my interents. :p

[eRe4s3r]

Your internet speed has nothing to do with your latency  But it has to be said - the game doesn't really work well with bad pings, thats because synchronization is only good if pings are perfect, if pings are bad, game becomes slower (which you call lag) but in fact the game is slowing down to synchronize with each player, lag would be units skipping about.

I would wager that europeans can only play against other europeans lag-free too..

[Fiskbit]

I'm in the US (west coast) and haven't managed a smooth game yet. It seems about as choppy for me regardless of whether I'm playing people on the other side of the country or even world. I manage speeds of 322 kbyte/s down and 45-60 kbyte/s up.

If this is due to latency (which I wouldn't be surprised about in my case, since my ISP does stuff that tacks on more than 30 ms), then perhaps some sort of latency control like Starcraft has (low, high, or extra high latency settings, affecting the delay before commands start executing) would be helpful.

[x4000]

The game has to transfer a lot of data, unfortunately.  100kbps up may be pushing it, if you're the host in a sufficiently large game.  The main culprit for lag is generally packet loss, because with TCP it then has to resend and try again, etc.  I may need to look into a UDP solution like I once had in the game, just for the apparently-higher-packet-loss-rate networks that a lot of people are on.  I have 7000 down and 368 up, as do most of my alpha testers, and we can play perfectly lag-free with two in the Raleigh area, two in the Boston area, in the US.

This is something I'll have to investigate more next week, but any other information on your networks would be much appreciated.  There are a few ways to get some network statistics on dropped packets, etc, but off the top of my head I don't know of any good ones.  Otherwise, it might just be that your upload speed is more constrained during hours you are playing than it is supposed to be -- doing a speed test at that time would probably be helpful.

This game has some of the higher network requirements around, I think, which makes it a bit more challenging.  I'll also look into some high-latency modes that you might be able to try in order to give more time to the network.  That might be a solution right there, I'm not sure.

[Revenantus]

I'm on 8mbps down, 1.3mbps up. I was able to play a perfectly smooth game with Darkreaver, but Fiskbit was apparently suffering major latency issues when trying to play with him.

I volunteer for any tests you might want to carry out.

[x4000]

Well, here's a new version that you can use to try out different latency settings.  I might make this more automated at some point, once I have more data, but for now this should help you run in "high latency mode" or whatever in order to prevent the network from causing as much in-game lag.  I would imagine that a setting of +2 or +4 would probably fix it for most people, but we'll see.  Depending on what exactly the problem on the network is, some other measures may still be needed, but I'll be very interested to see what you guys report the effect of this as.  Hopefully it helps!

[Echo35]

Alright, I've tried to play with 3 people so far. Everyone I played with lagged. I think it's because I'm in Australia.

Anyway, can't really say much else. Really sad, because I want to play co-op, but it's not very fun when it lags so much.

Well you DO live in Australia. The Internet service there isn't exactly well known for being fast or anything I've got DSL and it gets a little notchy online. Man I can't wait to get back to my T1 connection in my Apartment...

[liq3]

The game has to transfer a lot of data, unfortunately.  100kbps up may be pushing it, if you're the host in a sufficiently large game.  The main culprit for lag is generally packet loss, because with TCP it then has to resend and try again, etc.  I may need to look into a UDP solution like I once had in the game, just for the apparently-higher-packet-loss-rate networks that a lot of people are on.  I have 7000 down and 368 up, as do most of my alpha testers, and we can play perfectly lag-free with two in the Raleigh area, two in the Boston area, in the US.

Is this bits or bytes? I never know which one people are talking about. :/

Alright, I've tried to play with 3 people so far. Everyone I played with lagged. I think it's because I'm in Australia.

Anyway, can't really say much else. Really sad, because I want to play co-op, but it's not very fun when it lags so much.

Well you DO live in Australia. The Internet service there isn't exactly well known for being fast or anything I've got DSL and it gets a little notchy online. Man I can't wait to get back to my T1 connection in my Apartment...

I have pretty much the best internet in Australia as far as speed goes, at least for home use.

Picture for proof. 

Well, here's a new version that you can use to try out different latency settings.  I might make this more automated at some point, once I have more data, but for now this should help you run in "high latency mode" or whatever in order to prevent the network from causing as much in-game lag.  I would imagine that a setting of +2 or +4 would probably fix it for most people, but we'll see.  Depending on what exactly the problem on the network is, some other measures may still be needed, but I'll be very interested to see what you guys report the effect of this as.  Hopefully it helps!

This almost fixes the lag, although even with +10 there's still a small amount left (maybe 50ms stallin every 1000ms of gameplay). There's also no real difference between +7 and +10 as far as lag goes.

[x4000]

Glad that mostly fixes it!  Apparently it's not an issue of bandwidth for you, but of packet loss.  Having the extra time per game "turn" gives it the time it needs to self-correct for the dropped packets.  I'm not surprised that past a certain point it makes little difference, that's basically the point of your network latency and then anything beyond that is just adding extra command latency with no real benefit on the network.  Whew, glad this is working for you in general, though, I'm not an expert on various types of network conditions like this.