What are reasonable and enforceable limits to reduce lag in multiplayer?

[Panpiper]

So I've been noticing more and more lag of late as people are building bigger ships, bigger fleets, etc.. I am guilty of some of this myself. Our server does not have any posted limits and many are availing themselves of that freedom. Sadly the game is not really built for such excess, and until we get maintenance costs or something else that will reduce those things that cause lag, it would seem prudent for a server to enforce some sorts of limits on the scope of player's building ambitions.

My questions is two fold. What limits are reasonable, that still permit much fun and variety? What limits are easily or practically enforceable? Ship size limits? If so, what size? Fleet size? Entity count?

I understand there is a feature that can automatically limit the size of ships. That certainly can be a step, as ships measuring kilometers are no doubt an issue. So too however can my hundred ship drone fleet potentially be an issue. Is there any way in game to automatically restrain entity count per player? Total mass of all ships combined? Are very large stations an issue?

I do not fully understand all the myriad things that can cause lag. Quantities of entities doing collision checks is certainly one of them. Is quantity of logic also?

 

[kurosawa]

A1: That cannot be answers as each person have there own idea of what is reasonable, you have to set the limit to what you think is right unless you want to take up the ago old circular discussion "im right you are wrong, you wrong im right".

 

[DrTarDIS]

For "best user accessibility" Builds should be curtailed to have 50-or-less entities totaling 2-million-or-less blocks in any loaded sector cluster. You CAN go over that, with higher end specs client-side, but it's a good rule-of-thumb metric I've seen work with mid-range computers.
Other things like massive-hit-detection-swarms can cause spotty lag no matter how you put it. As does anything that causes more chunk updates than the server has deca-FlOp or network traffic can send in chunks.

 

[Shaker]

Ships:
Max size is 1km any direction
Any ship over 3mil is for show or organised battles.
Entity limit: aim for under 80

Fleets: 5 ships
Helps with there pathing as they always crash into each other.

 

[Tamren Shade]

GenXNova has the following ruleset, and for the most part the server runs pretty smoothly.

Community Guidelines

Contrasted to the NFD build server which has no limits besides "try not to crash the server".

The Genx server is hands down more reliable, but I enjoy the freedom of building whatever I want on the build servers, I just have to deal with more irregularities and disconnects on NFD :P

 

[Batavium]

What limits are reasonable, that still permit much fun and variety? What limits are easily or practically enforceable? Ship size limits? If so, what size? Fleet size? Entity count?

As stated everyone has there own idea of what is reasonable. My idea on it is simple. The server specs are the final limit to anything. If any one person goes over what the server is capable of then the whole server population suffers. But it really is that simple. There is a limit to available CPU power and there is a limit to the amount you want to fork out to keep the server running.

Some people will react very angry to that. You are taking away our toys. I don't want to be limited etc etc. I have been an admin on many a server and my answer to them was always go find yourself another server then. I never regretted taking a though stand for the greater good. If people don't understand then they can always start a server themselves and pay for it themselves.

I understand there is a feature that can automatically limit the size of ships.

You can limit the amount of systems linked to a computer. The server gives a warning if you try to enter a ship that has like to many salvage beams. It will render the ship inoperable until the number of beams is under the set limit. You can restrict more. I type this away from my StaeMade pc so i can't check what file exactly you need to edit. But lookup any .XML files a lot of things well practically anything can be changed in there.

Are very large stations an issue?

To a point they are. It depends on how many people are around it all the time. If it is a big faction then the server has to feed that sectors data every time someone comes and goes to the station. Ones loaded it doesn't do much. What you can do is give them an Advanced Shop 4 sectors away and ask them to park any capital ship there. To bring the total entity count of the sector down. Since all the ships with turrets combined can be very though on the server. An advanced shop has rails if you use 4 factioned dockers then the whole shop is theirs. It is basically a second Home Base nothing parked on it can be hurt or stolen by others. As long as the ships are factioned. The more people use the station the more it will weight in on the server CPU. That's why i always keep my spawn as clean as possible since that sector is often loaded.

Is quantity of logic also?

Logic can hurt a lot. The more complex the more CPU power to calculate it all on top of what everyone else is doing is needed. Even a large single factory can lag if it has a lot of enhancers. But the biggest problem is rotation of entities or weapon clocks. Weapons clocks on my servers always meant strait ban regardless of excuse. Yes some use it without ill intend but then i still say go do that someplace else. No toys like that on my servers.


Some rules i had:


No settling on Planets.

No settling near Planets if you have a Home Base Station no planet near you may load it's surface.

Planets may only be mined after you shoot them.

The admin will remove everything that lags Without Warning! "I often did a sector save to sort it out later when the dude comes back online"

Spawn is no parking lot any and all ships left there will be deleted. "If you use a public parking station set it at least 4 sectors away from the spawn sector"

 

[Panpiper]

Thanks Batavium for the involved reply.

GenXNova has the following ruleset, and for the most part the server runs pretty smoothly.

Community Guidelines

Contrasted to the NFD build server which has no limits besides "try not to crash the server".

The Genx server is hands down more reliable, but I enjoy the freedom of building whatever I want on the build servers, I just have to deal with more irregularities and disconnects on NFD :P

I actually enjoy building within a rules set, as long as those rules are actually enforced. Building without limits is simply an exercise in who has more time and patience for mining and who is willing to live with the worst and most lag inducing newb cube titan. The ideal limits would be ones set by the game, such as material costs for maintenance, (Reverse FP) faction point crew costs, extra crew requirements for logic systems, etc.. Such would not require any admin enforcement as they would be built into the game. People could decide of their own accord how much effort they wish to devote to maintaining their oversized, over turreted, over logic ship.

Apparently however on GennovaX, some of their odder rules are NOT enforced, which can leave someone who is following the rules seriously disadvantaged. One in particular is their rule stating that no turret may have weapons on them with a range greater than two sectors. This seriously gimps missile/beam and cannon/beam, two of the most useful weapon combos in the game, but it will literally be the death of you if you follow the rules and someone else does not. I have to wonder what the logic is in limiting such weapons?

I am thinking a rule something along the lines of, "Don't build stuff that lags the server. If your builds lag the server, you may be given a warning to fix it if the lag is minimal. But if you are lagging the server a lot, you might not be given any warning at all. That said, if what you have built is within the limits described by these guidelines (using something like GennovaX's rules), then you can be reasonably assured that your build will not be deleted."

Those guidelines would describe reasonable limits to ship block count, dimensions, number of turrets, etc.. They would also warn about the use of certain types of logic such as weapon clocks, and likely outright prohibit chain drives.

There is also the issue of fleet size and drones colliding with one another. I see that GennovaX has a limit in total block count for fleets (300K for all drones together), total number of drones (20) and the stipulation (if I read it correctly) that they have zero turrets of their own. I 'think' that is in place to prevent people from using docked 'drones' to bypass their turret limits. I would be concerned about not letting drones have 'any' turrets of their own, as they are otherwise a total sitting duck for swarmers. I also worry that 20 might be in itself excessive... I had one experiment with drones go awry with just a single drone bouncing all over for ten minutes trying to dock with a carrier, and it's docking point was a good twenty blocks from the carrier.

As an aside, I am also thinking that if there is a hard block/mass limit, we should probably also drop the mining bonuses to vanilla (right now they are X12 for factioned space, as opposed to vanilla's X5. If materials are harder to get, it makes hitting the mass limit harder and therefor makes those ships appropriately 'larger' in terms of achievement. I am further thinking that a block limit per say is less desirable than a mass limit. Many decorative blocks have relatively low mass, and those who build pretty ships should not be penalized. The problem is that armor is likely too heavy if having a mass restriction. Perhaps if we restrict mass as opposed to blocks, we could also change the block config to make standard armor have a mass of 0.1 and advanced armor a mass of 0.15 as opposed to it's current 0.15 and 0.25 respectively.

I am still not sure what actual mass, entity and fleet size restrictions would be appropriate. I do understand that it is largely dependent upon the strength of the server. Should we have a no turrets on drones rule, and let them be sitting ducks for swarmers? I think the literal collisions between drones is FAR more of an issue than would be the presence of a PD turret or two on any of them. I could of course be wrong.
[doublepost=1479654770,1479654583][/doublepost]

Ships:
Max size is 1km any direction
Any ship over 3mil is for show or organised battles.
Entity limit: aim for under 80

Fleets: 5 ships
Helps with there pathing as they always crash into each other.

These sound reasonable. A mere 5 ships in a fleet though? I have indeed experienced their collision issues. If there is a limit of five ships in a fleet, that would certainly allow them some point defense turrets, which is a big issue for me.

 

[Tamren Shade]

Resources are a non issue on NFD, it's a dedicated building server and everyone has creative mode and access to admin commands. One of the requirements to get on the whitelist is to post a picture of your work to prove you are physically capable of building something other than a cube.

Honestly, I wasn't sure how well that would work, but the two big Thou-Shall-Not-or-BANHAMMER rules are "Don't break or delete something that isn't yours without permission" and "Absolutely no saving of BPs that aren't yours without permission" . I've found the community there to be fun to hang out with and always ready to admin jump over to pass out some feedback on request .

 

[Az14el]

-at least a stated block or weight limit is pretty much a must, "no lag" as the broad brush rule on entity size is a bad idea in general, it's asking for size creep that will start to hurt the server at some point, and by then there's so many offending ships & the lag causes are so vague and hard to pin down that you're probably looking at an early world reset.

-Actually enforce these limits in the xml configs, as with GenXnova, you can have a good admin team but they can't check everything, and if it's still allowed within the game rules established by the config, even if not server rules, size creep is going to happen.

-Reasonable planet size & salvage beam groups, neither has to be particularly low tbh just neither too crazy either, both easily enforcable in xmls, again. Minimise the worst happening with planet mining, too many inefficient beams hitting several huge plates at once sorta thing.

-Higher jump drive distance, chain drives are going to be used, if not them then very fast charging jump ships. Less sectors being repeatedly loaded for people to get where they're going the better.

-Reasonable sector sizes & speed, too much in one sector is very bad, lots of people repeatedly loading lots of sectors with stuff in it is also pretty bad, there's a balance to strike here too. Could just be said "use defaults" but I don't think 2km sectors is even that stable with default speed, you really do pass through sectors fast especially in combat (double annoying), and definitely not once people start using fleets.

my .2

 

[Groovrider]

The server I play on is RP and has a 25k mass limit on ship before you have to declare it a capital and submit it for approval. That puts a whole new design focus on getting the most out of build and go up against custom ship and stations. This keeps ship mostly out of the lag category and keeps drone spam to a minimum as far as I can tell. The thing is ultimately it will only work if players are all on board. I'm having a blast building within the rules because it's genuine challenge with more of a focus on light and lethal as opposed to death wedge (guilty. very very guilty). I think players just need to realize they're working towards a common good rather than everyone for themselves.

 

[Shaker]

Panpiper fleets at 5 is a good number we found, hasnt been to many players causing problems. its a rule that the servers community needs to work on though.

In reality this game in its current state needs a block ceiling, my personal view is its in the 3-4million range, this is coming from someone

 

[Panpiper]

So, very tentatively, what I am thinking based upon what others have said, and attempting to err in the direction of freedom (always the direction one should err towards)... These 'might' be the rules:

*

These rules exist to preserve the viability of the server. They are not simply restrictions upon you. These rules are what give you the freedom to play on a relatively lag free server. For your own sake as much as that of everyone else, please obey not just the letter of these rules, but the spirit in which they were intended.

The server has a mass limit of 300K. This is game enforced, you will not be able to fly a ship that exceeds this. This includes the mass of any and all docked entities such as turrets and drones.

Ships may not have more than 40 turrets. A ship found to be in violation of this rule will be deleted.

A fleet may have a maximum of 5 ships. The mother ship is subject to the standard ship rules. The other ships in the fleet are considered drones and subject to additional restrictions. Drones may not have more than 4 turrets, and may not exceed a mass of *undefined*. Such drones are expected to engage in combat as independent entities, undocked from the mother ship. Using drones to bypass the turret limit is violating the spirit of the rules and will result in your fleet being deleted.

Stations may not have more ships docked at the station than the number of active players in the faction plus three. So if you have four players in your faction, your station could have seven ships docked. Drones that are docked to their mother ship are exempt, they are not docked to the station but rather their mother ship. Be aware that large numbers of ships in the same sector, even when docked, can create a significant lag issue. Please consider using a shop at least four sectors away from your station as a docking point for ships not actively in use. You can have as many ships as you want docked this way at trade guild shops. Factioned ships docked this way are just as invulnerable as if they were docked at your station. An admin might be willing to give you such a shop if you do not already have one.

The server has a limit of no more than 700 salvage beams active at any moment per player. These can be maximum strength beams. This is not a limit on salvage modules, but solely on the quantity of resultant salvage beams.

Chain drives are forbidden. Logic clocks that use rotating docked entities are also forbidden. Ships found to contain said items will be deleted.

Certain changes have been made to help balance these rules. As the ship size restriction is one of mass, not blocks, so as to not unfairly disadvantage ships that use advanced armor, the mass of standard armor has been changed to 0.1 and advanced armor to 0.15. Jump range is now 24 sectors instead of 8 and recharge is twice as fast (not sure if this last is doable).

The mining bonus for factioned systems has been brought back to the vanilla level of x5. This will make a 300K mass ship as difficult an achievement as a 700K mass titan used to be.

*

Feedback?

 

[Scypio]

My questions is two fold. What limits are reasonable, that still permit much fun and variety? What limits are easily or practically enforceable? Ship size limits? If so, what size? Fleet size? Entity count?

Ships with no aux powers. That's it, playing with the engineering in starmade and the power cap is a good way to not be laggy for us and others. Also, do not cover your ship with tons of turrets or do not spam theses ships, you can go easily high in entity count.

Also you can go with rules and so on, like you started to.

 

[Az14el]

I think the mass changes of armor might end up being too much of a buff there
And shield-rechargers imo are the most powerfully stat weighted non-weapon block in the game already, capacitators might be a better place to look if you really want to strengthen shields without "breaking" them. Thats a way to draw out fights, but buffing rechargers quickly causes stalemates (which can go very bad lag wise, final of this years B&S comes to mind)

can't speak for all of them but the rest look pretty reasonable considering the state of the game
muh rotators though

 

[Batavium]

Feedback?

Looks like a nice config that will enable all players to enjoy the server. You are probably going to tinker a little with them as time progress and how the server handles. New StarMade versions will also make an impact here.

You lowered the mining bonus to 5x. A neat feature I experimented with is the Astronaut mining Luck Bonus. You are totally exposed and it sure don't lag. That deserves a high multiplier. Some other servers also use this.

 

[kingreol]

the fleet restriction may be a bit small to make carriers not viable. we are assuming the update after this will be fleet based. everyone will be playing with it.

 

[Sinister99]

Putting some rules on our server is not a bad idea, but some of what you are trying to put on it is just wrong. 300k mass ship, come on really, well there goes a good carrier / flag ship. 500k would be better. And the biggest thing that lags servers and sectors is people using swarm missiles. When you get into a fight and 100 swam missiles are fired everything lags.

I would say limit swarm missiles is the biggest thing. It makes people's ams turrets more usable (We all know the AI sucks at shooting down missiles) as well as fps and more people are more willing to fight one another making the game more enjoyable.

As for the mining bonus that's a good idea, this as well would discourage people from building 500k ships or really have to work together in trading or faction team work to get them up and going.

The amount of turrets is another descent idea, but you cant just say 40 period. It really has to depend on the size of the ship. And once again I can make 1 turret with a crap ton of swarm missiles and lag the shit out of everyone.

5 drones per is to low for a drone carrier, a max of 20 would be better (with a limit on carrier drone mass size). It's a carrier not a fleet. With that said yes a none carrier fleet should have a limit of say 5 or 6. Figure Flagship / Carrier, a Battleship, Destroyer, Cruzer, and a couple frigates is what makes up a good fleet and not too much to lag everyone out, (if there's no swarm missiles) And a limit on carrier drones would limit the amount of turrets a person can place on them as well so its killing 2 birds one stone.

As for Chain drives.....ARE you smoking crack!!! They are almost a must have. I'm sorry but I don't want to spend 10 hours at work only to come home and have to spend 2 hours jumping across the star system to fight someone. Yes there are jump gates but ya those are very easily destroyed and don't last. Now limit the amount of chain drive to limit the amount of logic is a good idea like no chain drive larger then 10 or 12.

As for Logic, limit of logic operated spinning / turning clock or what have you per station and ship is good, but don't get too dramatic on it. Logic is one of the best qualities of the game. But you do need to find a balance for server stability.

Another thing, docked ships at a station....Well that's a tough one because it does lag the sector and the surrounding sectors up to 8 away but you cant really limit the whole faction to 1 per player +3. Now a limit of 3 per player would be more reasonable with +3 for faction community use. It puts a limit on crap in that sector as well as giving people the option to build.

Also Pan, I play on your server and am there everyday. I'm also the first one to fight Joel one on one just to make a point of I wont put up with mining griefers. (On our server that is) But the server is a PvP server. That's just me though I hate mining griefing. I wont kill miners because I know how boring it is to mine and the time it takes away from enjoying the rest of the game.

 

[Ashes152]

Panpiper
Limiting the amount of salvaging beams is one thing but limiting a player’s ship or fleet size/amount/capabilities strictly so that your Alpha stage game server does not lag or crash is a death sentence to the player population. Implementing these rules will only get the server by until a couple of the max potential ships are created and then you have lag again. Server wide lag at this point in the game can actually be created by only two blocks if done correctly.

The server is PvP. If you would like a RP or build server I would be happy to suggest you one.

I see that you did however work off of GenXNova server restrictions however decided to restrict more. With that, I might as well go back there along with everyone else and leave you to the super restricted server with no lag.

Feedback?

Instead of hiding this away on a forum and working with Fuzzy “behind closed doors” bring this to light on the server itself. Mail the active faction leaders and get their own and their faction’s input before telling them what they can or can’t do. Or there could be a section of the forums on the server web page for StarMade. If you truly think that the lag on the server recently is because of the size of ships you are truly mistaken and need to ask around.

I am not saying do not place up to date rules on the server. Just make sure the rules are not going to discourage the current players and they are set in place to deal with the actual issues the server has.

Feel free to message me in-game and I can point you in the right direction. Please hurry though, from what I gather you two are planning on implementing these rules with the server wipe for the NPC faction update.

Ashes152
Sons of Olympus
Founder

 

[Batavium]

This post is not aimed at anyone particular in this thread. But i hope all will read/watch it.

If Schema had a magic wand that he could use to remove all problems from StarMade. Than by now. He would wave it so hard that the Voyager Spacecrafts. All the way near the outer rim of our Solar System. Would see him clearly jumping up and down with it.

Running a MineCrehm StarMade Server:

Be sure to watch all 5 episodes

RP Detected! Destroy Destroy!

Spoiler: Admincraft 1

Spoiler: Admincraft 2

Spoiler: Admincraft 3

Spoiler: Admincraft 4

Spoiler: Admincraft 5

No admin wants to be a 24/7 police officer or put restriction on the server population just for the fun of it. This game has issues they need to be addressed and set into rules. Not so he can hunt all day any day for that puny little rotating radar dome. But for when that puny little rotating radar dome THAT HAPPENS TO BE YOURS. Desides at RANDOM to back flip the server. He can than say he buddy it's in the rules please take it down or i will. Do it a second time and we are going to have to have a little chat. And no he is not going to go out of his way looking for any other radar domes of other people because they aren't bugging the server out right now.

Admins have a real life and need to eat, sleep, WORK so they can fork out the bill. And when they are online they want to play the game that they love so much as to even open a server for it. FOR YOU.

That said StarMade seriously lacks knowledgeable admins. And you can only learn by doing it. So apply for an admin position on a server near you. To start out the owner can limit your commands. So that any mistakes won't cause much harm.

 

[MacThule]

Block limit sounds great. Personally I don't feel that the server performance needs to be repeatedly tested between versions where no substantial performance changes have been made. I doubt that the developers' goal is a game that makes the biggest ships possible just shy of breaking high-end servers. At this point in development gameplay dynamics and meta dynamics are probably more important to test than "what can my CPU and this server handle??" unless there's another big improvement like the chunk32 upgrade.

I believe that a block limit is going to improve player numbers over time because the game will be more naturally playable with less crashes and less lag-outs even at high server pops. It will actually help prevent players from doing things that hurt the server and accidentally degrading their own gameplay experience (and that of others, when it impacts the whole server). Sure, a couple players will bail right off just out of offense and general orneriness... but I don't think they're the ones to worry about. We lose so many new players every day who come to check the game out and find it laggy and crashy and never come back. A few mass-hogs won't be missed if the server becomes more hospitable.

Good to see an admin moving to protect gameplay. I hope eventually Schine does the same with vanilla, setting a default block limit that specialty servers can lift if they're huge fans of lag for the sake of ramming super star destroyers into each other.

I feel that the fleet limit... 5... is very restrictive. I fleet 10-20 small ships without a problem. I think a turret limit on drones might be wise though, I like that touch. I think rather than a fleet entity limit, a fleet total mass limit would be better, but would probably require direct enforcement, which sucks.