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

[Lukwan]

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?

Mega factories can lag me out when I get too close. Standard logic is not too bad but there is a tipping point for everything at a certain scale.

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.

[Good on you, mate. Here is a little drama that plays out regularly on PvP servers.]

Noob: 'Help, I'm being attacked by some jerk at the spawn...this is my first day playing SM.'

NoobMa5ter3000: 'Pew pew, take that innocent person just trying to learn the game. I rulz!'

WhyteNight: 'Hey, stop harassing that innocent player just minding their business...or I'll come over there and smack you down, evil-doer.'

NoobMa5ter3000: 'Back off man, this is a PvP server so I can do whatever I want, and I want to gank people smaller than me cuz I have low self esteem ...and cuz I rulz! ' 'Freedooooooom!'

WhyteNight: 'Ya, the sever is PvP so you gank the noob, I gank you. That's freedom baby. Release the hounds!'

 

[DrTarDIS]

Oh, also: set all your weapon ranges 1 decimal place to the left in custom block config, and your sector size 1 decimal place to the right in the server config longer distance traveling before you have to load new sectors/chunks = good for load-phase In theory making sectors really big would stop a lot of CLIENT chug. You REALLY need to keep the weapons balanced in range as you scale the sectors or you end up with "sniper NPCS" for any long-range missile, as your HUD won't even give you a red marker. Makes your effective HUD range ~= your effective attack range as well when you keep them scaled.

 

[kingreol]

Oh, also: set all your weapon ranges 1 decimal place to the left in custom block config,

The weapon range would be very helpful with AI and range players missile beaming before the defender can load them in. Server speed on the server is 300 m/s Unintended consequences with this plus lack of chaindrives, manual mining becomes more a grindfest. Which is hurting the game if that's what players start out doing, instead of building, testing, etc

 

[Panpiper]

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.

That's a very good idea.

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.

I am not happy with a ship restriction of 5 either. Perhaps if we made it mass based instead as MacThule suggested, so smaller ships could be more numerous? Smaller ships likely would cause fewer collision issues. No more than X mass in drones in addition to the flag ship? No more than X entities within the drones? The question remains what the X's should be.

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.

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.

I expect you are right and that 500K would be more reasonable. I am also very unhappy with only 40 turrets. That is insufficient even just for point defense on any sort of titan sized ship. But limits can't be what "I" want to play with but what the server can handle. I would love nothing more than to have the turret limit at 100 or more. But what if half the players wind up with such ships? Will the server be able to handle it?

You are certainly right about swarm missiles. Perhaps a rule that says no more than 500 warheads per salvo? That may sound like a lot, but with swarmers it actually isn't. It is ridiculously easy to get to that number. Or is that still too high?

As for Chain drives.....ARE you smoking crack!!! They are almost a must have.

Not limiting chain drives sadly is not an option. The lag they can induce is greater than any other lag source short of my own drone fleets. Remember though that I am suggesting that jump recharge rates be increased by a factor of two and that their range be increased by a factor of three. I can already with vanilla jump, move my battleship from my home sectors near the edge of the galaxy to the galactic center in not much more than five minutes. With those changes, someone could easily get around the galaxy in a handful of minutes.

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.

+1 per player probably is too restrictive. +3 however is probably too generous if we really want to reduce the lag from large faction stations. +2 might be the better compromise. Remember that extra ships can always be docked at trade shops and they will be secure.

Oh, also: set all your weapon ranges 1 decimal place to the left in custom block config, and your sector size 1 decimal place to the right in the server config

You are correct that we need to get Fuzzy to revisit weapon ranges given the increased sector size as well as perhaps taking another look at the AI accuracy setting. We want the AI to be accurate at the appropriate range.

 

[MacThule]

Every time sensible block/mass limits are suggested a loud minority of people call them oppressive and unreasonable, yet is there a server where these supposedly functional ships over 300K mass can roll up on another faction's station parked full of large ships & turrets then have another ship over 300K mass jump in, deploy fighters, and engage in battle without causing dangerous level of server instability? None I've heard of. That's a fantasy, and trying to hold out for that fantasy is killing all the MP servers ability to function smoothly at realistic levels.

If it's not going to be PLAYABLE anyway, I say keep it in SP. I think to keep things playable (not just building/designing/flying solo far from planets but actually interacting with others freely), a mass limit closer to 100K is advisable for MP where the load any one individual (no matter how spoiled and/or self-centered) puts on the server needs to be forced to respect the needs of a dozen or so other players relying on the same infrastructure. 300K is extremely relaxed; MP is about interactive play, not how big we can build. We can continue to build 500K mass giants in SP and share them here on the Dock, but they break MP servers. They just don't work and aren't playable in public MP except under very strict conditions, and therefore the server should prevent any one egomaniac from crashing it for everyone just so they can posture and primp about "how long my ship is" or how it looks. Take that stuff to the docks.

Multiplayer combat with all ships under 50K is actually mostly smooth, fun and exciting even with 4-5 players & several AI ships engaged. This cannot be said of rolling combat and dogfights with several players sporting ships over 100K with massed turrets. Very low mass limits will help servers check the docked entity capacity automatically as well, BTW because of pure surface area issues. I think the mass limit should be set very low until new performance breakthroughs are released by the developers, as should docked entity count. It sucks. We all WANT huge titans and mass carriers to work in MP, but they don't. They aren't playable. They ruin the server for others.

I'm sure there are some servers out there that would love nothing more than to have players in 500K mass ships constantly crashing the server - admins love doing all that unpaid support work so you can show off your too-big-to-fight ship - but not every server has to accommodate that nonsense. Not every admin wants to spend 6 hours a day catering to kids with toys so big they constantly break. I don't blame any admin for protecting their server from such things, because currently almost every server is plagued by lag caused largely by a tiny minority of very selfish individuals crashing around in utterly useless giants. 300K? 100K? 50K? 30K? All good - whatever works, but I say start out extremely low and raise the roof slowly once you know what works. We already know what happens with very high limits - further testing on every single server at all times is not currently valuable. Haven't seen much "alpha testing" being done on legit public MP servers with very strict size controls though.

 

[Panpiper]

Very low mass limits will help servers check the docked entity capacity automatically as well, BTW because of pure surface area issues.

You make a very persuasive and interesting point. Fuzzy certainly does not want to have to police people and count turrets. I most emphatically do not want to be an admin myself because I am too likely to disappear for months at a time. Fuzzy doesn't have many other people he would trust with the job. Having a low mass limit would indeed be automatically self policing.

What do you suggest should be the mass limit for drones however? Such sadly would 'not' be self policing. Any way you can think of to make it so?

 

[MacThule]

What do you suggest should be the mass limit for drones however? Such sadly would 'not' be self policing. Any way you can think of to make it so?

With the current tools I don't know offhand if that's even possible, but I'll think on it. A strict mass limit naturally limits mass per drone, but nothing more and vast drone-swarms are just as bad for public MP as unchecked dreadnoughts.

It would sure be nice if there were a server option to limit the number of fleets a player could own at one time (3-5 maybe) and another server option to limit the total mass of each fleet to no more than (x) times the mass of the fleet's capital/command ship, or even just (x) times the server's mass limit.

An entity limit for fleets is probably needed too, especially if it can include all subsidiary docked entities within a fleet. Then fleets can be capped at like 100-200 entities each total, to include all turrets and fighters.

 

[kingreol]

server options do seem to limit some things. you dont want to brick blueprints for the server with odd block configs. but having to police who has what fleet setup/etc/etc.. and there will of course always be people who believe someone is edge shooting in a battle... but sadly this update looks to be starmade where half the players are accually in battles, as opposed to 1 or 2 players having a fight every other hour. So im happy that this is being thought out. we dont need 5 players fighting npc factions with titans, making life a lag fest for everyone else..... i can support mass limits on fleets, it would prevent people from loading in 5 50k mass ai ships with self powered turrets, and all the ams one could wish for.. also one nice thing is building wont be such a pain just to compete in the game. and people can test and fight without spending months building the big ship just to pvp

 

[MacThule]

also one nice thing is building wont be such a pain just to compete in the game. and people can test and fight without spending months building the big ship just to pvp

That, King, touches on something that is always in my mind when mass limits come up, but is maybe a little abstract. I think that a lot of opposition to strict mass limits is rooted in fear and insecurity about not having the largest ship on server and therefore being dominated by whoever does. Limits put an end to that arms race though. If no ship can exceed, say, 75K mass, then once you've built a 74,987 mass battleship you actually have less to fear because no one can overtop you through sheer power. Unless the issue is that your combat skills suck and you can only win with a handicap/advantage over your opponent in the form of greater size.

In other games where PvP occurs, you can't always just beef up to guarantee winning battles, you need to out think and out reflex your opposition. Typically, you and your opponents & teammates are all using craft of comparable if varied capacities. Under a mass cap, Starmade PvP ceases to be about who can break the server with the hugest ship to "win", and becomes about who can out pilot and outfox their opponents using a similar toolkit and at a similar scale. Which is why all tournaments and melees have mass limits.

I feel like players who spend 4+ hours a day playing dislike the idea of mass caps, even limited in application to multi-player, because they know their excess free time grants them the ability to out-mine and outbuild others and want to use that to dominate servers instead of being forced to actually compete on relatively even footing again all comers who can put in a few hours a week and may actually have better raw skills & strategy.

 

[DrTarDIS]

That, King, touches on something that is always in my mind when mass limits come up, but is maybe a little abstract. I think that a lot of opposition to strict mass limits is rooted in fear and insecurity about not having the largest ship on server and therefore being dominated by whoever does. Limits put an end to that arms race though. If no ship can exceed, say, 75K mass, then once you've built a 74,987 mass battleship you actually have less to fear because no one can overtop you through sheer power. Unless the issue is that your combat skills suck and you can only win with a handicap/advantage over your opponent in the form of greater size.

In other games where PvP occurs, you can't always just beef up to guarantee winning battles, you need to out think and out reflex your opposition. Typically, you and your opponents & teammates are all using craft of comparable if varied capacities. Under a mass cap, Starmade PvP ceases to be about who can break the server with the hugest ship to "win", and becomes about who can out pilot and outfox their opponents using a similar toolkit and at a similar scale. Which is why all tournaments and melees have mass limits.

I feel like players who spend 4+ hours a day playing dislike the idea of mass caps, even limited in application to multi-player, because they know their excess free time grants them the ability to out-mine and outbuild others and want to use that to dominate servers instead of being forced to actually compete on relatively even footing again all comers who can put in a few hours a week and may actually have better raw skills & strategy.

I somewhat agree with you, but...

Alternatively, you may want to consider that over the past year starmade has gotten considerably more "grindy." A person who has spent 4 hours a week for 5 months would slip into that same "out-mine-out-build" scenario vs anyone "starting up" and playing 4 hours a day for one full week.

I think a LOT of the issues around mas, PvP, etc are inherently cause by the "lone wolf in the frontier" starting package starmade currently has. The NPC faction update MIGHT end up fixing that IF we can force a "newbie faction" on people, giving them access to "abundance" from the get-go.

I know when i DID have a lot of time and set-up "abundance" through infrastructure in [NO FACTION] Size wasn't really an issue, and Killing people four times my size" became the standard while "killing people ten times my mass" became the goal. The emergent gameplay of starmade is much like WoW: it only really starts when you stop gaining levels.

 

[kingreol]

passive mass limits via scaling curves would be much better. sure you can have a 200k mass ship but its efficiency would drop somewhere. either harsher shield block requirements. scale down of power for large weapon systems.(and get rid of the turret loophole to fire multiple computers at once) etc, etc... hope we can see some fixes to both turrets and heat seekers. i dont mind a large ship being tough to kill. but to basicly sit around, shoot 1000 swarmers. fire a few missile beams and let the turrets take care of everything else. seems a bit to easy for a tank to do

 

[Sinister99]

If there is any kind of restrictions put on ships and turrets it should be mass not block number. If you do a block count limit people can exploit that in multiple ways and you'll also see a lot more exposed module ships out there because people wouldn't want to waist the block count on armor.

After speaking with a couple people I found out that in the server confab the admin can put a limit on missile / weapon out puts. This would be a great way to limit swarm missiles and battle lag as well as the admins wouldn't have to police the server as much.

Admins also can see all the blueprints that are uploaded and saved to their server, now this would require a bit of policing but the admins could keep track and delete blueprints that players have violated the rules on.

As for docked ships at stations, after speaking with some people once again I came to find out that its not the amount of ships docked that lag the area or server its the undocked entities that do it. So in that case limiting the amount of ships a player can have is pointless as well as it requires to much policing involvement by admins to keep track of. It should be up to the faction leaders to keep their own areas clean not the admins. If a player is having issues at their stations then those players should take it upon themselves to clean it up to make it smother.

Logic isn't really the issue as much as people think when it comes to lagging a server, you can lag out a server with 2 blocks if you really wanted to. Now lots of constant spinning and moving logic can lag a server though. But once again, admins would have to police this in order to enforce it, and we are trying to avoid having to police everything. Once again though when it comes to things lagging a server, common since should play a part in this, if it lags DONT USE IT. Players should be able to clean up their own messes that are causing problems.

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If it were my server to keep it easy and not a lot of policing necessary I would do the following...

-Limit the amount of weapon outputs in the server config per entity to 10

-Ship size limit of 500k mass (including drones and turrets)
This helps in multiple ways for lag. As we all know large ships = more lag. Amount of drones = more lag. And it also limits people from building those massive missile turrets that turns the battle into a lagy turret war rather then a real ship battle.

-Max of 20 Drones per carrier
Once again the more entities the more lag, but we don't want to limit player enjoyment too much.

-Fleet size limit of 6 ships (Not including carrier drones) Max 1 carrier per fleet
This would keep the server from lagging to much as well as allowing players to have fun / descent sized fleets to play with. Swarm fleets is another lag issue. Have 200 20 mass drones will also lag out a fit and turn it into a drone / turret war rather then a fight.

-All stations and will be maintained by their factions.
Meaning don't leave a bunch of undocked crap laying around or moving parts that cause server lag. If that accrues, the faction leader will be warned to fix it and if not fixed in a time limit, the station and surrounding entities will be deleted without warning. DO NOT limit an amount of ships a player can have. This does nothing but turn people away because building is part of the fun as well as it requires a crap ton of police work.

-No mining bonus
This would make it harder for people to get those bigger ships and a lot of fleets. As well as allow for new players or limited player a chance to be somewhat on the same curve as someone with too much time playing. We all know that claiming a system is just a red flag for griever's to come and mess with you. With no mining bonus there's no claimed system and easier for people to stay on the same play level, somewhat. And claimed systems would now become a thing of faction pride rather then the claiming and unclaiming systems just for the bonus.

-700 mining outputs on salvagers

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Now these few simple rules would help the server dramatically as well as not limiting players gameplay enjoyment. It also takes care of a lot of everyone's concerns without making everything so complicated. This also makes it so the admins don't have to police 24/7. With access to all blueprints they can keep track of ship size with ease. And other players can inform them if people break the fleet size rule and a admin can just delete with ease. I truly feel with over 900+ hours of playing Starmade, reading all of your comments and talking to other exp players, that these simple rules would make the game a lot more enjoyable for people not only in PvE but also PvP. These few rules also would make it to where factions would have to work more together in order to fight one another as well as utilizing the fleet mechanics more and using all that Starmade has to offer rather then 1 big ship flying around owning everyone.

I will leave you with this,
Keep it simple.
It's a game, enjoy.

 

[MacThule]

The eternal debate: mass -vs- block count. The system can easily average the two figures (M+BC/2) with a simple calculation. M+BC/2 would not be as exploitable as either one on its own and could form the basis for a well-rounded gauge for limiting MP ship deployment.

 

[Sinister99]

The eternal debate: mass -vs- block count. The system can easily average the two figures (M+BC/2) with a simple calculation. M+BC/2 would not be as exploitable as either one on its own and could form the basis for a well-rounded gauge for limiting MP ship deployment.

Yes but again in order to check block counts an admin would have to spawn the ship rather then just look at a BP to see the mass. BPs don't list the block counts, I'm not only trying to make it with little rules and enjoyable but also that it doesn't need to be policed all the time by admins. And once again people will build ships with no armor leaving exposed modules that would also cause lag because they wouldn't want to waist block count on armor or looks. So all you'll get are these ugly ships fling around causing lag and more work for an admin to police.
[doublepost=1481907136,1481906992][/doublepost]On a side note, has anyone heard if the server is going to be reset with the NPC update and if so, will we be reimbursed on the server by the admins? Any info from an admin would be nice, the server is kind of dead right now because no one is sure as to what the plan is and is in a hold pattern.

 

[Edymnion]

Yes but again in order to check block counts an admin would have to spawn the ship rather then just look at a BP to see the mass. BPs don't list the block counts

Actually they do, you can see the block list from the catalog. Not a total count, but a count of each individual type of block. Should be easy enough to eyeball it and see if anything stands out as having too many blocks at a glance and only load in the suspicious ones.

 

[nulitor]

Actually blueprint mass is 0.10 times the number of blocs(that have been a weird revelation when I found it).
So if you make a ship which is just a brick of 1000 advanced armor its mass would be 250 and the indicated mass on the blueprint would be 100 and if you make a brick of 1000 scaffold its mass is 10 and the indicated mass on the blueprint is 100.
So if you want the block count just take the mass indicated by the blueprint and multiply by 10.

I think that reducing resources gains in hope of reducing server lag is not a long term tactic: in long term old players reach the point where they can have 500 of the max size ships and those cause lag on most servers because even 100k is absurdly huge(because when Fred and Tom fight Jack and Alexander with all their fleets and all their ships you can have 6 100k mass ships on each side no matter how much you reduce resource gains because they just need run around the universe strip-mining in a 435 sector radius around start for a few weeks or months).
So reducing resources gains only delay the endgame where people have fights where the total mass of ships go over 1000k which is already enough to blow any server / computer who exists(a fight with two 250k mass ships is already enough to murder framerate).
However having a limit on both the ship number and ship mass who makes that 2v2(NvN with N>2 are probably not a common occurance) have less than Xk mass(with X being what the server tolerates) allows your servers to survive endgame of the players.
However reducing resource gains to the point where players take time to reach end game have horrible horrible effects: the players who are new to the server(and barely have enough resources to have one fighter) get curb-stomped by players who can have the maximum number of ships at the maximum mass and re-field them in the middle of the battle.
Furthermore if there is no asteroid re-spawn then the new players must travel longer and longer before finding resources.
If there was a server with maximum mass(or block count) of ships of 1k and with a maximum number of active ships per player of 6 then you would not need to restrain resources gains since people would not be able to lag the server(unless they want to but it is another problem and they can do that without resources they only need around 600 credits to make logic laggpocalypse ships that they then send to place where they want people to suffer) when reaching endgame(maximum number of ships of the maximum mass)