PSA: Ship-launched fighters do NOT cause lag in instances with more than one player.
- Thread starter Sophokles Logimo
- Start date
Erm, the entire industry disciplines of QA and QC are dedicated to reporting that nothing extraordinary happened. It's literally the entire point of the QA phase.
Do you have a recommendation for any industry certifications I should aspire to in order to report that this particular subject in a game I enjoy is without problem?
Yes, PICNIC is well worth investigating.
I'd second that request to share the testing. Last I remember the lag was building up over time, rendering the instances worse and worse, depending on how many CMDRs were there. So testing should take that into account.
PvPers imho never cared much about SLFs (except for their instance breaking), why should they?We have found the first PvPer who wants to save his preferred playstyle without ship-launched fighters, it seems.
They never were more than an additional damage source in PvP because they are flimsy things, easily killed by rails.
And if the lag thing is gone, they will be utilized by everyone, PvPers too, if they are useful now.
In my observation, because the very notion of NPC's being present in a PvP fight is something some of them despise.
Regarding my previous tests: Half-hour bounty hunting sessions in hazardous resource extraction sites with 2 CMDRs from Europe and the US with SLF's, with 2 more without SLF's being present was an extreme example with no issues at all.
I have also been using SLF's in power conflict zones with other CMDRs present and no issues, and those fights went over longer times. Even PvP struggles with SLF's on both sides were no problem.
But as I said, I will make a video one of these days.
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I was just a dabbler in PvP, so take my words with caution, but most of them simply didn't care about NPCs.
I mean, with the addition of ATR, some of the worse gankers threw hissy fits for targets who dared to make their life more difficult.
(I always lol'd when I got pulled with crimes on in a PvP ship, and the wannabee gankers complained I had crimes on when they shot me.
Duh, just don't commit crimes if you don't like the police
or ask nice if I am in the mood for some PvP )The "real" PvPers (
drinks) arranged most of their fights anyways, and the gankers knew ways to ignore NPCs.Back to topic, I'd be genuinely curious if it got better (I hope!), because in my opinion the SLF lag hurt the non-PvP community much more than the gankers.
I used the SLF a lot in the beginning, especially in my beginner days with @faarken and @Energy Gap doing HazRes all day. And for AXI it was no joke either.
Questions:
- Was the lag caused by someone using an SLF with an NPC or an actual player in the pilot's seat?
- Can we check this to confirm one, the other, or both?
I cannot confirm that the problem even exists, but the ones who claim it does say it is only with NPC fighters.
Which makes this whole claim particularly weird.
The SLF lag issue has always been about NPC fighters.
Multicrew SLFs have never been a problem AFAIK (apart from the "normal" kind of lag caused by bad p2p connection that can happen in the abscence of SLFs as well).
Interesting point. Since I don't use them often (except when I'm doing "wanted" hunting in a USS (weapons fire detected) I always use an NPC for it.
Is there a way to test out if the problem still persists with an NPC?
If it's you who has an NPC SLF then it won't be you who can test the lag, because the laggy one will be you (in your mothership), not someone else.
The original (early 2019) version of the SLF lag looked like this:
1. Two CMDRs in the instance, no SLF deployed to make sure the instance is fine (neither of them can see the other one lagging/rubberbanding).
2. CMDR A deploys the SLF (NPC in fighter, CMDR in mothership). CMDR B is the observer.
3. CMDR B can see CMDR A's mothership rubberbanding like crazy (quickly sliding back and forth randomly). The lag can reach insane levels and it's one sided (CMDR B's ship is not lagging on CMDR A's screen).
4. The lag gradually gets worse the longer the fighter is present in the instance. If CMDR B kills the NPC SLF, CMDR A's mothership instantly stops rubberbanding on CMDR B's screen.
5. The lag gets significantly worse if CMDR A keeps spamming commands (attack, defend, etc) to the fighter. This is probably no longer true, because fdev have (supposedly) fixed it since (by implementing a cooldown that makes command spamming less effective). They have never fixed the underlying cause of the SLF lag though, so it's still present in a less severe form as far as I know.
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Thank you very much for the description. I think that clarifies what the problem was. My question mainly goes to the original poster concerning this problem and just wondered if there is a way a couple of us can test this.
Like I had stated earlier, I do tend to use an slf just for fun when I'm hunting pirates and wanted criminals in my own instance. I would not mind using them in something like a PVP battle but I would not want to do this if there was still lag going on.
If, as the original poster has stated, that FD has actually resolved the issue, it would be nice to use them again. Otherwise, what was the point of them in the first place?
If the problem is still there, I could certainly use that big size module space for something more efficient.
Myself and my regular Wing mate have teamed up for years, both of us deploying out Crew-Piloted Fighters and we've never noticed a problem. Fps remains great - and that's actual experienced fps, not reported fps - and we notice no issues outside of the odd usual game quirk. We both have decent, if not latest and greatest PCs, with solid internet. We were both doing this primarily while doing some NPC bounty hunting in a Haz Res, though we would see the odd other Commander to. We'd always invite them to join us, if we thought they too were there to bounty hunt. Sometimes they'd join, sometimes not. No worries either way.
Last time a ganker tried to get me though - and I say "ganker" as I was in a barely-engineered (bar the shields and some of the turrets I robbed off something else) trade ship on the way to outfitting, no cargo, not wanted, not an opposing power etc. - my performance went to carp and they were teleporting all over the place from my perspective, not taking any damage, and I took sudden massive damage, while being frozen on the spot. Aka, throttle worked and speed indicator went up, ship did not move. Dunno what happened, but my UI even froze - I couldn't look left or right to access the panels, even though the ship was powered. My game UI was basically frozen, the only button that worked was "Esc" and I did a legitimate Menu log. I was then greeted by a load of abuse by said Commander for "Combat logging", when I did no such thing. My UI crashed - so I thought - due to what I suspected were Network issues. I mean, I wasn't playing the game any more, the UI wouldn't let me and I was entirely unable to interact with my ship. What else was I supposed to do? Of course, they ignored what I said as they knew all and everything and were the most important person in the entire game. I was there just to be entertainment for their sadistic role-play lol. I was more irked by their arrogance at the time, considering what their arrival did to the instance, and their unwillingness to accept that something in the game broke pretty badly moments after they arrived... I genuinely thought they'd be glad to know there was a "game issue" and I was basically disconnected from the game instance before I logged out via the menu. Nope.
Running into someone "role playing" as a total Richard Cranium is one thing, it happens, but all that other weirdness.. well I don't know what was going on. I assumed that perhaps their connection was just really bad, or their PC was perhaps a little weaker than ideal or, maybe, that FDev's netcode was having a bit of a wobble. It didn't occur to me that they might be exploiting something to cause those things. I didn't even realise that was a thing. People with invulnerable shields perhaps or whatever these "cheat engine" things allow people to do - I've not a clue, though I've tinkered with such things in the past NOT IN ED, but in single-player games like Crysis back in the day purely for lolz Though, being able to cause me to freeze in place, unable to even look at the ship's panels, while they teleported around taking no damage... makes me a little suss....but the game can be "quirky" at times, so, "role play" choices aside, I continue to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I know I rambled a bit there, but that one experience is what finally ruined Open for me. All because one person in a PvP build wanted to kill the guy in the empty trade ship - it wasn't even legitimate piracy. Were they using external "cheat" type tools to aid them? I don't know, I didn't think so at the time. However, several people suggested that their was something fishy there... and not just your regular networking gremlins.
Sad to say, I've not been in Open since that, it was just the last straw for me. A horrible game experience when I only had a limited time to play and a set task to complete, just outfitting a ship. Quite happy in Mobius as I like just seeing other players flying around doing their thing, but not forcing me to be their entertainment, ruining my plans for my short windows of play time. I LOVE the cooperative interactions I've had.
As an aside, I thought I'd logged in to a Private Group at the time of that incident, so I thought it was just a friend messing with me. Only when they opened Fire did I finally realise, then there was a moment of "You can't do this in Mobius!", before realising I must have gone Open by mistake lol. My bad for that bit.
Last time a ganker tried to get me though - and I say "ganker" as I was in a barely-engineered (bar the shields and some of the turrets I robbed off something else) trade ship on the way to outfitting, no cargo, not wanted, not an opposing power etc. - my performance went to carp and they were teleporting all over the place from my perspective, not taking any damage, and I took sudden massive damage, while being frozen on the spot. Aka, throttle worked and speed indicator went up, ship did not move. Dunno what happened, but my UI even froze - I couldn't look left or right to access the panels, even though the ship was powered. My game UI was basically frozen, the only button that worked was "Esc" and I did a legitimate Menu log. I was then greeted by a load of abuse by said Commander for "Combat logging", when I did no such thing. My UI crashed - so I thought - due to what I suspected were Network issues. I mean, I wasn't playing the game any more, the UI wouldn't let me and I was entirely unable to interact with my ship. What else was I supposed to do? Of course, they ignored what I said as they knew all and everything and were the most important person in the entire game. I was there just to be entertainment for their sadistic role-play lol. I was more irked by their arrogance at the time, considering what their arrival did to the instance, and their unwillingness to accept that something in the game broke pretty badly moments after they arrived... I genuinely thought they'd be glad to know there was a "game issue" and I was basically disconnected from the game instance before I logged out via the menu. Nope.
Running into someone "role playing" as a total Richard Cranium is one thing, it happens, but all that other weirdness.. well I don't know what was going on. I assumed that perhaps their connection was just really bad, or their PC was perhaps a little weaker than ideal or, maybe, that FDev's netcode was having a bit of a wobble. It didn't occur to me that they might be exploiting something to cause those things. I didn't even realise that was a thing. People with invulnerable shields perhaps or whatever these "cheat engine" things allow people to do - I've not a clue, though I've tinkered with such things in the past NOT IN ED, but in single-player games like Crysis back in the day purely for lolz Though, being able to cause me to freeze in place, unable to even look at the ship's panels, while they teleported around taking no damage... makes me a little suss....but the game can be "quirky" at times, so, "role play" choices aside, I continue to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I know I rambled a bit there, but that one experience is what finally ruined Open for me. All because one person in a PvP build wanted to kill the guy in the empty trade ship - it wasn't even legitimate piracy. Were they using external "cheat" type tools to aid them? I don't know, I didn't think so at the time. However, several people suggested that their was something fishy there... and not just your regular networking gremlins.
Sad to say, I've not been in Open since that, it was just the last straw for me. A horrible game experience when I only had a limited time to play and a set task to complete, just outfitting a ship. Quite happy in Mobius as I like just seeing other players flying around doing their thing, but not forcing me to be their entertainment, ruining my plans for my short windows of play time. I LOVE the cooperative interactions I've had.
As an aside, I thought I'd logged in to a Private Group at the time of that incident, so I thought it was just a friend messing with me. Only when they opened Fire did I finally realise, then there was a moment of "You can't do this in Mobius!", before realising I must have gone Open by mistake lol. My bad for that bit.
On the SLF: yea. I also have not experiened any issues with it since a long time. On Mobius: yea, i also roam there, since a long time.
On the experience which made me decide: i did some test-runs in open at some time. The test was to fly to a station, where some of those "we are the toughest of them all, we want a challenge" so-called "pirates" were roaming. Tried it with a type 7 (full of HRPs, no cargo) and my badly engineered FDL. All those tough pirates interdicted my T7. But never asked for cargo. After all, they had no cargo hold themselves. Sacrificing an internal slot would have made them waaay too vulnerable against my pair of non-enginered small pulse lasers. That would have been an unacceptable risk. I never was at risk of death in that brick of a T7, but they chain-interdicted me till i decided that i could be doing that for hours... so i jumped out.
Returned minutes later in my FDL. And what can i say. Those "we are so tough, we need a challenge" pirates never interdicted me. A wing of them even jumped out of the system, when a single FDL was pointing their nose at them. (Not understanding that i had no FSD interdictor on board. ) So, i reached the station without a single interdiction. So, these "tough guys", they bore me. The best they were able to do was waste my time. But hey, that's also the experience i had with PvP players of other games, especially when meeting them in RL: almost all of them actually were people you should mostly pitty.
So yea, thinking about that, maybe i should occasionally go to open again. Fly around in an unarmed, non-engineered ASP scout or something like that, to give those poor souls, who all the time have to rant how tough and evil they are, the little good feeling they sometimes may have in life...
I have experienced severe lag involving someone using an SLF exactly once. It was quite notable - but I've also experienced no lag with SLFs present, as well, and lag with no SLFs present.
Broadly speaking, I SUSPECT it has more to do with hardware limitations than anything in particular with SLFs. My instinct is that it's caused by a similar problem to what causes the rotational correction bugs with Interceptors around coriolis stations.
(For those who don't know, in large instances like that, to spread the load, each player in the instance hosts an equal portion of the load. If the player 'hosting' a particular interceptor docks, that interceptor will instantly start spinning at high speed, because they're being affected by the rotational correction, as well. This conflicts with what your pc expects, so you often get fairly severe rubberbanding as well, and your gimballed weapons don't know where to aim because the thrust vector of the target is completely contradictory to their actual speed and direction. )
What seems likely to me is that in certain conditions, where one player's PC is not able to effectively host the instance, it spreads the load, leading to the aforementioned rubberbanding, especially in cases where they are sending commands to an SLF being hosted by someone else.
What strikes me about this is that it seems to have grown less common as time has passed, without apparent input from Fdev. This makes me suspect it's a hardware issue, and as the average player has gotten a better PC, the issue has grown less notable.
That being the case, it seems to me that given the relative uncommonness of the issue, the broad ban is no longer particularly necessary. Rather, if you have low-spec equipment, a slow connection, or other things which might actually cause rubberbanding, you should make every effort to reduce that possibility, since intentionally causing connection disruptions is probably against TOS.
But if you've got a good connection and good hardware, there's no reason for you to change your behavior. If the attacker still gets rubberbanding, the issue is almost certainly on their end, and the obligation is theirs to upgrade their equipment.
Broadly speaking, I SUSPECT it has more to do with hardware limitations than anything in particular with SLFs. My instinct is that it's caused by a similar problem to what causes the rotational correction bugs with Interceptors around coriolis stations.
(For those who don't know, in large instances like that, to spread the load, each player in the instance hosts an equal portion of the load. If the player 'hosting' a particular interceptor docks, that interceptor will instantly start spinning at high speed, because they're being affected by the rotational correction, as well. This conflicts with what your pc expects, so you often get fairly severe rubberbanding as well, and your gimballed weapons don't know where to aim because the thrust vector of the target is completely contradictory to their actual speed and direction. )
What seems likely to me is that in certain conditions, where one player's PC is not able to effectively host the instance, it spreads the load, leading to the aforementioned rubberbanding, especially in cases where they are sending commands to an SLF being hosted by someone else.
What strikes me about this is that it seems to have grown less common as time has passed, without apparent input from Fdev. This makes me suspect it's a hardware issue, and as the average player has gotten a better PC, the issue has grown less notable.
That being the case, it seems to me that given the relative uncommonness of the issue, the broad ban is no longer particularly necessary. Rather, if you have low-spec equipment, a slow connection, or other things which might actually cause rubberbanding, you should make every effort to reduce that possibility, since intentionally causing connection disruptions is probably against TOS.
But if you've got a good connection and good hardware, there's no reason for you to change your behavior. If the attacker still gets rubberbanding, the issue is almost certainly on their end, and the obligation is theirs to upgrade their equipment.
The bar for good performance has always been fairly low for ED, as has the internet connection requirements. For years, prior to Odyssey, I was playing on a 2600k + GTX680 just fine. Then got a 1070 which really didn't make much different (I locked game to 60 fps @ 1200p). At the time I was on a 2.5mbps/1.0mbps ADSL connection. It was slow, but had relatively good latency. Things worked great. Odyssey changed things of course but, even today, my friend is using a basic AMD 4100 (quad core Ryzen) paired with a 3060 and 16gb of RAM. This plays the game well and we've teamed up many a time and not seen even a hint of an issue. However, when we meet up most often in our own Private Group. That said, even in Mobius things are generally ok.
Perhaps there are those playing on even weaker hardware than this that do run into problems. I'd suggest though that the 4100 is pretty low-end these days. I think, on paper it's got very similar performance to the over ten year old 4790k I have in another system. That's ten year old "high end" performance, which is pretty ancient. Heh, that 4790k is paired with a 680 currently - I might test how ED runs on it for science. Nothing on-foot, I'm not personally interested in that, so all space-ship stuff.
Perhaps there are those playing on even weaker hardware than this that do run into problems. I'd suggest though that the 4100 is pretty low-end these days. I think, on paper it's got very similar performance to the over ten year old 4790k I have in another system. That's ten year old "high end" performance, which is pretty ancient. Heh, that 4790k is paired with a 680 currently - I might test how ED runs on it for science. Nothing on-foot, I'm not personally interested in that, so all space-ship stuff.