Its lag Jim!

[Squid Torgar]

The latest CG has become something resembling a Star Trek Episode. You know the one, where time keeps on rubber banding and they are locked in some kind of loop. The amount of lag is insane. ED seems to suffer from networking issues at the best of times but this is something else. Its really making a mockery of the latest CG.

I sincerely hope network optimisation is being looked into.

 

[Darth Ender]

the mockery or not of CG aside (because that's probably another topic as there are lots of things that makes community goals a mockery and have little to do with networking performance), there is probably little that FD can do about this again for three reasons.
1. P2P means arbitration over who shot who or who is where and who gets corrected has no neutral middle-man.
2. There is no hard limit on how crappy an internet connection can be in a given shared instance. So a bunch of players with decent connections will get their experience crapped on because Johnny Lets-play-Elite-over-a-cell-phone-tether-on-2g-in-the-middle-of-the-Australian-Outback wants to play and FD just lets him and his 1500ms latency on with everyone else.
3. The more people you share an instance with, the more nodes you have to send data and receive data from. How FD has decided to handle figuring out who did what when every client is sending updates at different latencies makes for a non-uniform gameplay experience. For instance, it seems like if you start shooting an npc ship, the time since your last shot determines if you are the arbitrator of the position and simulation state of that ship or if the next cmdr to shoot it is. This combined with the #2 is the source to a lot of rubber-banding of ships in CZ's I believe.

 

[Squid Torgar]

the mockery or not of CG aside (because that's probably another topic as there are lots of things that makes community goals a mockery and have little to do with networking performance), there is probably little that FD can do about this again for three reasons.
1. P2P means arbitration over who shot who or who is where and who gets corrected has no neutral middle-man.
2. There is no hard limit on how crappy an internet connection can be in a given shared instance. So a bunch of players with decent connections will get their experience crapped on because Johnny Lets-play-Elite-over-a-cell-phone-tether-on-2g-in-the-middle-of-the-Australian-Outback wants to play and FD just lets him and his 1500ms latency on with everyone else.
3. The more people you share an instance with, the more nodes you have to send data and receive data from. How FD has decided to handle figuring out who did what when every client is sending updates at different latencies makes for a non-uniform gameplay experience. For instance, it seems like if you start shooting an npc ship, the time since your last shot determines if you are the arbitrator of the position and simulation state of that ship or if the next cmdr to shoot it is. This combined with the #2 is the source to a lot of rubber-banding of ships in CZ's I believe.

If you are right, thats very depressing. Couldn't they assign instances by ping?

 

[Darth Ender]

They do not do that as far as I've seen.

Could they? Sure. I mean they can assign instances by any number of arbitrary things. I think it would be hilarious to see an instance with a bunch of dialup quality connections.

The other concern is that the ping time is the ping between players, which is different for every player to player connection. So for instance. 4 players. Player A to B's connection is great. B to C is great C to D is great. But player A to C sucks. A to D is great. etc. So what mechanism do you use to say who should be in this instance? The path your packets take in a p2p connection is different between each pair and while that path could change at any time, it's more important that the paths are fundamentally different for every pair. Which makes determining who has a bad network connection out of a group a bit difficult.

What could fix that network quality uncertainty? A proxy server that players connect to when sharing an instance that relays your packets to all members of an instance and vice versa while in the shared instance. Will FD do that? who knows. Their current matchmaker server seems to do a similar job as a torrent tracker (letting other players know who to try and connect to).