Odyssey is coming: But PvP rubber-banding is STILL not fixed.

[StewartScott]

As title says, I have been playing Open in the current CG and its still becomes 'unplayable' when other players are present (even after all these years), and don't say it can't be fixed because we all know that's pure Bull Manure, plenty of other games out there pull this off.

Is there any news I had missed that Odyssey's has finally addressed this BIG instancing problem because as of yet I haven't see it.

(rant off)

 

[fus roh potato]

In some ways it can't be, as they've chosen P2P networking. You're no longer at the mercy of your own connection, but also the connection of others.

In other ways, it can be mitigated. For example, a ship should never be bouncing back and forth over and over. Timestamps for location data can be easily used to interpolate and predict motion, to fill in gaps and ignore late data received after new data. Instances where this occurs abnormally often, such as when SLFs are launched, were also issues introduced after specific updates. The spammed duplicate and redundant entity location data should have been hotfixed within a week, but has instead been issue for more than a year repeatedly removed from the issue tracker without good reason.

 

[RicoMJ]

.

 

[wrmiller]

What makes anyone think that they're ever going to fix/change it?

 

[gorankar]

One of the biggest issues with CZ's in open imo, is the networking. You are lucky to get 6-8 players in an instance without terrible lag. Anymore than that, appears to be an act of some deity for it to be lag free. Even just tolerable is usually too much to ask. I think they would have fixed it if they could do so without resorting to a full netcode rewrite. It's been years. It is prolly best we accept that if we want a low lag experience, we are going to need to keep our per instance player counts relatively low.

 

[StewartScott]

I believe 'a ping filter' that allows players of a certain ping range to each other to be able to join an PvP instance would help, just allowing people from China (for instance) to join a U.S. hosted game or letting anybody join whatever instance causes the issues, if whoever is 'P2P hosting' should have 'a ping cap' on people who want to join their hosted instance, seems reasonable enough to me rather than just let everybody worldwide to be able to join willy-nilly (as it apparently is now) which only causes lag problems every single time, it could be improved but FD doesn't even 'try' to improve it, instead they just let people complain away (like me).

 

[Amanojaku]

Some people blame SLFs, but afaik that issue was caused by spamming SLF commands, not simply because an SLF was in instance. It's probably hard to tell because people could be spamming commands to cause rubber-banding and saying they're not. All I know is everyone hates it when you use a SLF in PvP now.

The simple truth is it's because of p2p servers and netcode. If someone has a slow connection, they're casting the "blink" spell.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Some people blame SLFs, but afaik that issue was caused by spamming SLF commands ...

What is SLF?

 

[Amanojaku]

What is SLF?

Ship Launched Fighters

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Ship Launched Fighters

Thanks

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

In some ways it can't be, as they've chosen P2P networking. You're no longer at the mercy of your own connection, but also the connection of others.

In other ways, it can be mitigated. For example, a ship should never be bouncing back and forth over and over. Timestamps for location data can be easily used to interpolate and predict motion, to fill in gaps and ignore late data received after new data. Instances where this occurs abnormally often, such as when SLFs are launched, were also issues introduced after specific updates. The spammed duplicate and redundant entity location data should have been hotfixed within a week, but has instead been issue for more than a year repeatedly removed from the issue tracker without good reason.

Doesn't matter what system we use, P2P or server client, you are still at the mercy of other connections to some degree.

For a twitch based game, there is no perfect system. If you have a server client system, you would end up having to have geographical server systems as the lag would be far to much to play with people all round the world.

With internet speeds going up all the time and the power of PCs getting higher and higher, P2P may well be the future of all online gaming.

 

[ForeverN00b]

SLFs create lag even when commands aren't being spammed. PvP groups have done controlled testing on this. The frustrating thing is that it wasn't like that for the first few months SLFs were introduced, and SLFs were viable. Then something changed where SLFs were just broken for multiplayer use and FD never bothered to fix it.

 

[varonica]

I believe 'a ping filter' that allows players of a certain ping range to each other to be able to join an PvP instance would help, just allowing people from China (for instance) to join a U.S. hosted game or letting anybody join whatever instance causes the issues, if whoever is 'P2P hosting' should have 'a ping cap' on people who want to join their hosted instance, seems reasonable enough to me rather than just let everybody worldwide to be able to join willy-nilly (as it apparently is now) which only causes lag problems every single time, it could be improved but FD doesn't even 'try' to improve it, instead they just let people complain away (like me).

And then PP "Open Only" lovers would complain you were just creating a new impediment to them meeting and destroying the "enemy".

 

[stormyuk]

I believe 'a ping filter' that allows players of a certain ping range to each other to be able to join an PvP instance would help, just allowing people from China (for instance) to join a U.S. hosted game or letting anybody join whatever instance causes the issues, if whoever is 'P2P hosting' should have 'a ping cap' on people who want to join their hosted instance, seems reasonable enough to me rather than just let everybody worldwide to be able to join willy-nilly (as it apparently is now) which only causes lag problems every single time, it could be improved but FD doesn't even 'try' to improve it, instead they just let people complain away (like me).

I too wonder why they haven't introduced either a region filter or actually being able to set the maximum ping to another client / user you are willing to put up with. Many other p2p games have this setting.

I was on last night in open in a busy system and it was great. It just takes one player with a 500ms ping to break the entire instance.

 

[DMaster]

I guess the main problem are people playing via wlan or other mobile connections. I have often been told that WiFi is not really suitable for playing with others over the Internet. At first I didn't want to believe it, but in Space Engineers I saw very impressively what an extreme difference it makes whether I'm connected to the router with cable or with WiFi. Maybe Elite should take this into account when instantiating and rather mix people with cable together and people with wifi...

 

[Crimson Kaim]

It would be a good start to fix fighter lag as these not only cause the player commanding the fighter to lag but every other NPC hosted by that player as well.

 

[GroG79]

Yes

We should replace the internet

 

[GroG79]

I guess the main problem are people playing via wlan or other mobile connections. I have often been told that WiFi is not really suitable for playing with others over the Internet. At first I didn't want to believe it, but in Space Engineers I saw very impressively what an extreme difference it makes whether I'm connected to the router with cable or with WiFi. Maybe Elite should take this into account when instantiating and rather mix people with cable together and people with wifi...

Might be in your case. However a good wifi connection should add very few latency

You can test this by pinging your local gateway and see the roundtrip time for a ping. Usually 1 or 2 ms

 

[Winterwalker]

Doesn't matter what system we use, P2P or server client, you are still at the mercy of other connections to some degree.

Quite. Dav Stott was talking about this on stream last week and it turns out client-server iS used by the game, as a fall back when handling some modems, it's not always P2P. But that doesn't solve everything; server in - server out is an extra processing step, with it's own latency that P2P doesn't add, while still going through both client pings. (P2P has to handle player pings obviously but doesn't add any server latency as extra).

In the end both have their own advantages and disadvantages. ED uses both, depending on the situation and we're none of us on a LAN so really we can't complain too much. Get in a private group with people nearby you know are on superfast connections if it bothers you that much but we don't live in a perfect world yet.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I believe 'a ping filter' that allows players of a certain ping range to each other to be able to join an PvP instance would help

How does the game tell whether an instance is a PvP one or not?

Up until version 2.1 the game was a lot pickier about letting people into instances together, and as a result just keeping a wing in the same instance over a couple of supercruise hops required a lot of luck. For most purposes - and PvP is a rare one - it's better to be in the instance with some performance issues than not being able to instance at all.