Slow internet support

[oddchild]

Remember when AOE 1 came out, there was 56k game hosting supported. I am not suggesting that 0ad needs to have that, however if anyone remembers... It worked quite well and actually did not lag so much. Why is that? Is the way that AOE sends and receives data in multiplayer more efficient? Why is it that 0ad is not more efficient after all these years?

[Itms]

I see two reasons:

- First, the lag is mainly (and by mainly I mean 99%) caused by the game which is slow on your own machine (as it is on every machine, but hopefully we can provide you important improvements in the upcoming releases). The performance bottlenecks can be even more important in MP games but it is not related to sends/receives across the network.

- Secondly, and this is true for all modern games (and a lot of modern software), as nearly nobody has 56k modems, game devs don't even work on network usage optimization. AOE1 devs probably invested a lot of time in improving that, and that time can be saved for other things in modern software development.

[historic_bruno]

A lot of places still have slow internet, whether rural areas in countries like the US or developing nations, and in some places bandwidth is still relatively expensive. Even if 95% of our users (an example, I have no idea what the actual stat is) have faster than 56k bandwidth, it's no excuse to not consider network efficiency of the game. After all, if it's playable on slow connections, it should be even better on high speed broadband, while minimally impacting other things like streaming and file downloads. It's just like there's no excuse for memory leaks even if many users have 64-bit OSes and memory to spare, or badly inefficient code even if it's not as noticeable on the latest CPUs.

I haven't seen evidence that bandwidth is a cause of lag in 0 A.D. mmultiplayer games (there was a report of building walls causing a disconnect in one case), but our multiplayer implementation could certainly be improved, by adapting to the players' actual network latency for a more responsive and less jerky feel. That has been discussed, but it's not trivial, and as Nicolas says, it's not the most critical issue right now.

[oddchild]

My internet here in Lebanon, goes from being fast enough to watch youtube%2

My internet here in Lebanon, goes from being fast enough to watch youtube (late night) on low FPS to being VERY slow. Usually, i find if I am playing people that are in Europe the game seems to run fairly smoothly without much lag.

Most games out here, are pirated American games. I find it rare to meet folks that know what Linux is or much else. When I was helping at a Christian Iraqi school years ago, I tried to get them to switch the school computers to Linux. It took me over 9 days to download ubuntu!