Half a second response time (lag) in multiplayer only

[vittopascu]

Hello,

I recently found out about this game and I am truly amazed. The game is very responsive in single player mode, however when I host or join an online multiplayer game I get about 0.5s (or worse) lag, for instance, from the moment I tell a unit to "go somewhere" to the moment it actually performs the action. I tried on two laptops, one with windows 10 and one running linux (flatpak) and I have the identical issue, all good in single player, long response time in multiplayer, even if I play alone.

Can anyone help troubleshoot this issue? Thank you very much.

Cheers,

[bb_]

This is very much expected. In multiplayer the game needs to be synchronized over the internet. In order to do this, any command you send needs to be shared with all clients before processing it. More precisely, a client need to send the command to the host, then the host shares it with all clients. Hence when you give a command it is only executed a little while later. IIRC this "delay" is hardcoded to be .6s (or .4s?, whatever). In future we might implement having this time "dynamic" i.e. it would be as low as possible depending on the used network connections (this also related to the idea of "variable turnlengths"). This would make the game more responsive in some situations, in particular two computers on the same network.

However do notice that there will always be some delay. In particular, if you are playing with someone on the other side of the globe, you will have at least .133s delay (we need to travel from the client to the host and back, so basically travel a full circumference of the earth). Simply by the laws of special relativity (nothing can move faster than the light). Likely this will be even higher, since your signal probably will travel slower and with some detour.

[Grapjas]

@bb_ the interesting part is this:

3 hours ago, vittopascu said:

long response time in multiplayer, even if I play alone.

 

But i guess you still answered it with this:

35 minutes ago, bb_ said:

IIRC this "delay" is hardcoded to be .6s (or .4s?, whatever).

 

[vittopascu]

Hi, thank you very much for your reply, that really helps understand that the behavior is "by design", and I respect that. However if I may give my humble opinion, having spent the last 20 years playing this genre of games online like AoE and Warcraft 3 (where players would host their own games just like in 0AD) as well as a lot of action RPGs like Dota2: speaking for newcomers I think not having a dynamic delay is a behavior that one does not expect. All other online games I played do indeed have some latency, but the command-to-effect delay is strongly correlated to one's ping, and rarely exceeds 100ms. It might not seem like a lot but the difference between 100ms and 600ms reaction time is enough to make the game "feel defective" even though it is not.

By the way, speaking about long distances, I am curious about what happens if the total delay of this transaction exceeds the hard-coded value, even just once in a while?

Please do no take this the wrong way, I really appreciate that this game exists and that it is so polished, I really can see myself playing it with friends and I can get behind an intentional design choice, I am just chipping in my humble feedback

Edited January 16, 2022 by vittopascu

[wraitii]

13 minutes ago, vittopascu said:

Hi, thank you very much for your reply, that really helps understand that the behavior is "by design", and I respect that.

I'll point out that the behaviour is by design because doing it dynamically is harder, and we haven't done it yet.

Ultimately, we would like to reduce the response time, but it hasn't yet been implemented.