Network data changes

[Amadeus]

If my development team was put to shame like that by a consumer, I would be extremely embarrassed. It would be time for firings and hirings... in that order.

I was watching the most facinating episode of NOVA last night on the development of the latest fighter jets by Lockheet Martin and Boeing (the competition)...and all I can do is shudder to think if engineers there were as sloppy as most of the ones we see in the computer entertainment software industry. And HONESTLY, I don't think it's the little guys, I think it's poor ass leadership letting this get by in the first place. I can't even imagine what kind of disaster the console version of EQ is going to be when they can't patch it every week


I swear the test server is just a coffee table in California somewhere.

[CybMax]

After the last patch there has indeed been a great deal better.. Still have some random warping and similar, but better than it was..

Now.. I too have no problems getting WAY more data inbound on my net, and so do a lot of others, but it might be a problem outbound from SoE serverpark..

So.. to the real fun.. The "lag" you get (not spawn warping++) but the LAG.. the less than 10 fps lag.. that is purely graphics engine coding.. The lag in bazaar is not from cluttered network traffic, but from a bad graphics engine..
Just step into a totally empty zone, go up in a corner all by yourself and check what fps you got.. Now add in a couple of spellcastings, a few friends and watch the fps go to a near halt.. It is not network traffic that makes THAT lag..

[seq_not_i]

Amadeus: In the electronics arena, engineers are that sloppy, even in aerospace. I did some work for Lockheed and after 5 prototype circuit boards, the system still had incorrect parts called out.

I'm not an engineer, I'm a mechanical type that translates electronic engineering ideas into a chunk of fiberglass with components on it but even I was able to catch engineering mistakes.

I hate to say it, but in general, the US companies I do work for are inherently worse in getting to production than overseas companies.

/kick US engineers

Now that I ripped my country's engineers let me add to that with a positive. The US, in general, is quicker on new design ideas and some of the new stuff I'm currently working on will make you hardware geeks /cheer when it is released.....Hell, I'm cheering now!

[old_fart]

If the zone and character info is encrypted we may need to automate key retrival so that SEQ has it before the zone info is sent. Or get the zone info from the client...

[high_jeeves]

SEQ currently just caches the encrypted data until it receives a key.. then it decodes it and moves on.. this is already taken care of.. The key can be received 1 second, or 10 minues after the zone-in, and SEQ will correctly handle the original zone info.

--Jeeves

[cbreaker]

Originally posted by bonkersbobcat
I always, however, max out my CPU when playing EQ.

I've seen lots of people say this. It's totally not valid =)

Would you want EQ to not use 100% of your CPU and thus run slower? *any* fairly modern 3D game will run your CPU at 100%. Why save clock cycles, when you can put in that fancy texture or detail? I dunno about you, but over here, EQ is pretty graphically intensive, there's a lot to put on the screen. The models themselves are some of the most detailed models I've ever seen in a game.

Not to say that the EQ engine is top-notch, it's got a lot to be desired. However, even if they make it the most efficient 3D engine out there, the game will happily put those clock cycles to use elsewhere.

I expect any modern game I run to completely maximize it's usage on my computer. If I see 60% CPU usage, something is amiss.

Just my off-topic 2.

[S_B_R]

I think you are slightly missing the point cb. It's not that EQ should use less than 100% of the CPU. It's that it shouldn't waiste CPU cycles on this stupid pseudo-encryption of opcodes, and compressing compressed data...

[Hlapmoop]

I'd rather have smooth gameplay than pretty graphics. My gmeplay now is laggy when in any real situation where it would matter and I already got all the graphics turned down. You got a point, the game should be snarfing up all the resources it can to run. However, it shouldn't be taking up all those resources because it's trying to do too much in too little time.

[baelang]

Originally posted by seq_not_i
Amadeus: In the electronics arena, engineers are that sloppy, even in aerospace. I did some work for Lockheed and after 5 prototype circuit boards, the system still had incorrect parts called out.

I used to work at Boeing. don't even get me started on some of the software i saw there.

[Hobo]

ROFL...I still work at Boeing and I know exactly what you mean.

[fester]

Darkgrue, one thing of note.

Evidently (from my testing) EQ does not do much 3D processing.

For real performance (at this time) you need to get a system with on board video and PC2100 DDR or better memory.

AGP 8X video cards (like the top Radeon 9700) may score 11 times as faster than onboard on the 3DMark 2001, but they are slower when I ignorantly added the Radeon 9700 to my systems.

I would suggest removing all video cards (Radeon and Nvida) from my EQ systems and are running on the onboard video. DDR is required, because one of my systems had PC133 ram and was better served by a Radeon 9700.

This (of course) does not hold true for just about every other 3D game (especially things like unreal or quake) so keep the 3D cards handy or make a special EQ system to play EQ.

[devnul]

For regular play EQ is much deproved. Rampant ghosting and stuttering. Right now game quality is the worse it's been in a while.

In a large raid environment, and the nexus, things seem a little better than before.

It's certainly not impossible to accomodate both of these.

Compressing compressed packets is just pathetic in a product like this.

dn

[Crux]

cbreaker:


my cpu cruises at 49-51% usage in a relitivly dead zone, and upwards of 70-80% on a large guild raid now with eq. i suspect my video card is pulling alot of the load from the proccie though.


p4 3.06ghz
1.5gb ram
ati 9700

[bonkersbobcat]

Originally posted by S_B_R
I think you are slightly missing the point cb. It's not that EQ should use less than 100% of the CPU. It's that it shouldn't waiste CPU cycles on this stupid pseudo-encryption of opcodes, and compressing compressed data...

Agreed. When tuning a system you look for the bottleneck and improve it. If you don't tune to the bottleneck you don't do any good. I have a decent system. (P4 2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, Nvidia Ti 4600) When I play EQ my processor is always maxed. This means that my particular bottleneck is the CPU. My point here is that improving the network protocol is not going to help me because the network protocol is not my bottleneck. I don't think I am alone.

You might argue that the network is really still the bottleneck and that EQ is just using the extra avaiable CPU time to draw faster or with more detail and is not really waiting on the CPU. I don't think this is the case because the amount of data that goes over the network is not siginficantly different when I am in the Bazaar then in other zones. My performance in the Bazaar, however, is significantly different then in other zones. This tells me that it's not a network thing, but rather a CPU or video thing.

I have tried swaping out a couple of different CPUs and Video cards I have noticed that my performance difference is pretty linear as I change my CPUs and doesn't have much variance between my different video cards. This tells me that my bottleneck is not my video, leaving the CPU.

Given that CPU is my bottleneck, the best thing that SOE could do for me is to improve their use of available CPU time. Burning extra cycles to do a funky encryption on the network (that will get broken anyway) makes things worse, not better for me.

As a disclaimer, I do run at 1600 x 1200 with everything enabled (It's winter and I have to keep the house warm.)

Edit: spelling

[fester]

CPU is cheap now. I am quite sure they upgraded their servers CPU speed to handle the new encryption (and possible other improvements.)

It is only a matter of time before all the player base will be on 2ghz or better systems (considering cheap ones are 2.4ghz for $499) and then the few cpu cycles used for gzip will not matter.

I would suspect that gzip -1 uses little cpu when used against the low bytes per second rate (2 - 9 k in a raid) that EQ generates.

I would even bet that seq uses more CPU (before Jan 28) to display and animate the world than the CPU in the client to decode these compressed/encrypted packets. If I can run two sessions of seq with reasonable success on a 333mhz celeron, then that would me it uses (on average) 167 mhz to process packets. Sub seq's GUI for the compress/decompress and that means that about 200 mhz of your 2000mhz processor will be dedicated (or 10 percent).

In my mind 10 percent is acceptable if they can manage to make it less laggy while retaining the compressed payload.

EDIT: My main point (which I left out) is that the bandwidth savings for them is worth a considerable amount (since the nearly half the required bandwidth for their user base.) This means that if they keep their current bandwidth allocation, they are good until maybe 200k users. I would bet bandwidth is their largest expense (aside from maybe staff) and this is no small amount of money. Use 1.5 kb/s as an average savings per user, take 110k users, is 161mb/s (or an OC3). I am not sure, but I know a T1 costs about $700 a month so say OC3's are half off the rate, that is a savings of $36,000 a month (for them.)