ShowEQ 6 Beta Test

[Loki]

Already fixed

That's great! You're quick! I haven't played in last couple days but will be tonight and tomorrow.

EDIT: I didn't even notice on the map issue, but I was only playing in GMM zone and dying to GH/GL. I got some old quests I gotta do. I box 4 or 5 characters with mercs at a time.... Maps I am using is using mapconvert script posted by Razzle and my own "merge" script.

[fransick]

Maps I use in SEQ5 are all loading without issue. Fix looks to be right on. It's been rock solid but I see significant lag and difficulty repainting the map screen that I don't experience with 5. Not sure where to start troubleshooting. It takes a few minutes to kick in then sticks until I close and restart. In other words, zoning doesn't fix it.

[cn187]

This could definitely be tricky to troubleshoot. A few questions come to mind that might help me get started:

When you say difficulty repainting, do you mean as it relates to the laggy behavior, or are there other repainting issues like ghosting or artifacts?

How does the lag act - does it seem like a slideshow - the whole screen updates at once but the updates are too far apart? or is it more like part of the screen updates, then another part of the screen updates, then another part of the screen updates, until everything is updated?

If it starts lagging after a few minutes - does the amount of time before it starts to lag seem to be fairly consistent, or is it pretty variable?

Once it starts lagging, does it seem to get worse the longer it runs, or does it get to a certain level of lag and sort of stay there?

Have you seen it start happening while you're in different zones, or have you pretty much been in the same place when it happened?

[fransick]

This could definitely be tricky to troubleshoot. A few questions come to mind that might help me get started:

When you say difficulty repainting, do you mean as it relates to the laggy behavior, or are there other repainting issues like ghosting or artifacts? No Ghosting or Artifacts. Behaves more like the FPS drops to 1 FPS

How does the lag act - does it seem like a slideshow - the whole screen updates at once but the updates are too far apart? or is it more like part of the screen updates, then another part of the screen updates, then another part of the screen updates, until everything is updated? Whole screen updates but they are far apart. When sitting in PoK, I can see all the NPCS and PCs move but at something close to 1 FPS

If it starts lagging after a few minutes - does the amount of time before it starts to lag seem to be fairly consistent, or is it pretty variable? Time it takes seems fairly consistent.

Once it starts lagging, does it seem to get worse the longer it runs, or does it get to a certain level of lag and sort of stay there? Reaches a point then stays there

Have you seen it start happening while you're in different zones, or have you pretty much been in the same place when it happened?

Happens in all zones I have visited

I was contemplating setting up another Linux box with a more current distro and better equipment to see if that changes anything. Didn't have time this weekend and traveling next few weeks so might be a bit before I can test.

[cn187]

Thanks fransick, that should get me started.

If you do get a chance to test with something more recent, that would be great. But of course, RL comes first. Who knows, maybe I'll have it figured out by the time you get back. Safe journeys!

[cn187]

So far, I still haven't been able to reproduce the map lag.

If you right click on the map window and go to "Show", at/toward the bottom is "show debug info". That will overlay an FPS counter in the corner of the map. I'd be curious to know what it says both when things are working normally and when it's lagging.

[BlueAdept]

Of all times for the beta testing to happen, it has to happen when I am closing on a new house and moving. Sorry guys, I will be out of action probably until January. I close on my house on the 18th.

[Loki]

I have not seen any map lags either - I will keep testing though. So far it's been solid.

BlueAdept - Congrats on your new house!

[fransick]

Thanks fransick, that should get me started.

If you do get a chance to test with something more recent, that would be great. But of course, RL comes first. Who knows, maybe I'll have it figured out by the time you get back. Safe journeys!

Some further testing with map debug... once the lag starts it persists through zoning and is unshakeable until a restart of SEQ. It drops the FPS to 1 and ms vary between 52 and 150. Super slow and does not happen on SEQ5. I can say that it hasn't Seg Faulted once and doesn't seem to have a problem with "

SEQ: Giving up on finding arq" which are two things I have been seeing on SEQ5 of late

[cn187]

fransick -

Today I spun up a Fedora 14 VM, compiled SEQ there with the available library versions, and spent some time in-game. But still no luck reproducing the lag issue here. No matter what I set my FPS limit to (even 1fps) my render time never goes above 5ms.

Maybe you could try dumping some profiling data so we can see if something is taking a bunch of time that isn't supposed to? You'll need to "make clean", re-run configure with "--enable-profiling" (and any other flags you usually use) and then re-compile.

Then run SEQ, and once it starts lagging, wait some more so there's plenty of data, then exit out of SEQ. That will produce a file called "gmon.out" in the current directory. Then you run "gprof showeq > profile_info" and it will convert all of the binary profiling data in gmon.out into something that's human readable and put it in profile_info. Then if you can post that profile_info file here, I can compare it to what I have and see if anything stands out.

Thanks.

[Loki]

Does it happen in any zone? Are you playing EQ Live? TLP?

[Loki]

Got a Color Con .."bug".. (I'm not sure if it's a bug or it's intended - probably the latter - and it is also in Official build). The "Even Spawn" is default to 255/255/255 to show black fonts on white background. Since I have dark theme on KDE, it still shows it black color but I just drop one of the color down to 254 and it shows white. Also DROP: or DOOR: etc will show black color and there isn't any option AFAIK to change that.

Performance still seems fine.

[fransick]

Does it happen in any zone? Are you playing EQ Live? TLP?

Seems to be any zone playing on live. Just for kicks I spun up a fresh install on a more current distro and it looks like I am having issues with pcap. It will zone and show skittles but then only capture packets randomly after that. The packet counter increments every once and while so something is up. And here I thought doing a fresh install would just be easier than messing with an old install!

[cn187]

it looks like I am having issues with pcap. It will zone and show skittles but then only capture packets randomly after that. The packet counter increments every once and while so something is up.

A couple of things to try:

1) when you're running SEQ and experiencing the map lag and packet loss, can you run "top" (or similar) and grab a screenshot?

2) Does going to the Network menu and selecting "Real Time Thread" help/change the issues you're seeing?

[cn187]

Got a Color Con .."bug".. (I'm not sure if it's a bug or it's intended - probably the latter - and it is also in Official build). The "Even Spawn" is default to 255/255/255 to show black fonts on white background. Since I have dark theme on KDE, it still shows it black color but I just drop one of the color down to 254 and it shows white. Also DROP: or DOOR: etc will show black color and there isn't any option AFAIK to change that.

Performance still seems fine.

Thanks. Since it's in the official build as well, I'm not going to consider it a show-stopper, but I'll add it to my list of stuff to work on. I've also noticed a lot of little things about the UI that could use fixing/improvement, so feel free to share whatever you find even if the issue is present in the official build.