I think im on to something (lag)

[DannyDopamine 0]

While looking at different popular game server hosting websites for dayz i noticed many of the customer reviews for the dayz servers inparticular had many negative reviews. I even checked on various of the popular server hosting websites (sites that have been proven very good overtime) and they also had abnormally large amounts of negative reviews for just DAYZ hosting. All the other games they hosted had positive reviews from customers.

 

 

This basically indicated to me that dayz itself is the culprit. But why?

 

Even when i would play in gameservers.com hosted rooms with 30ping and with 20+ players i would get constant red-chain icons and constant de-sync issues where i would not be able to pick up items or use my inventory.

 

Than i realized that Dayz (or arma2) network coding engine uses an absurd amount of server-side dependencies compared to normal games resulting in a much larger bandwidth footprint per player.

 

Here is a list of actions i noted that all require back and fourth communication with the server in order to execute.

 

1.Clicking an item in inventory (recieving message which takes shorter or longer depending on how long the server takes

2. Pressing keyboard slots 1, 2, 3, 4,5.. all the way to 9 takes a varying amount of time to draw weapon depending on server

3. Items visually appearing on floor after discarding

4. Selecting another players body

5. Opening/closing doors

6. Climbing a ladder

7. Eating

8. Reloading

9. Dragging items from one slot to another.

10. Emptying ammo

11. Drinking

12. Loot

13. Zombies (understandable)

14. Proning

 

And basically tons of other things. This isn't good!

 

I just find it very unusual and impractical for a game to need THIS many permissions from the server to carry out such simple tasks. Its not wonder why dayz uses up such a large bandwidth footprint per player.

 

Usually multiplayer games use as little server-side permission as possible and just focus on communicating things like player position and bullet registration.

 

In any other game (even if the server is lagging tremendously) you can still switch weapons instantly, reload freely, use healthkit freely, drop item freely.. Because it does NOT need permission from the server for these simple tasks..

 

 

 

WARZ (i know chill)

I hate to use such a crap game as a comparison, but its the only one similar enough in regards to having a large map on a single server as well as thousands of loot items and thousands of zombies.. In warz they are able to support up to 200 players in a server without virtually any connection lag or "rubber banding" across the map. This is only possible because each player has such a tiny bandwidth footprint. Unlike dayz, in warz ALL of the loot is client-sided which takes a tremendous load off the servers. (if you drop an item in warz it appears instantly on the ground because it does not need to communicate its x,y position to the server)

 

Also in warz (even if you are lagging) you can still switch weapons, take out melee items, reload your gun, and do ALL these things that require fast user-response in real-time because it is clientside (which is how it should be)

 

Warz (like dayz) also uses server-side zombies (if they didnt than two players would both see a zombie in two different locations). But in warz the zombie bandwidth is optimized according to the amount of players in each server. For example, if there are 10 people in a warz server and the bandwidth is plentiful the zombies will have a position update rate of say... 30 times per second.. If there are 50 players in a warz server than the zombies position update rate will drop to say.. 20 times per second.. In 100+ player servers the zombies server update-rate will drop all the way down to about 10 times per second which allocates more bandwidth to the players instead of the zombies. In dayz i notice the zombies update rates are never modified accordign to server population which is unfortunate. But considering its alpha i hope this is one of many things they will eventually get around to.

 

To make a long story short.. Dayz relies way too much on the servers when in reality they should be doing the exact opposite. Thanks for reading i hope we can all get a better understand of WHY we experience lag in dayz instead of just blaming the servers or our PC's.

Edited February 24, 2014 by DannyDopamine

[[email protected] 46]

It will be tweaked more in time, they just need to figure what can be safe to use client side and what needs to be processed. Much of it is there to prevent hacking and catch out those that do, so its not really a bad thing.

[DannyDopamine 0]

I understand where you are coming from saying that it is a good thing to prevent hacking but lets not fool ourselves, arma is one of the most blatant hack-ravaged game i have ever witnessed in my entire pc gaming career. Arma is like a hackers dream come true. It has more security holes than a torn up net. So I will have to disagree. In no other game have i ever seen people able to hack to the extent that people have hacked in the arma games.  Some examples are hackers teleporting 100 jeeps into the air that rain down and lag out the server, teleporting everyone in server including the host a mile out into the ocean, hackers spawning 50 custom zombies personally right to your location all wearing white doctor suits with screen flashing blue/red and gangnam style music playing, hacker joining copying everyones serial-key and leaving, hackers giving all players DMR with infinite ammo, hackers giving people 100mph speed running.. All while laughing in the face of battleye anti hacker.. So even on the rare case that it WAS in fact made this way to avoid hacking (which i highly doubt) it was a catastrophic failure regardless.

 

But to make a long story short, i have never played a game that requires 1/10th of the amount of server-side handshakes that the arma engine requires. I honestly don't think it was made this way for any other reason besides the fact that bohemia starting out as a small inexperienced crew on a low budget with the first arma game (which is the base structure for all the following arma games) I simply believe it was because bohemia did not really plan on this being such a sucess on a large scale. I think they just wanted the online to work and thats it. I don't think they had any intention of optimizing the bandwidth footprint to be on par with some of the more popular triple A online games.