It happens quite often, Erfgone. It only means either your program (the client) or the remote server has not received news from each other for too long. This is due to network congestion.

Or, if you happened to be logged when the server shut down, you could have got this message. Just check the status of the server on this page. If the server is offline, wait for it to be online again and with the status \"running World: loaded\".

As I\'m writing this, the server is offline, which means everyone has to wait  


In summary, you should just retry logging in.

Maybe those raw facts can help. Anyway, they tend to go against the \"computer only slowness\" theory. Please feel free to compare with your experience and/or to comment.

1) Either when on a local server, or on fragnetics with 4-5 clients logged in :

- there is no \"lag\" throughout the city and under it. For instance, in the basement when you come out from the dungeon, everything is smooth (almost thought I was disconnected !).

- an exception to this is the first time you enter a sector. If you make several turns on yourself, this is choppy at some angles. Then it disappears. Maybe caching some textures and/or items. Next time entering the same sector it\'s fine (maybe 768 MB help here). The choppy effects are synchronous with HD accesses.

- on top of the tower, it\'s slower, the computer most probably. The effect is constant and does not really disappear (maybe it\'s worse the very 1st time though, cfr. previous point). The worst angle is towards the plaza.

2) Usually, with about 30 clients :

- some lag

- everytime, coming out of the dungeon via the basement is something I am proud of, and that I consider as a major achievement. Yeah right, maybe I\'m overstating a little bit  :rolleyes:

- the first time you enter a sector, same cache-like effect. (ever fell from the tower this way ?   )

- on the tower, same slowness towards the city.

Those effects were not felt when there was usually about 15-20 people at the same time, some months ago. Especially the \"freeze for several minutes\" one.

3) Sometimes, especially during W-E, with about 30 clients :

- big \"lag\" ! Sometimes entering some region of a sector (for instance the part of town between temple and the tavern), your framerate is going down. I mean it, 1 fps, then 0.1 fps. Then sometimes much worse : you can\'t either move or type commands, for several tens of seconds, or even for minutes.

- this effect may disappear if you go out of the region (e.g. /spawn). Not always.

- this was more rare in the dungeon. Also more rare in smaller sectors like library, temple, tavern.

- additional effect I didn\'t see before : the server drops many clients at once (usually only a handful remain logged).

- (quite rare) bursts of \"lag\". Every second, a little freezing. Lasts several seconds to minute. Someone doing the server backup ?  

System specs

WindowsXP, SP1, DX9
PS v0.2.010 (with update   ) - windowed 1024x768, openGL mode (32-bit desktop)
3 Mbps dsl connection (ethernet router), located in Belgium, fragnetics ping averaging to 350 ms (in all the above cases)
1.33 Ghz Athlon, 768 MB DDR 266 MHz on data bus (2100)
GeForce 3 (64 MB), nVidia v43.45 drivers

Hope it can be useful ...

Rulzern :
And also, won\'t this game attract a higher % of griefers and lamers than other MMORPG\'s, being free and all? I mean, lamers and griefers don\'t usually pay for a game just to ruin it for everyone else, but when it\'s free, it\'s a different matter.

Yes sadly enough this is becoming more and more frequent, because Planeshift is getting known to a wider public than (pre-)alpha/beta enthusiasts. That\'s one reason why I wouldn\'t advertise this game too heavily (at least not to inadequate public but is it possible to choose ?). Unless it can help the developers of course

A kick feature (with voting system ) could maybe handle that easily enough for now ?

Solaire :
Woooow, thank you Scrythe. This is awesome material. I might even consider giving c++ a second try now ^_^

Kundalf :
my experience with no matter what progging language is, that books and tutorials can never replace a course/classes, where you have feedback and some advice in the beginning.

imho, the best way to progress (without too many headaches) is to practice. Then you are forced to ask yourself many questions that are not in teaching books. Write programs, and read programs from other people, preferably good programmers. There\'s plenty of open-source software to choose from, although it is not easy to tell good code from bad code when you are just beginning to learn.

Courses are good (if the lecturer is) and can boost the process. But you have to be available enough to attend them. That\'s why I prefer learning with a book and get my feedback from reading other\'s code    Both schools have their pro\'s and con\'s.

I also have to agree with Skizzik and Kada. Now the world of PS is quite advanced and stable, frequent DB wipe-outs would give the dedicated players a feeling of constant \"early development stage\" and unstability.

And like others, I think it would be nice to have something permanent in the game, that could be bought with the crystals. Of course, I know there is already enough work for the dev team, so better keep it simple  

Just another idea, that could work for now or in the far future : I think I\'m not wrong saying that most people would want a way to be easily recognized in-game. So I would tentatively suggest the possibility for them to \"buy\" a texture for their character, like personal clothes. Special items would require 3d modeling, so let\'s put that aside.

For instance, as the texture size should be quite small, it could be designed by the buyer and uploaded to the server and then downloaded to other clients on demand (i.e. when the character has to be rendered). Of course we have to hope nobody will make it provocative or aggressive, but I don\'t think dedicated players would. I also realize this implies additional coding, but am I wrong or is this a feature you would implement anyway ?

Or this could be a set of pre-defined textures, that would be downloaded along with the client at next update.

By the way, I suppose DB wipe-out means crystals and weapons ?  8o

Technical help forum is intended to try helping others, not insulting them. At least, that\'s what I thought before seeing this.

So, sorry if you misunderstood my statement and yes, you have taken it wrong. I should have guessed the solution was not so easy, so it was indeed a dumb question from me. Obviously it wasn\'t apreciated.

Bobbity, dumb question : do you have bash correctly installed ? Your OS seems to have difficulties finding it.

Check the permissions on /bin/sh, there should be a problem here.

Right. Besides, even commercial S/W companies cannot afford wide target range anymore. It costs them too much to develop specific code for win32/linux, then S/W and H/W graphic rendering (on opengl, d3d, ... no, not glide anymore...). It also means more complex support and maintenance. If you add lower-end machines on top of that...

You could see this with id. I think they were one of the first gaming company to say \"well, now we don\'t publish s/w-rendered code anymore !\". Was it risky ? They are still there, and I don\'t know many people without a 3D card in their computer.

By the time PS will be more mature, your computer should normally beef up anyway. That is a corollary to Moore\'s and Darwin\'s laws (though I\'m not sure they worked together )

What I am very curious about is how PS will scale. Now, there is \"only\" one city of, let\'s say, medium size. Most of the buildings are empty (or are they full of diamonds - sometimes I wonder). And if you look down from the big tower, you can feel that there is much work to be done by the rendering engine so that you can admire the view of MB.

Will they do like in Morrowind for inside/outside ? And will the land be continuous ? We\'ll see...

But I\'m afraid the gain they could get with optimizations will be used to extend the features in PS.