Originally posted by willaert
Lag seems like a generic word for what happens when the machine gets locked up when playing an online game-- I thought lag was the time it took info packets to go from my computer to the server and back again. My experience with PS doesn\'t seem like lag at all, because when my PS game freezes, my CPU slams the roof and won\'t come down. I can close PS no problem, but this seems like a rendering issue to me, especially because I notice the problem is worse in areas with more polygons. In my experience, I get \"lag\" whether there are 4 clients running or 30. Is it really \"lag\"? I\'ve got a 1.6GHz machine, intel board, lots of memory-- so, I don\'t think this is a machine issue either.
Does anyone with some technical knowledge want to try to explain this to me?
Nick
While I don\'t claim to be a technical expert at all, I have been programming and messing about with computers for some 20 odd years now.
Several years ago when Jorritt first put Crystal Space together, with only a couple or three teammates at the time, I reviewed game engines written in C/C++ for flipcode.com. CS was one of the first reviews we did. Trust me, the engine has come a l-o-n-g way since those days.
Improved orders of magnitude than it was back then or not, there are still issues with the optimizations for the graphics rendering and effects. I would suggest a good read of the
Crystal Space site to get the complete lowdown. At the very least you will begin to see how complex some of these issues people complain about really are from a developmental point of view...
If the machine you\'re trying to run games on, not just Planeshift but any highly graphical 3D game, is not up to a certain spec, you will have problems. This is not lag. That\'s an altogether different kettle of fish that willaert covers pretty good above. Lag, in it\'s most simplistic essence, is packet loss and network bandwidth latency. I would venture to say that it\'s not lag you\'re experiencing as much as lack of optimization in the engine itself and
possibly lack of proper machine tweaking on your end.
Things you might wish to investigate are shutting down uneccessary background processes, clearing out the startup menu using msconfig, optimizing your registry using a product like regClean or RegMechanic, possibly doing a scandisk and defrag, insuring that all hardware, including your BIOS, is running under the latest drivers, optimizing the performance of all the hardware on your machine (use SiSandra to benchmark exactly what your hardware is doing, especially graphics and sound cards, et al).
Lastly, make sure you\'ve updated all the virus and adware/spyware definitions of the tools you use for keeping track of such things and run those tools religiously to keep all the nasties chased away. And always shut off things like popup blockers and virus scanners prior to firing the game up. The fewer process you have spawned, the better the engine can run as it has more system resources to draw upon. Todays games are resource hogs from hell for the most part... lol
Running a serious gaming machine is a chore if the system isn\'t kept at optimal operating efficiency on a regular basis. If you don\'t know how to do some of the stuff I mentioned, READ UP on it and learn. There is no better teacher than experience. And experience, my friend, comes from doing it and making mistakes. Learn from those mistakes and get better at the task next go-round. Pretty soon, all this will be second nature...
Again, the primary problem
everyone is suffering through right now is this is a pre-alpha tech demo, not a full-fledged game. Nor will it be a game for quite some time to come. If a playable game is what you\'re after, Planeshift, at the moment, is not the vehicle to use in getting there. Come back several updates from now after the devs have had time to assess the issues that come up during this tech period, add planned features and are able to add more content. Meanwhile, enjoy exploring, meeting fellow adventurers, forming bonds and amassing your fortune finding crystals so you\'ll be far and gone ahead of noobs coming in later... muahaaaaa
Hope this sheds a little light on some of the dark corners of your issue, joshuab. There are so very many things that could be contributing to the problem--keep in mind that we are talking about Windoze, right... rofl
Cheers!
Miago
