I Had a Dream!

[KG_Soldier]

In my dream, Little Powell and Norb conversed:

LP: "You know, Norb, the GCM community is working hard to understand and improve lag problems in large games."

N: "I know. I read the GCM Forum at least twice a day."

LP: "What are you doing this weekend?"

N: "Thought I'd look at Cav code."

LP: "Perhaps you need a break from the Nap project."

N: "That'd be nice, but I need to do something. I mean. . . I have no life and live to work on code."

LP: "How about looking into MP lag issues for the GCM fellas?"

N: "I do have a few ideas on that subject. Yeah. . . I'll look at it this evening. This is going to be awesome. The GCM peons will worship me and buy three copies of SOW Waterloo each."

And then the alarm went off and I had to get up and go to work.

[NY Cavalry]

Norb,

I am wondering what MP advances we will have with the new release? You made SOW MP and for that we do thank you. I am sure that you yourself recognize the need for improvements. The Napoleon community will be larger and will be even more fickle than us.

Let me post about a challenge that we are having using the gcm mod with Sow. The issue is lag. We like big games. Big games make for a challenging game. You really have to learn and work with fellow players that have all the different qualities that you see in reading books about military commanders. Whether a commander is slow, aggressive, defensive, etc. You just cannot get that experience quite like we have with GCM MP.

The slowest computer regulates the speed. This has to change. We have new players who have converted their commodor 64s to gaming? I don't know how? They like the game and want in mp games. Now imagine a mp game created for 90 minutes and it takes 3+ hours. This is a reality for us. With good connections and computers we can run a created 90 minute game in 90 minutes. That is a chuck of time already 2+ and 3+ hours is just unworkable. Eight player games run alright with minimal lag even if the computers are slow.

Do we exclude players? This is not a good option, but we have been experimenting and it doesn't go over very well....and mind you they are experimental games. Are slower computer people restricted to max 8 player games? Is the game made for only 8 player mp games max and any games over that are considered unsupported? Many of the players with weak connections or slow computers consistently state that they are able to play MP with other games and they run just fine.

What will it be for the Napoleonic groups that want to play MP; and there are several Napoleonic groups?



I don't know what is doable, but could we get something like an option for the host that can run the game clock? Lets say the group will accept 20 percent lag. The Host sets the clock speed and all the computers have to run off that clock. If a slow computer has pauses and "glitches" where regiments seem to jump then so be it.


I think you really need to think about this for the next release or the Norbsoft expansion may not be able to handle all the demands from the Napoleonic community. Even though Mp is a small part of the overall community.

[Garnier]

I don't know what is doable, but could we get something like an option for the host that can run the game clock? Lets say the group will accept 20 percent lag. The Host sets the clock speed and all the computers have to run off that clock. If a slow computer has pauses and "glitches" where regiments seem to jump then so be it.

This isn't doable for a game that runs entirely on each player's machine. Each player's computer is running everything and if they can't keep up, the only options are to wait for them or disconnect them. The alternative is to have the host machine run the whole game and send the game state to all the players, but that isn't easy or practical for most RTS games.
Most other RTS games have this same issue, and typically they "solve" it by putting hard caps on the size of a game, often to 8 players. I'm glad Norb didn't put such a cap in, but that means it's up to us to set our own limits. If you mod a total war game to have bigger battles than is allowed by default, you'll make it lag and run into this same problem.

I think it's really impressive that we've had so many 20 player / ~80000 troops battles run at all.

While the game could be optimized better, it's mostly up to us to figure out how big a game our hardware can handle. Even if the game's performance was doubled, every computer will still have a limit to how big a battle it can handle smoothly. With decent hardware and reasonable battle sizes the game runs fine already.