I was playing a strat that Lubberlick hosted @ mwf of 2 with Strange<FLY> and greenforces on the other team.
#1 I noticed a something I think might be related to the warp issues some people have noted. Both sides played as scions so after a little while both sides where in warriors with arc, gauss, blink, and varius sheilds. During the dogfights in these ships with people would apper to blink away but a half second later and their ship was still there and they where fighting as if they had not tried to blink. It made me wonder if for some reason the keyboard or mouse commands where getting out of order when transmited over the net or they where being miss ordered by multiworld. becuase say you are shooting arc at another ship but you want to shoot a guass at him while the arc reloads so you switch to guass and fire so that sends one command over the net switch weapon and then its sends a second fire command. Now you want to switch back to arc and fire again so the games sends the switch weapon command and then another switch weapon command since you have to switch past the special port and then its sends the fire command. Now here is the important part, somewhere inbetween it being sent and its being displayed on the other peoples computers the last to commands switch and fire get reversed so my computer sees it as fire and switch wich would make it look like on my computer you tried to use blink but in reality you shot a arc bolt at me.
I hope this can help people focus on something that might be cause strange warp because if weapon fire and weapon switch comamands are out of order what other commands are out of order? mouse move, direction change?
#2 In 1.3 with ai units being bigger part of strategy there is new issue with having large numbers of units on the commanders screen. it seems that now you cannot move one group of units into another group of like units that is currently being built. This can tie up a large amount of the commanders f keys with single units while they build.
it only happends in blink
its same in 1.2
i call it fake blink... because it looks like blink.. u see green from his ass but nothing happends.. ive learnt to live with it... its whenever a ship got blink... try it on dms with any unit u want.. its all the same
Ah thanks you have confermed it then.
Maybe I did mot make my point clear enough, if this fake blink is a sign that commands are being read out of order and we can find where they are being read out of order we could possibly fix %90-%99 of the warp we have currently. I feel that is a big deal.
you might be right :o
i didnt think of this that way :P
Yep, it happens on 1.2, too, when cycling weps (mouse wheel). I even took damage from someone blinking through my vehicle but the next second the fake blinker was back where he was before.
I'm not optimistic that weapon switching is the cause, but I guess it's worth checking out.
When I was in a stock Mortar Bike (in stock 1.3) my health once went from green to yellow to green when I was hit with a laser or blast from a Sabre. I certainly wasn't switching weapons as there is only one in a stock MB. Maybe the Sabre was, but I'm not sure about that, as not much else apart from the blast or laser stood a chance of reaching me.
Also, I have seen scouts move in a skipping way: an ISDF scout was running in a straight line from one base to the other on Quarry, neither that scout nor me (also in an ISDF scout) were engaging each other. He was moving in a straight line for about a second, would then skip forward a little, move in a straight line, skip forward. Skipped forward at least twice in the part of the journey I saw. I was not fighting, I might even have been stationary or moving slowly, at about the middle of the map while he went all the way from one base to the other in a straight line.
thats moving faster then the engine can understand.. i can show u the fastest way to hover - if u look on radar or T ull see blank like vir and ull see my "image" trying to follow me
The reason I thought of this goes back to the way bz2 sends data between players. Unlike most other fps which send data saying I'm at xyz and I'm facing w direction, Bz2 sends data like player press the move forwards key player moved mouse left x amount player pressed the fire key. Then each persons computer updates their copy of that player using those inputs. Its almost like you had 8 people sitting at the some keyboard. So over the corse of one second dozens of commands are being sent, just think how many updates the mouse alone generates over 1 second during a dog fight?
Sure, I understand BZ2 is a complicated game, thats one of the reasons I like it. I don't have much of a technical understanding of the inner workings of the software.
In that example I gave in my earlier post, one of the simpler things in BZ2 was happening: one ship moving in a straight line with another stationary ship nearby, no weapons firing. I don't know what was happening elsewhere on the map; I think there were five or six of us in total in the game.
What I'd like to understand is why it seems worse in 1.3 compared to 1.2? The example was from stock 1.3. I usually play FE strat, which has a third race, and is based on the 1.2 engine, so has more crazy movement possible. I realise you know that, but it does seem odd that when BZ2 is running with 1.3, in a slower and simpler way, warp has got worse. But we're in beta, hopefully we can work something out to improve it.
There is a gameprefs setting that says "If you are watching a player ship move the engine will move it x% of it's max speed per refresh". If it is less then 100% then a ship going at full speed will appear to skip. If it is up to 500%(the max, I think) then it might skip BACKWARDS.
no that setting says that a ship my move up to X% of its forward speed per frame(refresh) its can move slower and be just fine.
Ok, if it is going at speed X, gameprefs is limiting it to Y% of the unit's max forward speed, and X is higher then Y% * Max Forward Speed then the unit won't go as far between multiworld syncs then it really does, and it will skip. That is how I see it, anyway.
Another observation to throw into the mix:
warp seems most obvious with units built by the Rec. I've noticed warp most pronounced with scavs, un-deployed turrets, and scouts, doing that "skip" thing. Maybe Mortar Bikes will always be a special case, though it does happen with other stuff, like Maulers.
Was using Blast against human piloted Scion scouts; was a waste of time.
Was using Shadowers against human piloted Scion scouts; was a waste of time also: the missiles weren't even heading for them, but a little bit off, the scouts were not that far away either. The "spray and pray" weapons worked a lot better against moving targets, chain, Scion scout plasma, etc.,.
I assume you guys are doing this with broadband and low pings. It sux when your ping "hovers" around 300ms +/- 50ms, like mine.
I think all pings were under 200ms; mine is typically about 130 to that server. I don't think a scav or turret on the move is going to cause many problems for even the humblest connection?
Yep, only units that fight back (human or ai). :D