Gaming Madness Community Forum

Damn go for a couple of days and come back and you put the sents on. Now you going to get lots of low level people to set one up and walk away. I hope you take em out soon. Seems to be working better then the last time you had them on here though. The new vehicle thing is interesting.

Sents dont even last long. They are put on to get destroyed. Besides most likely they are coming off. They are generating too many error messages.

and too much lag.....otha dan dat i aint got no problem wit em

too easy to telefrag people with these.....and sometimes yourself....i dont want to imagine one of these things in Kurts hands when hes having a bad day ](*,)

Here is the purpose behind sents and future plans...

1. I added sentinels beta so we can stress test its development.
2. Added sents because I havent patched server yet with v1.80 Wop Invasion. Think of it as something to keep you busy.
3. The plans for sentinels are as follows: (1) debating to add them as an ability RPG Role Heavy Support. (2) Sentinels will be limited to only 1 or 2 per map. The purpose is have a sentinel to support the team. (3) the sentinel will be also available as an artifact and added to the special weapons chest. As you see, sentinels will not be used as a default weapon for everyone. Keeping it limited adds new team strategy and fun.

As far as for lag, try and understand what is lag and hows its caused in the game. Here are some examples.

Small maps cause lag, because everything is in a small area so you have a lot of collision processing going on (projectiles, explosions etc). I am working on this to where the collisions only get processed where necessary. Meaning monsters cant damage monsters and players cant damage players.

Large maps cause lag becuase of the long life of a projectile. Watch when rockets are fired into the large sky, the projectiles seem to fly forever. Again, i am fixing this issue by reducing the life of the projectile, meaning ranging weapons.

Rough terrain can cause lag too. everytime an Actor changes elevation location it must be processed.

Here is another good example of lag. Play Torlan with sentinels. You will realize that the lag is less than players abaltross without sents. Why? Again, monsters, players firing weapons are all too close, relsults.. constant processing of collisions and damage radius processing. Think of each object having a coke can cylinder around it, when they touch each other it calls all that process touch processing. If you notice in Torlan, lag is less because the more spread out the projectiles are. This means the less chance of a monster hitting another monster (avoiding collision processing) as to Abaltross DM small map as to where just about every projectile is touching several players and/or monsters. Again, every object has a coke can type cylinder around it. Try this example and you can see what I mean... Take two un open coke cans, one in left hand and one in right hand. Take right hand coke can and tap the left hand coke can a few times. Now if you were to open the coke cans, it would foam out like a fountain. Because the two coke cans collided, damage was processed, the result, coke spewing out if you opened it. You can also think of timers the same way. If you let the coke can sit, the air would slowly make its way back to the top, results... doesnt spew when opened later. next time you play a small map I want you to imagine coke cans (projectiles, monsters and players) all in a small hall or something. If you count, you will probably see about 100 coke cans colliding. Also, in the game, collisions have associated timers which are triggered when objects touch. If we can avoid the unecessary processing we can reserve the machine cycles for better things. Again, I am working on this to where monsters stop calling these processes when colliding with other monsters and the same for players.

Now do you have a better understanding on lag?
On saturday, I sat on server 8 hours straight and watched and played large maps with sentinels. 16 players, 14 sentinels, 8 Guardian Spiders were running at same time. Thats like having 38 players and lag was an issue for 90% of the people. Its all mainly about how the projectiles and associated effects get processed. And collision processing can be a holy nightmare.

Hope this info helps.

AngelDust wrote:and too much lag.....otha dan dat i aint got no problem wit em

erm.

I already said they generate errors which = lag.

Joey, pup tart shoulda told you about it. Yesterday I was getting a big handful of errors.

TheSynGame wrote:

AngelDust wrote:and too much lag.....otha dan dat i aint got no problem wit em

erm.

I already said they generate errors which = lag.

Joey, pup tart shoulda told you about it. Yesterday I was getting a big handful of errors.

oooooooooooooo shaaaaaadaaaaaaaaaap

No kidding Gen, thats the whole intent of beta testing.

These beta sents are on the server so players can stress test it, tell us what they like, what to change, and for us to collect and analyze real-time raw data. We couldnt place them in the next server v1.80 patch if they have issues now could we

Thanks Gen, I know about the errors, lag, and crash they may cause, we have some fixes to do. We are working around the clock trying to fix stuff for next server patch.

You guys can do me a favor though. I have server side logs but need client side logs to analyze. Please play a whole game (wave 1 thru 20) and post your ut2004.log to forum so vaptor and I can go thru it and fix sentinel errors/bugs/performance issues.

Thanks.

joeyz wrote:You guys can do me a favor though. I have server side logs but need client side logs to analyze. Please play a whole game (wave 1 thru 20) and post your ut2004.log to forum so vaptor and I can go thru it and fix sentinel errors/bugs/performance issues.

Thanks.

I'll be happy to do that tonight, provided I can find a slot and play a full map! However, I'l try my best regardless!

joeyz wrote:You guys can do me a favor though. I have server side logs but need client side logs to analyze. Please play a whole game (wave 1 thru 20) and post your ut2004.log to forum so vaptor and I can go thru it and fix sentinel errors/bugs/performance issues.

Thanks.

done.

->http://monstermadness.iforumer.com/view ... ness#21870

and i think its best to look into more different clientsided logfiles....

ats