For those of you without lag...
 

Right, I imagine the title of this thread alone may cause some drama, but let me be clear. This is a poll to find out if there's common ground in players that don't suffer unplayable degrees of lag or slow down. Before anyone says *everyone* suffers it, I don't to any troubling extent, and I find it highly unlikely I'm alone in that respect. I'm willing to accept their may be a minority of players that don't have problems, that's fine. I'm creating this thread to assist the developers in knowing whether there's common ground in those who play Regnum without undue slow down or stability issues.

So *ONLY* vote, only comment, if you are reasonably happy with things, an FPS drop in huge fort wars would be deemed acceptable, I get that to, but if generally you find Regnum amicably playable. Again this *isn't* a thread to start arguments or question the existence of lag, or boast which OS is superior, or any of that, it's just to find out if there's common ground between those who don't have so many problems.

UK player using Kubuntu (Gutsy) and a Nvidia GeForce 6200 here incidentally.

Hi Trix,

I find this poll very useful, and I thank you for it. :)

Please vote carefully as this is a very good feedback for us.

Thread stuck.

Regards.

PS: Argentinian Player, Debian Etch, Nvidia GeForce 6150.

RADEON X600 256MB HyperMemory

I have some lag from time to time, gameplay is decent to great :)

Not a problem! I hope it helps.

Someone just pointed out to me my signature apparently falls outside new guidelines, I've been away from the forums for a bit so I must have missed that post. Is there a maximum number of lines now? I made it use the smaller font size, I don't know if that's sufficient, I'm happy to change it if required.

Nah, smaller font doesnt count. I used smaller font and even less lines than you and still was out of rules. Ah well.

I have immense lag when big groups of people pass by me. I don't think I will vote :p

I had talked with surak in the past, and sent him some screenshots. I came to the conclusion that my lag (big crowd ping spike/freeze) was caused by resources being downloaded, since the dload rate (one of TCP/UDP, dont remember which) showed 0. Surak told me this happens when the connection is hogged by downloads. I had "update all resources at once" checked since day 1 in this game. Surak said that it might be broken, which I'm pretty sure it is, since I still get resource downloads. Perhaps people that have played the same installation of regnum for a long time and definitely have all the resources downloaded have less lag than everyone else.

At any rate, download all resources imo should be checked, could people state if they have that option ticked or not? I wanna see if it's just me.

I'm on the US east coast, and i have immense lag. Therefore i did not vote.

So, yah...

Please now, this has been accepted as a useful thread. There's plenty of other threads to complain about lag on. If the devs don't have to trawl through complaints on this thread it will save their time in terms of gathering useful information and comments. Maybe there should even be a sticky for constructive lag complaint related posts, but this one is for the happy players.

Realising it's very early days in terms of voting, five out of six happy players using modern Nvidia cards sparks a note of interest.

Ok depending on the OS i use i either have lag or not

If i use linux i have hardly any lag but i crash 3-5 times in a session
If however i use windows xp i have random lag spikes at inappropriate times (ie fort wars) but no crashes

I use windows as id rather lag then crash i tend to keep away from fort wars if its too laggy

Lag was always much worse for me under Windows as well. From what I can tell, the Windows client runs better, but seems to have an unexplained lag that causes the game to "chug" alot whereas the Linux client doesn't.

I know it's not graphics lag because of the 40-60 FPS even in wars.

Unfortunately I cannot vote, as I have always had poor performance and lag on machines that I have tested. In cases where the performance was good (usually Windows), I still get those unexplained lag locks, which is quite confusing.

I think it is something to do with DirectX, because if I remember correctly using the OpenGL renderer dropped the frame rate to abysmal levels but also made the hidden lag spikes go away. Maybe it is even NVIDIA-specific.

For reference to NGD, I'm on a 3 Mbps cable connection with 512 kbps upload rate. Ping is consistently 100-200ms.

Tested machines

AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz
512MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6200
Linux

Problems encountered:
Poor performance, overbearing memory usage - frequent stalls due to paging

AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz
384MB RAM
S3 ProSavageDDR (Unsupported))
Linux

Problems encountered:
Poor performance, overbearing memory usage - frequent stalls due to paging

AMD Sempron 1.67GHz
512MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX
Linux & Windows

Problems encountered:
Linux: Poor performance, overbearing memory usage - frequent stalls due to paging
Windows: Moderate performance, frequent lag locks

AMD Sempron 1.67GHz
768MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6200
Linux & Windows

Problems encountered:
Linux: Poor performance, slight memory usage issues - most problems come from very low FPS
Windows: Moderate performance, frequent lag locks

AMD Athlon 800MHz
640MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX
Windows

Problems encountered:
Slight memory usage issues, frequent lag locks

Intel Core 2 Duo (1.9GHz x 2)
2GB RAM
Intel onboard graphics(unknown chipset) (Unsupported?)
Windows

Problems encountered:
Excellent performance, but very frequent lag locks
Very high latency on the controls, controlling my character to fine degrees is almost impossible

Again I have made this post out of legitimate concern for the performance of Regnum, not to flame NGD.

Regards.

Acer laptop
ATI X1300 Mobility Radeon + fglrx 8.5
2GB RAM
Ubuntu 8.04
2Mbit ADSL, stable ping 20ms

with particle effects the game goes well until there are 3 or more players in the view range, then it goes worse with FPS
when 30+ players around (fort wars) the game is absolutely unplayable (<1 FPS)
I'm sure one of the effects causing this is Regeneration, not sure about others

without particle effects, with force safe mode, the game is well playable even in fort wars
FPS in abandoned area: 30-100 depending on number of polygons
FPS in war area: 15-30 (which is still very good)

and for the server lag - I can see server lags when 600+ users online, sometimes making levelling very difficult (a mob appears suddenly in front of me and hits me 4 times in a row instead of dying far enough)
server ping is always between 80 and 120 ms (I think it's some 10-20ms worse last few days)

What do you call "lag"?
It has been explained a countless number of times. There are three different phenomenons that are accounted as lag: bad client performance (aka "fps lag"), bad server performance (aka "server lag"), and bad connection latency (ie, lag). The latter only makes a difference regarding gameplay when there are very few users on the server (because of the bad server code/protocol). Ask Znurre who lags as much as anyone with a ping of 30-40ms. I myself play with less than 100ms. The two formers, client & server lag, are experienced by *EVERY* player, it's not a matter of OS/configuration or location.

Now there might be a difference between different platform users (Windows or Linux) or driver/videocard users, but by any means it should not be called lag.

My room mate plays on PC with Ubuntu 8.04, some newer NVidia graphics (256MB) and has all effects, including ex-dangerous antialiasing, maxed - his game runs really smoothly

For how long does the game run smoothly? At what resolution?
I play 1680x1050 and the client runs smoothly too "for some time".

And it doesn't matter in the end with the server misplacement of players and casting delay.

I voted because I only got huge lag from time to time in huge fort wars with 50+ ignis.

My config is a Debian Linux (Lenny) with Geforce 8500 GT, I therefore voted European/Other Linux/Gefore 6xxx or faster.

And I have to add that During the last month I add to downgrade the window resolution for playing regnum from 1440x900 to 1280x960 to keep good fps.

Hi,
although i do have lag i'll post here just so the devs can get an overview of where and on which systems it occurs.

Two machines, both have lag.

First Machine:
AMD 6000+ Dualcore, 8GB RAM, Nvidia 8800GT, Game running off SCSI 320 disks on an ICP Vortex Raid 1
I get FPS lag in fortwars after a few waves of enemies, it goes down to 10-20 FPS after a while, no fps lag the rest of the game. Network lag occurs depending on server load.

Second Machine:
Intel Pentium 4 2800, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 6600GT, Game running off a Western Digital Raptor 36GB disk.
I get FPS lag in fortwars and FPS lag when people approach, both enemies and friendlies. In fortwars it goes down to under 10 FPS. Network lag occurs depending on server load.

Just to clarify, FPS lag for me means FPS going down (to unplayable levels), network lag means spell cast lag, jumping back when running, warping players etc.

Both machines on a cable line 16mbit/1mbit.
OS on both Debian/testing.

I don't know how long exactly, it could be a month or two? before that, antialiasing (and maybe something else too) was often causing crashes...so he used to play with min detail
now I can see no flaws on his (:rale:) 1680x1050 display during playing regnum - but surely I can't see everything

I'm saying "how long" regarding the playing sessions. Does he play at fort wars for 2 hours without the FPS value going down to a point where it's unplayable?
For the record I'm also playing Regnum under Ubuntu with a monster PC.

I'm constantly amazed by how the forum, and more specifically complaining, seems a bigger part of the Regnum experience than the game for some people. So many users reaching their monthly climax of disgust at what a terrible, terrible game Regnum is, and how they are never coming back, but can still be found posting a week later, still complaining. Regularly gathering together for the grand exit, the regular occurrence of the devs making some *inexcusable* action that *will* cause *all* to leave the game, following those who fight for the rights of the users against the evil developers, except that grand excursion never happens does it. Nope people are still on playing, as ever. Some of us actually enjoy playing the game, hard to believe, but it's true. Some of us, really *don't* have performance issues.

So, one thread, one thread, clearly stated, comment and post if you *don't* have a performance issues with Regnum...


My best to you gamemod, I really don't envy your job. And as ever my best to the devs, constantly having to suffer an avalache of abuse and criticism, marked occasionaly with a satisfied grunt when the ranks of oh so distinguished long timer players deem you've done something satisfactory in their eyes.

Yah, and I know I keep saying I'm gonna quit these forums, then I come back, it's because one of these days I hope the bunch of you that keep quitting actually do quit, and this forum gets the chance to grow and blossom a little. I get the feeling you just enjoying complaining. As it stands at the minute nobody can say anything positive or constructive on these forums without it getting beaten down, every thread however specifically and politely titled is turned into another moan thread, and is pulled off topic to match the rest.

Well see you in a month or so I guess...

Out.

I'm sorry Trix but I simply don't believe you. Maybe you just don't have the same standards. When we're talking about "lag", people are either referring to server side lag *that's happening for ALL AND EVERY PLAYER* regardless of your computer and location! So even being the NGD apologist you are (personally I don't think it does any good to the game) you just can't ignore this. Try playing Warlock if you want to notice server lag -- when you cast a 3s spell with devotion and it takes 5s it has nothing to do with your client.

As for CLIENT PERFORMANCE issues, they depend on two things: (1) your computer and its setup (you can do something about that) (2) the game code (you can't do anything about that). Once again, the code is the same for every player out there (whether you run the Linux or Windows version, the differences are only platform specific) so the memory leaks and bad memory management are there for everyone as well, they have been acknowledged by NGD, what's more to add?

I understand you may like to dismiss that with the back of your hand but imho your poll doesn't make sense. It should be "With which setup do you play Regnum with high framerate?" and it has nothing to do with where do you play. I don't want to put you down at all, it's just not scientifically sound, and this is my job after all so I can't remain silent :cuac:.

Righteousness to a whole new level. I actually liked you when we first met.

Astounding.

You're right, I'm wrong, Regnum's unplayable, we're all gonna quit tomorrow etc. Feel better?

Apologist? You really can't believe that I don't have a problem, I have to simply be being sympathetic. I pity you. Don't want to put me down, but what else would you do with your day if it wasn't to criticise everyones opinions pray tell?

I'll go and sign in anyway, maybe if I kick the f**k out of my case it'll crash and go slower to satisfactorily meet your infalible view on things. It's incredibly rude of me and the other people who have voted not to have a problem I know.

Well, really, out. I thought that someone might have said something supportive, intelligent or interesting, then I saw your user name, but foolishly I read your comment anyway...


This is historically now the game I've loved playing the most in my life, best time I've had since Laser Squad on the C64. I just wish the vast proportion of the players who frequent this forum with their negative presence stopped existing, like a nasty stain on an otherwise polished surface. Then it really would be perfect.

I'm always up for a new World Record :sifflote:. From the moment you post a thread on a given subject, you cannot expect people not to reply. By the way, a thread with the similar content as my reply was made in the Spanish forum here: http://www.regnumonline.com.ar/forum...ad.php?t=25292 and commented by niclam who acknowledged the problem (also in other threads, like here: http://www.regnumonline.com.ar/forum...ad.php?t=25302).


I would like to, but we can't both be right, it's logically unsound, if I say: "Everyone has the same code, the code has performance issues" and "We all play on the same server, the server has some performance issues" and you say "I have no issue at all". Either you play at times there is no lag at all (circumstantial) and for client issues you have to play in small resolution and not go to Herbred often when you have 40 raging Syrtenses and tons of visual effects because I do not know *anyone* who doesn't suffer from a framerate drop when this happens (even after you go to save and the Syrtenses are gone), and I talked about that with about everyone. Znurre lives very close to the datacenter and *he* experiences lag.

Now about the possibility of you having the one computer setup with no memory leak (you would still suffer from server side lag), it's a matter of faith I guess. I've always been a non believer and a skeptic ;).

I never talked about crashes, I think there are far far fewer crashes than before and that the client as extremely progressed on that matter (but unveiling other problems).

I'm not only referring to this thread, in general you are one of the few who cannot bear with critics whether they are constructive or destructive. At least I get that impression from reading you. Maybe I'm wrong but just as you have the impression from my posts that I'm a total jerk, maybe you're wrong too ;) (and maybe we're both right).

I've never talked about crashes, but slow-downs yeah. Obviously it depends on the in-game actions you have.

I guess we all have our faults then :biggrin:

sorry, I'm not a native english speaker ... or reader :p
afaik he can play no matter how long (6 hours in a row) no matter if conquering forts or levelling alone - and of course he has a monster PC too :biggrin:
I've never heard from him about regnum being unplayable...(only from myself when enabled particle effects)

European player, Other Linux Distro, ATI Radeon R4xx or faster

(Madrid, slackware 12.1, ATI Radeon X700 SE)

The thing is that the FPS slow down happens only if you have a lot of encounters with players drown and visual effects, a good example is hours of warring at Herbred.

I play with a AM2 6000+ X2, 2GB of gamer (low-latency) ram, GeForce 8600 GT with 256 MB of Ram, SATA harddrive. When I think of my old PC, it was very slow to play Regnum, felt like a movie from the 20's. With this new PC in comparison it's very fast -- but it goes slower as I play.

Ask him to use Alt-I to get the FPS value when he starts the game, then at Herb, and if the value goes down.

NGD has acknowledged the game to the point that the next version (already there on Amun) has (with Alt-P) a "gameplay ping" value which measures a factor of server lag+FPS. With that we will be able to compare the actual performance of everyone.

Well to actually be on topic:

European player, Vista, 6xxx and up (8600) Nvidia Geforce.

Most of the time I experience little or no lag.

If I am grinding, I can happily grind without any major lag until the cow's come home - The only time I will lag, and it will only be small lag, in this case will be if it is at peak time's when there are 750+ player's on.

When I'm at fort war's I will normally be fairly lag free, e.g. ~20 / 30 FPS. It's only after I've been at these war's for awhile that I will start to lose FPS / get spell lag and will need a relog.

Tested on my poor IGP geforce 6100... quite accurate :

European player, Kubuntu, 8.04 Hardy
r200
Ati Radeon 9250 Gamer Edition

no lag, only in enormous group fights like forts where are tons of people (samal). just fps drop down, solved with relogging. fps usually green, sometimes even blue.
didnt vote because didnt find my option (r200)

European player, Debian 4.0 (r2?)
Intel i945GM
512MB ram
Lag only when arriving to a fort and the client draws the picture into my screen.

Ubuntu 7.10
Radeon 9200SE
256 MB ram
The game runs smoothly untill the ram is full completly. Fort figths are completly unplayable.

Server side lag (spell lag, positioning lag etc.) happens when there are a lot of users online.

Summa: i dont have big problems with lag.

Like Elrik said, Location has very little, perhaps possible almost nothing to do with lag. Niclam said that lag breaks down into 2 categories, there is lag that comes from the client code and some of the memory hogging junk ingame, and then there is lag affected by your PC.

Im not going to vote seeing as I don't have a graphics card, *yet* nVidia 6600, really should come anyday now, then I will try the overall aspects again and vote.

EDIT:

Got my card today and everything is the same, no lag, only major lag where there are many resources like towns, if there are alot of resources, (it can even be a small rock) lots of those create this junk kind of lag.

nVidia 6600
Intel Pentium 4
512 MB RAM
I can at least play in fights now 10 on 10.

And fort wars seem shaky, but they work.

european player
gutsy 32bit, amd dualcore, geoforce 8600gts + 4 gig Ram - smooooth, lag on forts >40players

gutsy 32bit, amd singlecore, geoforce 8600gts + 1 gig Ram - laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag on hunts >8-10 players, fortwarts 10fps/min

Norwegian player, (K)ubuntu Hardy 64bit, NVidia GeForce 8500 GT, Core2Duo 3Ghz, 4Gb RAM

Graphics settings on high in a 1280x1024 window, FPS drops to 10-20 FPS sometimes during large fort wars, but for a MMO I think that's not too bad.
Tried lowering graphics but got no noticeable improvement on something which is to me a minor issue, so I kept'em high to enjoy a prettier game :biggrin: .

When low-mid action server ping is stable at 60-<100 ms. (very good)
When lots of things happen, sometimes drops to 300-1000 ms. (also acceptable for the most part)
Completely unrelated to what I'm doing, spikes at 1- >9 sec. (could be without, but most probably happens to everybody at once, so... :p )

This was not originally meant to be a gaming machine, so that's why I got a mediocre gfx card but tons of ram... wondering whether that might be the reason why i'm having less issues than most with RO. ;)

i chose european with ubuntu hardy and ati or slower, just because i have an Intel Integrated R945GM Express

NVidea 8600M GT in my Macbook Pro (running win XP SP2) , on US west coast, and I hardly ever have lag. There are some days when I get random motion bugs, and others where the grass is an issue for FPS, but on a normal day I can turn everything up on its highest setting and get 60+ FPS at 1920x1200 (perhaps around 20-30 in a big fort war).

I voted in the "non-European player, Windows 2000 / XP, Nvidia GeForce 6xxx or faster", but I'm not sure if the 8600M GT is actually faster since it's the mobile version for a laptop.

Well, interesting to see my exact situation got the most votes thus far...

European player, K/X/ubuntu (Gutsy/Hardy), Nvidia GeForce 6xxx or faster


Though I have an occupational background in IT, I am no expert on the subject of MMORPG performance. I approached this thread with the objective of collecting varied information that could possibly contribute to why some players seem to have more than acceptable performance. A systems graphics card has nothing to do with lag, clearly. That's just graphics performance. I find it telling how 32 out of 53 voters use a Nvidia GeForce 6xxx or faster. It's probably difficult to gather a proportional estimate of those who claim to suffer lag, and those who suffer poor graphics performance because their settings are turned up to high.

Anyway. Looks like I've gone and broken my silence again, hmmmm.

I'll try to think of an approach to interacting here that doesn't depress me or start pointless arguments, I'm sure there must be a way of starting something encouraging or useful on this forum.

Well, I tell a lie, I seriously doubt it. But I'll give it another go when I think of a worthy idea and I've saved up enough carefree attitude to shrug the quite likely disappointment off...

Oh, thanks for the patch devs, all seems splendid, I *adore* the new horses. And though I may be shouted at for suggesting such a notion, my performance seems to have gone up a few more notches. Keep up the good work and best of luck!

My recent upgrade has proven very sucessful in the lag department.

Non-european player, Windows 2000, Amd dual core 5000, 2G DDR2 800
On-board nVidia 8200 256m (9800 GTX 512 ... be here in 2 days)

I have experienced NO lag issues, other than the small lag spikes i get when large groups pass by, or fort wars where i experience some minor lag.
It seems as if you might have stumbled onto something here with the PC being apart of the lag issues, or at least contributing to slower / weaker performance.
Old system: Windows 2000, P4 2.8 , 2G DDR 400, nVidia 6800 GT 256 .... experienced lag all the time, especially during fort wars where I could barely move.

Very imformative thread here ........... :thumb_up: :thumb_up:

European player, K/X/ubuntu (Gutsy/Hardy), Nvidia GeForce 6xxx or faster
Generally I'm having "acceptable" performance. When I'm off-fort fighting/grinding (that is: less than 10 players, or so) I can have anything in between 25 and 100 FPS. Mostly between 35-55, suddenly dropping to 15-25 for a while for no apparent reason and then back up. If I turn on post-processing and/or multitexturing and all the other goodies, it only affects the temperature of my GPU, not that much the FPS.

At bigger fort-fights it's totally unacceptable, with FPS < 5 quite often.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, 512MB
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 @ 1.8GHz
Mem: 2GB, DDR2, PC5300
OS: *buntu Gutsy, running Openbox without composition (also have been running Ion3, Xfce, KDE and some Gnome).

The game feels a lot smoother on my P4 3.4GHz with a NVIDIA GeForce 6xxx-something, which makes me actually believe that my CPU is the bottleneck (when will multicore/threading be supported?).

I did not vote, but my cathegory is "European player, Other linux distro, Nvidia GeForce 6xxx or faster"

I use Gentoo Linux, and I have 512 MB of RAM.
After some playing I always get lag, but the game still has memory leaks. They eventually cause the whole system to lag, which does not say much about the game itself.
I think it's mainly around the cities (I only play in Alsius, both on RA and Horus).
Being there for a while makes my swap usage go off the charts.

Solution I use until it gets fixed one day:

Monitor RAM and swap usage on my external monitor (I play on a laptop) and restart the game when swap usage gets too high.

Other than that, the game runs fine as far as I can tell.