[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[Douglas Goodall]

Adam Martin wrote:

>  I haven't conclusively determined whether the following is a
>  server problem or a client problem. Polling other people, and
>  team members, suggests that sometimes it happens to everyone
>  equally, and other times it does not. Sometimes, it clears up
>  after 30-90 seconds, other times it does not. That long a time
>  frame suggests it's server-side rather than client - except see
>  below.

I played AO on and off since launch. There's definitely more than
one issue, some of which have been fixed.

  1) Server lag

    The game freezes. Usually for about 10 seconds, but occasionally
    longer. When the game recovers, almost everything is in the same
    place. Other players will say "lag" at the same time, every
    party member has about the same amount of health, etc. This is
    almost certainly server lag. Mobs tend to move around during the
    freeze, but I suspect this is just how AO handles mob locations
    and pathing (it is not well synchronized--and they're either
    using some combination of position and vector, or the client
    does not correct a mob's position if it is within a "margin of
    error").

  2) "Freeze" client lag

    This is the most annoying kind of lag and occurs randomly,
    though crowds and zoning seem to make it more likely. The entire
    computer freezes (even NumLock, etc). This usually takes at
    least 30 seconds, sometimes over 5 minutes (which will
    disconnect you from the game). The game world appears to keep
    going in your absence. Everyone is in a different place, mobs
    have been beating on you the whole time, you may be dead
    already, etc.

    Reasons to suspect client-side lag: computer locks up, hard
    drive thrashing, game keeps going.  Reasons to suspect something
    more interesting: lots of network activity.

  3) Zoning/Post-Zoning lag

    The game is not locked up, but extremely slow. You can see the
    order in which objects are loaded between frames (which is odd,
    also it either loads objects back-to-front or is somehow
    rendering partial frames in slow motion), which are best
    measured in seconds-per-frame. I'm pretty sure this is client
    side, but the computer isn't completely unresponsive. Sysmon is
    interesting to watch during this kind of lag (memory allocation
    goes down and back up, sometimes more than once), but I can't
    figure out exactly what's going on.

My theory (which is probably wrong) is that the game has a "texture
cache" or "object cache" which, after reaching a certain size,
resets itself in a clumsy way (i.e. walking through a linked list
deleting one member at a time then reloading and recompressing (AO's
textures are stored uncompressed, no really...) all currently needed
textures from scratch). This doesn't just happen when zoning. It can
happen at random times, just like #2, but it seems more common
during and immediately after zoning and is always triggered if AO is
minimized. If you minimized AO several times, you'll notice that it
sometimes recovers quickly.

>  The freeze is proportional 80% to the number of people in the new
>  zone and 20% to how recently you've visited it. The former
>  strongly suggests bad server code. The latter COULD be poor
>  DirectX/OGL batching (very bad texture streaming; unforgivable
>  really not to stream-in-advance), or it could just be
>  cache-coherency style issues on the server (perhaps the player
>  data is retained on the old server which slightly reduces the
>  zoning time).

AO allows alot of equipment customization, which means there are
more textures in a crowd of players than in most MMORPGs. They do
not stream textures in advance, at least not in any way that's
noticeable or effective. I think the relation to crowded zones is
still texture (un)loading, which for some reason does not occur
every time you zone.

Some group members will arrive in the new zone much, much faster
than others. This happens in most games, but it is related to
overall computer speed (i.e. Alienware Jane always zones first,
Compy386/Dial-Up Bob always zones last). In AO, zoning speeds seem
random. When I'm waiting to zone somewhere, I'll often see people
who were "behind me" way ahead of me on the other side (and
vice-versa). This also leads me to believe it is client-side (unless
the server handles requests in an arbitrary order or "forgets"
zoning requests which have to be re-sent).

> Even though some of that is tinged with a little bitterness too,
> it's worth pointing out that the major fundamental non-battle
> gameplay element of AO doesn't have any flaws at all that I've
> seen (PS: it's not crafting! that's the second biggest non-battle
> gameplay bit :)).

Twinking? AO embraces twinking. It makes twinking fun!

AO throws better parties than other games. And they have Gridstream
Productions and a surprisingly good community (perhaps because the
bugs chased away the impatient).

Generally, I agree with your mini-review here. AO's a great game
except for the interface and bugs. What makes it worse is that AO's
been through major interface redesigns which changed the interface
without addressing the worst flaws (like random backpack order--and
just wait until you get a corrupt local settings folder).
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