When a certain amount of mobs are present, consistent delays are pretty much guaranteed to occur. It mostly seems to occurs on Heresy / Damnation, especially with Hi-Intensity. I’ve also experienced it on Malice with Hi-Intensity but rarely without, so both gut feeling and logic tells me it’s directly related to the amount of mobs.
Hits that register on the client (hit marker) fail to register on the server. The game just straight up drops/ignores inputs. The worst affected part of the game seems to be weapon swapping, idk if it’s because there’s a different client-server verification involved than other inputs, but it’s definitely the most noticeable one.
On Heresy / Damnation I’ve sometimes spent 3-4 seconds trying to swap weapons (even / especially for ranged to melee, which is meant to be instant), and multiple times it has gotten me downed simply because the game never acknowledged the input.
If you try to swap to melee and immediately attack what often happens is that your character will simply fire its gun repeatedly, even if you keep trying to swap to melee after the first input to do so failed.
I haven’t attached any logs because logs seemed pointless in this case.
Please sort this out, it’s causing a HUGE amount of frustration when trying to play Heresy / Damnation. Shooters are not turn-based strategy games. They NEED to have crisp responses at all times, or everything about them falls apart.
I worry this falls into their graphics FPS drop comment from launch, that a drop in performance is acceptable for the amount of enemies on screen, and tbh it’s not acceptable. Moments of major input delay when every action counts pretty much drives the enjoyment of the game into a brick wall.
For the record, I play this game on a 3080 / i7-12700.
Both are well above their recommended specs.
Also, I have played (and personally modded) games online for ~20 years, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty, this is not a client side issue.
Everyone I know who plays higher difficulties, regardless of their hardware, say the same thing. Streamers I watch who play higher difficulties, regardless of their hardware, have consistently said the same thing since closed beta.
I think their (@LoveTruffle) point was more that they (Fatshark) view the game performance degrading acceptable for the sake of keeping everything ‘balanced.’
In no way are they perfect in terms of having a high and steady framerate, but that was the approach we chose rather than, for example, making too big compromises regarding the number of enemies or the graphical quality of levels. We believe that most players can accept a short temporary loss of frame-rate to be able to get the overall gameplay we offer.
AKA hopefully the lag/input issues aren’t acceptable to them for the sake of O BOI BIG HORDES as their servers implode. (Because it isn’t) They’re not directly referencing server quality but it’s already kinda crazy to me that they think it’s acceptable for the game to have major hitches performance wise.
Can confirm and will add that hi intensity damnation crashes the server (resulting in “mission aborted due to unexcpected error”) quite commonly, every other game atleast. Please upgrade those servers or make sure they’re not part of the 0.5% of hardware that crashes (as per Magnuson claims)
Yeah, I’m aware they were discussing graphics in that post, but that’s why I said I was worried they might have the same stance on input delay caused by heavy server load caused by large skirmishes.
That is fair, but they were quite explicit on it being a discussion on client side performance in the blog post you linked. Third paragraph:
…performance in terms of end-user framerate and the game experience has always been on our mind…
No need to make excuses for them.
There’s plenty of evidence that the servers cannot currently handle the amount of stuff going on on high difficulties. I’m not asking FS to fix it in any specific way, just asking that they do.
I get this error often when Lag hits, more often during the mobs on higher difficulties though that doesn’t completely explain it as it happens to me even at lower difficulties or when there are no mobs. I disconnect very often right now and have been just before the 1st with the server reacting badly. I have reset, Power Cycled, setting changed, and even factory restored my Computer, Router and even traced out to my ISP. I don’t have this problem with other games just this one. And didn’t have this problem since beta until just before the new year.
Never actually had that. So, not universal at least.
Never actually had any specific mission abort / failure as a result of what I consider unequivocal server side issues, so far. Just very consistent server side lag / input delay / dropped inputs, at high difficulties specifically.
The only disconnects I’ve had were during the very first days after release, when the servers straight up crashed.
I suspect it’s partly because my Internet is just this side of okay because it’s the Tmobile 5G but I am out in the boonies and it has some weirdness. But since nothing else is getting downed it is some sort of handshake issue.
Yeah, we’re on the same page, I was clarifying for Skip. (They still took it wrong though, whelp)
EDIT: For people who haven’t experienced it: Just gonna link to this old post of mine that also links to another old post of mine. I can’t be arsed to retype it.
See specifically ~2m55s for me to be absolutely losing my mind, JUST LET ME SWITCH WEAPONS followed up by my ability breaking even though I was just hitting it out of pure wtf):
The beginning of the video also just shows how rough it can get in actual combat situations. Nothing says fun like getting deleted by reapers because the game won’t let me do anything. (As they fire at a 75 degree angle) Pay attention to other things like my gun magically reloading itself, how nice! (Unfortunately it also rewinds time and the bullet does no damage, how not nice.)
Apologies if I was being ignorant of a point you were trying to make. Would you mind clarifying?
And yeah, holy crap, that’s exactly the kind of illustration I was looking for. That failure to switch weapons at ~2:59ish, with no weapons at all out for a second, and brief “lag reversals” to the previously equipped weapon is very typical of the kind of weapon switch delay I’m talking about.
This has been happening more and more lately, even when there’s less stufff on screen. It’s not FPS drops, and it’s not because of bad internet (4090 and gigabit connection), though I’m sure spotty internet doesn’t help things.
The servers and/or the netcode simply isn’t up to the task. It’s possible that servers haven’t had a needed restart since the whole FS office took 2-3 weeks vacation over christmas - or that FS have downgraded the servers rented from AWS because of the very low number of players compared to launch. I don’t know, but something is going on.
It used to happen now and then, but now missed inputs, silent enemies, enemies SILENTLY hitting with no hit marker, and a slew of other issues seem to be happening more and more often, even when there isn’t particularly much going on in the mission.
Neither Lovetruffle nor I were trying to excuse it. We were saying it’s possible they might not view the lag/hitches as a major problem because to them they view performance drops as acceptable in the first place. Yes, the blog post is referring to graphical performance but if that’s already their stance on general performance woes, it leads to questions in terms of why the performance network wise is so shoddy on higher difficulties/with larger hordes. We were both agreeing with you.
Short version:
Fatshark thinks performance drops are fine. (See blog post/quote; they also seem to think people are okay with them which is ???)
This makes us both question if they view performance issues networking wise as okay as well. (Which is not okay)
‘Server is shitting itself’.
Made my day. Lost track of how many countless times I’ve typed this exact sentence in chat to a pint where people probably got annoyed with me.^^
Point stands: I can only second this. Your clips show it perfectly.
Just hard agree on everything. Exactly the same experience, had always been an issue at times, now it’s the permanent status quo each match. Timeframe checks out with my experience. As well. EU West here (Germany).
(Mostly replying to show that this is not an isolated issue.)
I personally have no performance related issues with the game at all since release including server connection. (maybe like 15 disconnects and crashes in nearly 150h since release) (Zotac Amp Extreme GTX 1080, Ryzen 7 5800x, 32GB DDR4 @3600MHz, 50mb/s connection)
But when running with the Hellbore weapons this issue becomes extremely apparent sometimes in hordes. Either you cannot properly switch to melee and it keeps firing or charging or the other way around, where you activate your special as vet and equip the ranged weapon but it doesn’t charge immediately. You have to release and hold the fire button again which makes timing shots a nightmare.
This might not be a problem for most weapons, but for the charge weapons it is extremely annoying where you want to “hold” the button and not mash it (as with e.g. Kantrael).
