OMG... [hitching]

...can you guys PLEASE fix the hitching!

 

Im sure they are working on it... I would assume people would skip this thread due to such a non descript thread title.

 

We didn't skip it.

I kind of enjoy Barugon's mystery thread titles, you never know what you're diving into!

 

Lucky dip ftw!

 

Yep @Barugon , I was hoping for at least a small improvement for the hitching issues, yet, we get another release where all these new things come out, and hitching/lag actually gets worse. I totally stopped reading the release notes and only skim them for information on performance adjustments, which is basically the same text that we see every release; something to the effect of "We are continuing to improve loading times and Framerates, while working on reducing hitching/lag." But, then you d/l the game, load it up, and find no discernable improvements. I know that there are those who actually do have improvements, but there is still a significant portion of players who are experiencing these issues. I'm sick of seeing all the new things being added in game while next to no attention seems to be going to correct the performance issues. It's like having a car with an engine that can barely stay running, and rather than fix the engine you start adding a bunch of aesthetic items to it; new rims, speakers, paint job,etc. I know that staff is trying to fix the issues concerning performance, but we seem to get little information as to what the issues may be, what is being done to address them, or what we can do to help resovle the issues. I just want the performance issues fixed so we can enjoy the game like others who have no issues with hitching.

 

Sorry about the thread title. The game is barely playable for me and I was just a bit frustrated last night.

 

@Barugon, are you playing on PC? If so, what kind of sound card or sound board do you have if you don't mind me asking?

 

If, by PC, you mean a personal computer, then yes.

If you mean the Windows operating system then no, I use Linux.

I'll try to see if switching various sound settings has any affect.

 

Yeah, PC just means "Personal Computer", if you meant to say OS(operating system), then via his signature, "Save your soul, install Linux.", he is not using Windows. PC does not equal Windows. Unless a person has a soundcard that isn't integrated, I would guess that most players have sound card from 1 of 3(possibly more) manufacturers. Players, in past testings, have disabled sound setting alltogether and it has made no difference, but there is no way to actually entirely disable sound in the game, so that probably isn't a good testing option. My guess, and it is just that, a guess, is that it has something to do with the networking code that the game deploys. I would love to hear if there are players out there suffering from hitching issues who only play offline.

 

I tried various sound settings and it didn't help.

Before R54, I didn't have this hitching issue.

 

Sorry, yes meant Windows machine. Just thought I'd check as I get hitching and freezing of SOTA on my Win10 machine and I play another Unity game that had bad hitching for ages for a minority of players and was fixed recently. The issue was, I believe, audio related.

If there was any relationship between the hitching and audio in SOTA it may have been worth reaching out. I now doubt SOTA hitching is audio related from your feedback.

 

I tried paying attention to when sound effects happen and music starts and there was no correlation.

 

I've had a good amount of hitching as well this release..I was at a LAN party during last release and had two friends buy the game and play it with me. The first thing they mentioned was that other people seemed to be teleporting across the screen and at times would lose track of where I was because of it.

 

Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not talking about network lag. What I'm experiencing (and I think a lot of others are getting it too) is moments where the framerate slows to an absolute crawl for several seconds. Sometimes the game completely halts and then comes back after some amount of time.

 

Yep this has been mentioned in R54 in some scenes, also there was stated that the devs could not reproduce this. Now in R55 its worse then ever, I play on GNU/Linux (2 different distros) and on Windows 10, I have a laptop and a PC where I play on. They both run GNU/Linux mainly and Windows for the games that do not support GNU/Linux. And MY reproduction rate with hitching is 100% on both operating systems and both PC and laptop.

So that the statement that they can not reproduce this, is for me a really weird statement. As my laptop runs a nvidia GTX and my PC runs on a AMD high end card.

 

that's a good point. i have one started i haven't touched in months.

...yes, there's the same hitching offline.

 

Also @Ally Oop : ...yes, there's the same hitching offline.

@Barugon Yes I understand, I get the same. I get both in fact, elastic banding of other players and mobs, and a nasty hitch/freeze.

both these statements seem to point at a non network related issue. A thing I have noticed and is also widely reported (so the Devs know all abut it and are surely working on it), is when I rotate my character in a standing position, either in zones or in town and especially shortly after scene load, my game totally freezes for several seconds. This is in addition to hitching in general.

I believe this freezing on rotating your character has been discussed as relating to an overload/bottleneck of objects loading as a result of a 360 sweep of the view angle of your character during the rotation, and is to do with object details, distance rendering and excessive object detail. If this is the issue, at least in part, its a huge task to fix it as it means a rework of a great many scenes to reduce the number of objects, the detail of some objects and tune the render distance. In some of @Chris updates he talks about work underway retrospectively on scenes. I have also read that the reason some have stutter issues and some not, is probably to do with the way various people's machines are configured to share the graphics load and rendering between GPU and CPU. My understanding is that even on a similarly hardware configured Windows machine, different brands of GPU and CPU will interact and behave completely differently.

That is why I posted separately on the scene detail in East Vauban Foothills and I have noticed this in other recent maps. To my untutored eye the more recent maps (despite the builder's getting greater experience with the tools, and despite Unity upgrades), seem to be getting simpler in design and significantly lower in object detail and/or render distance. (pure speculation).

Imagination is a powerful thing, so I could be completely wrong, but I am a scientist by background , so I have looked at similar objects, such as the same tree species, at various distances across various scenes of different vintages. In later scenes (Vauban for example) versus earlier scenes (Twins foothills for example), the render or detail at similar distances seem to be quite different. Trees for example are quite fuzzy and blurry in Vauban whilst at a similar distance in Twins Foothills they are crisp and sharp showing leaves and branches.
Look also at rocks, water and grass; rocks seem a much lower poly count in Vauban than some other beautiful scenes.

Sadly I finds East Vauban foothills to be quite ugly, or at least stark or bland compared to other scenes and I feel the same with some of the other more recent scenes. Though this doesn't massively impact actual game-play and some new scenes have puzzles and side quests to compensate. However as an explorer first and foremost, I really enjoy the vivid scenes with lots of detail, beautiful vistas, wildlife, and richness. Later scenes do not seem to have this as much as some of the earlier ones but this may be a necessity and reality going forward, at least for a while.

 

So, unless there is some kind of network code running while in offline mode, it shouldn't be impacting performance.

I had the hitching issue prior to r54, but it wasn't as frequent and normally didn't become an issue unless I'd been playing for long periods of time. I'm wondering if the changes in the draw distance has anything to do with the hitching. I noticed that lots of graphics don't actually get drawn until you are right on top of things in some cases. Mobs don't seem to spawn until you are around 20meters or less away from them. Things ran much smoother, for me at least, when things were drawn well in advance of me arriving to a particular location. I used to, on the overworld, be able to see players, sieges,etc., half way across the map. Now it seems like too many things may be attempting to load all at once, rather than gradually. I also noticed that the game is only requesting a maximum of just over 3GBs of 8GBs available on my video card.

 

Actually even in single player offline mode we have connections open to the shroud of the avatar servers, and UDP traffic is still flowing through my network...
I did a netstat and a wireshark based on SotA server ip.

Code:

udp    40704      0 192.168.2.113:40630     208.81.240.51:5057      ESTABLISHED 4940/Shroud of the 
unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    81623    4940/Shroud of the   
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     82677    4940/Shroud of the   
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     83682    4940/Shroud of the   
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     83633    4940/Shroud of the  

Code:

root@DevTop /home/feeyo {0} > # tcpdump host 208.81.240.51
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on wlo1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes
19:20:01.126821 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 24
19:20:01.226187 IP DevTop.40630 > unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2: UDP, length 44
19:20:01.427609 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 32
19:20:02.452455 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 24
19:20:02.519868 IP DevTop.40630 > unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2: UDP, length 44
19:20:02.759013 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 32
19:20:03.680813 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 24
19:20:03.741640 IP DevTop.40630 > unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2: UDP, length 32
19:20:03.763803 IP DevTop.40630 > unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2: UDP, length 24
19:20:03.987860 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 32
19:20:05.011967 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 24
19:20:05.028731 IP DevTop.40630 > unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2: UDP, length 44
19:20:05.216521 IP unassigned.ch3data.com.intecom-ps2 > DevTop.40630: UDP, length 32

 

I'm really confused. I commandeered my husband's desktop (it's an IBUYPOWER system that I should have bought for myself since in was a 1080TI before the price hike) and I experience no hitching with everything on max. It doesn't look as nice as it did but still looks nice. I turn around and go back to my Surface Pro with everything turned down and I get lag spikes but not where I would expect. It doesn't seem to matter where I am or how many I'm grouped with. I am unable to predict when I am going to have performance problems on my Surface Pro anymore. I am thankful that I'm getting consistently good performance on our really expensive desktop while some folks aren't so lucky.