DUST Search - Figured Out What Is Causing The Lag In PC Matches!

Eko SolI wrote:

want to write so much right now but I am not. It is difficult for it to be the sound itself.

Typically, LAG is attributted to taxing resources to a point of creating a bottleneck at the NIC, CPU, Memory, etc on either or both the server and client. We would need WAY more information to make determination that sound is the issue IMO and IME.

I would argue that you could be on the right path in that something that should be locally kept and processed is being shot over the internet and taking up valuable resources on the server which chokes up the game. Or that the "code"/"db" "stuff" is over taxing the PS3 and creating local lag. It could also be a combination.

In conclusion, if it is the sound then it would be the processing of sound and that would be what causes the lag. This would also mean the lag would be local to the PS3 since the bottleneck would be there to begin with.

It just doesn't make sense from a programming or network perspective for it to be sound because sound is sound. It would have to be a bottleneck at the server or the PS3.

EDIT: An easy fix from CCP would be to limit the amount of "total" sound sources. Typically this causes some issues (some sounds will be heard while others won't) but it is for testing purposes only. Just limit the number of simultaneous sounds allowed locally on the PS3. If the lag doesn't go away then it isn't sound. It should be a very easy test. Unreal Engine has some good stuff for sound as a whole.

EDIT: And lag in games like this can, sometimes, not affect frame rate but will affect other "calculations" elsewhere. An example is the sudden invincibility people have on occasion. Doesn't seem like lag from the traditional sense but it is.


Author	Thread Statistics \| Show CCP posts - 3 post(s)
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 114	Posted - 2013.12.04 03:09:00 - [1] - Quote It actually applies to both PC and non-PC matches and this is just my theory from what I've experienced personally from the behavior I had in game. It's the sound! It's something to do with the sounds that every deployed object makes. I know in EVE for a very long time, in order to reduce lag in large fleet fights everyone would always disable the sound to prevent the client from crashing. Apparently you have somehow recreated the same problem in DUST. Only we don't get the option to disable the sound. I'll use drop uplinks for my example. If you put down one drop uplink, it makes that nice soothing "woom woom" noise if you are withing a certain proximity to it. Well if you put down another one, it also wants to make that same woom woom noise only now it's competing with the original uplink and they are BOTH making the noise and sometime they don't mesh together well. No multiply this by like 2 dozen separate instances of "woom woom" all within proximity of you. If you step outside the area where they make the noise, no lag... Renter the area, suddenly all kinds of lag! Kinda like how in beta when you went from outside a building to inside the building and the game would glitch as it loaded the stuff it needed for the inside of the building. So if it is indeed the sound processing choking the hell out of everything because it's trying to make 2 dozen instances of all the noises simultaneously while still running everything else, then I have a possible idea on a solution. So instead of trying to make 2 dozen noises, just make ONE. Whenever you check for proximity to any equipment to make the "noise" instead of continuing to check for others and wasting processing to do it, just set a flag to only check when not within proximity of the original object making the noise and make only the one noise not 2 dozen. Then when you leave prox of first one or if it is destroyed, then go back to original check for proximity to equipment and if true make the ONE noise again. If none, then stop. Seriously, I don't need to hear a cacophony of 2 dozen uplinks to know that they are there. Just make one woom woom noise and good to go. Anyways, just a thought and hopefully it gives you guys something more to go on as to the possible cause of all the lag.
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 123	Posted - 2013.12.04 16:49:00 - [2] - Quote Spectral Clone wrote: If this really is the cause of lag in Dust 514 gameplay, you should get the freaking nobel prize of game devs. Oooh! That reminds me of another small thing that they could add into DUST. The ability for medals to be awarded like they do in EVE now... ;)
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 124	Posted - 2013.12.04 17:00:00 - [3] - Quote Spectral Clone wrote: OP: Did you submit a bug report? Hopefully CCP can reproduce this. Make sure you record a video (cell phone cam) and publish it on youtube. Maybe xXGhazbharanXx could help out to try if this really is the case. Yes. No, I provided a good enough description of how to reproduce this so that CCP can do it for themselves. It would take like a full squad of players in logi suits loaded with dual uplinks and nanohives to do this from a player perspective. The devs could just spawn stuff using dev hacks and reproduce it more easily.
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 131	Posted - 2013.12.04 20:09:00 - [4] - Quote Ku Shala wrote: well done would make sense. i've always thought links and hives had something to do with it... although I've had PC lag in matches with only max vehicles deployed so maybe this is only part of it. Actually that would be directly related as CCP still hasn't figure out how to fix the localization of a lot of the vehicle sound effects. As pointed out by them, even the dropship noises permeate the entire map from every single dropship in play no matter how far away they may be. So I see your input as another symptom of the same issue. Thanks for the extra insight. ;)
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 149	Posted - 2013.12.05 15:44:00 - [5] - Quote CCP Delamorui Eddy wrote: SponkSponkSponk wrote: How bout this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz2h-VfDJy4 Hi, thank you for the video. We are already aware of this specific issue shown there. Do you perhaps have a video that demonstrates that there are no framerate issues where there is no sound, and issues where there is sound from various sources as the OP described? We are currently chasing down that specific issue. Thank you. CCP Delamorui Eddy, No I cannot easily replicate this as arranging for the right map with the right people and somehow hoping that the enemy will cooperate too is not within my power to do. These are things that you should be able to do on your end by creating a "special match" for your own testing purposes and populating it with your fellow devs. To produce the dozens of uplinks and hives you would only have to just input instances of them using creation commands. As for trying to "demonstrate" a difference between sound and no sound, that is also NOT within our power as there is no option within the PS3 to completely DISABLE the sound card. It is mismanagement with sound effects and the memory that it is gobbling up that is causing this issue (I believe) and possibly combining this with the clipping of the fancy graphical effects of the "shimmer" deployables all loading at once. So simply turning off the sound on the TV won't show this difference as the PS3 will still be trying to generate the sounds even if the TV never makes them. Turning off some of the sound options within the game client like music and voice will possibly free up more memory for this issue, but won't definitively prove it. So unless you are willing to create "test matches" under the "other contracts" portion of the game, we have no way to help you definitely test this issue. That's why I reported it to you and described it as I did. The ball is out of our hands now and you need to make the next step in this investigation.
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 191	Posted - 2013.12.09 15:01:00 - [6] - Quote Smooth Assassin wrote: If turning my sound won't work, i'm gonna sue you're theory. (JK LOLZ) First you have to prove to me that you can disable the sound card on your PS3. =P
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 303	Posted - 2014.01.08 21:47:00 - [7] - Quote Anything come of this yet, CCP? I tried to keep my help tickets reporting this open, but your system keeps automatically closing them after two weeks. I noticed that you toned down the graphics needed for the equipment, but the sounds are still just as annoying and worse there are now sound errors creeping back into the game. (Like if a player does a high jump and activates the inertial damper, but for everyone else the noise continues on and on and never quits.)
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 311	Posted - 2014.01.10 22:14:00 - [8] - Quote CCP Frame wrote: Hello guys. We are deploying memory optimization fix tonight during downtime for this specific issue. Please reply to this thread with your experience/videos/findings once you've tested it for a while. Thank you for all the feedback so far! I haven't had a chance to try out a PC match since the patch yesterday, but I did do multiple pub matches and they are still bogging WAY down due to equipment spam still. The major culprit is the new lab large socket map where you have lots of underground and multiple above ground levels. What happens is not only is equipment being placed everywhere at one X, Y coordinate area, but also in the same Z axis area thus the three dimensionality of that particular map combined with the many "indoors" areas really causes the lag to happen every time. Additionally, when the volcanic environment is added on top of the lab socket it seems to make things worse.
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 311	Posted - 2014.01.10 22:28:00 - [9] - Quote Eko SolI wrote: want to write so much right now but I am not. It is difficult for it to be the sound itself. Typically, LAG is attributted to taxing resources to a point of creating a bottleneck at the NIC, CPU, Memory, etc on either or both the server and client. We would need WAY more information to make determination that sound is the issue IMO and IME. I would argue that you could be on the right path in that something that should be locally kept and processed is being shot over the internet and taking up valuable resources on the server which chokes up the game. Or that the "code"/"db" "stuff" is over taxing the PS3 and creating local lag. It could also be a combination. In conclusion, if it is the sound then it would be the processing of sound and that would be what causes the lag. This would also mean the lag would be local to the PS3 since the bottleneck would be there to begin with. It just doesn't make sense from a programming or network perspective for it to be sound because sound is sound. It would have to be a bottleneck at the server or the PS3. EDIT: An easy fix from CCP would be to limit the amount of "total" sound sources. Typically this causes some issues (some sounds will be heard while others won't) but it is for testing purposes only. Just limit the number of simultaneous sounds allowed locally on the PS3. If the lag doesn't go away then it isn't sound. It should be a very easy test. Unreal Engine has some good stuff for sound as a whole. EDIT: And lag in games like this can, sometimes, not affect frame rate but will affect other "calculations" elsewhere. An example is the sudden invincibility people have on occasion. Doesn't seem like lag from the traditional sense but it is. That is EXACTLY what I was saying with the OP. It's all "local lag" created by 'bottlenecks' in processing due to how they programmed the sound without any limitations. It happened that way in EVE too back in the day. Only on a PS3 you cannot disable ALL of the sounds and so it cannot be worked around. Additionally, the devs cannot reliably repeat it because it's local to each PS3 and sometimes it happens and sometimes it won't. That's why you may be experiencing lag in the game and your team mate thinks you are just making it up. It's also why CCP devs believe a lot of the lag complaints to be due to local internet issues outside of their control and always ask anyone reporting this issue to first check their local networks for anything that may be causing problems. In the end it's a combination of the sounds without limitations combined with the current voice comms in game that make the PS3 want to kill itself. And by the way, sooooo many people are raging in FW matches right now because they cannot reliably use the Team Chat Voice Channel without incurring the voice comms bug. This also nullifies any benefit we might have gotten from OS supporting EVE pilots as they can only talk to us through Team chat in FW matches. Oh and one more thing. The bug from beta where someone drops from a height and uses the inertial dampener, but the LOUD AS HELL sound effect of the inertial dampener being active doesn't STOP. So I can hear nothing but the guy next to me with that sound going on! This tells me that if that is the case, then you probably have the same issues on smaller (quieter) levels throughout the game where you open resources for sounds and do not properly close them out when they are done. Thus causing the slow-over-time leak of memory and resources due to sound that I pointed out in the OP. Obviously not intentionally, but by the use of some simple library to create sounds, you have introduced a "sloppy" piece of code that is doing this. In the end, I still say it's the sound!
Jadd Hatchen Psygod9 D.E.F.I.A.N.C.E 349	Posted - 2014.01.22 22:17:00 - [10] - Quote CCP. Anything come of any of this yet? I would submit another petition about it, but you would just automatically close it like you did with the previous two. 8(