Question about Jumpy Movement

[Lathander]

So this is the first time I am loading the server to a host for management by a team. Previously I haven't seen any jumpy behavior, but now it appears that once and a while the player will jump/lag on movement. This can either be in the middle of a map or at a map boundary. I was hosting with DigitalOcean, but also attempted to load up to amazon AWS to see if it was DigitalOcean and latency, however it appears to be happening on AWS as well.

 

Is there a setting I missed for latency threshold with player movement? Everything else operates excellent with no lag, only movement is jumping. It isn't often, but it occurs enough to be quite noticable.

[jcsnider]

It's caused by our terrible code to prevent speedhacking:

https://github.com/AscensionGameDev/Intersect-Engine/blob/4cab01d144131fe15d3736194806066428258ac2/Intersect.Server/Networking/PacketHandler.cs#L415-L419

 

It's highly influenced by latency and causes those stutters. Removing those lines or tweaking the threshholds may help at the expense of speedheck protection.

 

We're working on new methods to combat that, but haven't really jumped into a smarter alternative yet.

https://github.com/AscensionGameDev/Intersect-Engine/issues/141

[Lathander]

Thanks for the reply JC, before I packed up my work for the night I remember seeing that line with a comment in the code and I did a search and found it. I tinkered a little a noticed a pretty decent result from it, I appreciate the direction!

 

Do you feel like the movement code, especially passing between maps and smooth and clean enough to give great results or is there still optimization to be done there? Just curious because the mapping system and concept of managing the map connections was a really cool design. I recall reading a thread where everyone talked about not making the maps any larger because it will reduce the effectiveness of the system and how it works. I didn't really see anyone explain it in detail.

[jcsnider]

The sizes of maps don't matter nearly as much now after the rendering upgrades described in the first half of the op of this topic...

https://www.ascensiongamedev.com/topic/3623-dev-blog-1312019-rendering-optimizations-texture-packing/?do=findComment&comment=35669

 

Before those rendering changes the amount of Vram and time to create the cached map layer images were insane and would only get worse with map size. 

 

There are still always going to be optimizations that we can make both to map rendering and the map traversing logic, but right now I do feel as if it's in a pretty good state. (There's a lot of other areas that I'd focus on before that anyways)