Server Performance Fixes

I'd assume that they have looked all these and then some to improve performance.

My guess is that we assume A causes B but behind the scenes a lot of that is probably not the case, which is why they have and haven't done certain things.

People call it unplayable and broken and I get the frustrations but it really hasn't been that bad in my experience. I'm on servers for a very long amount of time without major issues beyond what we have all already been dealing with for years at this point.

Yeah reg issues get annoying in the moment, naval/player and bugs here and there but I've also played this game at times where it was way worse in the past for a stretch here or there of time.

You have absolutely no idea how game development works, do you?

You ever notice how when you are far away from an island or a fort, all you see is an outline and a silhouette, but when you get closer the blocky outline smooths out and landmarks become recognizable? In computer graphics, draw distance (render distance or view distance) is the maximum distance of objects in a three-dimensional scene that are drawn by the rendering engine. Essentially, sunken kingdom content and sea forts use minimal server resources until you decide to swim/sail near them.

You ever notice when you sink a skeleton ship that the ammo pouches are the first "loot" to descend into the depths? That's called an asset's Time To Live. It's the same for land despawning; while ammo pouches exist they may be a bit of a drain on server resources, but ammo pouches don't have a long TTL. I don't think this is an issue.

tl;dr; They already do these things. They mentioned this in the documentary I believe. Most server resources are devoted to animating things bobbing while aboard a ship, and the ship itself. The water simulation in this game is intense. You want the server to perform better, then tell the yokels stacking FotD a dozen times to sell off faster. That's where most of the bad performance comes from. If you see an active FotD on your server, and you're not going to contest it, change seas. Your performance will improve a lot.

@lordqulex said in Server Performance Fixes:

tl;dr; They already do these things. They mentioned this in the documentary I believe. Most server resources are devoted to animating things bobbing while aboard a ship, and the ship itself. The water simulation in this game is intense. You want the server to perform better, then tell the yokels stacking FotD a dozen times to sell off faster. That's where most of the bad performance comes from. If you see an active FotD on your server, and you're not going to contest it, change seas. Your performance will improve a lot.

Having only two galleons in a private server is still laggy as hell even when fighting in an isolated part of the map where most ''competitive'' games are held. (In private scrimmage servers)
How do you explain that?

I agree with the rest of what you said though, to sum it up, it boils down to LoD (Level of detail) for meshes; farther away, it looks like a very low poly mesh that increases in detail the closer you get.

All of this really comes to poor foresight for the games development long term, if they could somehow import the game into EU5 from EU4 and utilize Nanite then it would like walking down a gentle slope instead of walking up wonky stairs when rendering in detail. (Nanite supports millions of polygons) Amongst other amazing feature sets.

Also I've seen people comment about Nanite being used for waves, but I believe it's only for static meshes. (Getting mixed answers from this in the UE Community).

Also to contradict what I just said above: I believe it ain't as easy as going from UE4 to 5 since they used a custom UE4 build specifically for the game, Which is common practice for big gaming studios as well as for Maya, Houdini which I know they 100% use just from their Artstation and youtube work.

Source: Starting to Work as an artist for games :). Also funny ever since I dove into this world, I just can't look at games the same without looking at objects and seeing how they were modelled and textured and seeing obvious seam placements.

Also the GDC SoT Videos are interesting behind the scenes development, that they showcased for the game and may give you clues as to why, there's literally footage of meshes and EU4 Nodes and say how many tris (Mesh) the Galleon has... They literally have multiple videos of game dev for everyone to see for the public to watch. SO it's no secret but to many people get things wrong (Which isn't a dig at anyone, since each their own pace of research & interest).

@Nimsyy Since you have a bigger voice then the rest of us in the community of you know what.
Maybe question if 'safer seas' servers could be expanded into having a toolset such as custom tools and actually hosting multiple boats and not a single crew in the future, it could be built upon.

Maybe they could cull Partnered servers as it won't be needed and would save resources and actually give the sandbox game... Sandbox features in the form of future safer sea upgraded iterations. (NO WAY)!
Wouldn't that be the dream.

[Mod Edit]

I seem to recall they said Safer Seas is going to be run client side, and not on Rare servers, but I may be misremembering that from the announcement.

@ix-indi-xi said in Server Performance Fixes:

Having only two galleons in a private server is still laggy as hell even when fighting in an isolated part of the map where most ''competitive'' games are held. (In private scrimmage servers)
How do you explain that?

Otherwise, what you mentioned blows my mind! Microsoft literally sells cloud based hosting services, and the fact that this game is straining the servers it's running on, presumably Microsoft servers, presumably the servers they sell as a service, is a massive black eye in my opinion. If you're a Microsoft partner and they can't or won't give you the equipment your software needs to run well says a lot more about Microsoft than it does Rare, in my professional opinion.

Source: I have worked as a low-latency, high-frequency, real-time data transfer software developer for 20 years. What little I know about animation and computer graphics I learned in college using OpenGL. I know nothing about how to build the visual part of a game like this, but if you need the client/server data transfer to be optimized, fast, and efficient, I'm your man.

@mrestiercol said in Server Performance Fixes:

The solution is extremely simple, increase the tickrate, if you can't, new servers. As long as that doesn't happen, nothing will change.

I've read this a couple of times from you and I'm just curious what your theory is as to why they haven't adjusted something that you say is simple? Since they have worked for years on this.

@silverwing-525 said in Server Performance Fixes:

For the life of me, I still don't understand how Server performance is STILL an issue for this game. They got freaking Microsoft servers running this thing. The only way they'd be stronger is if they had NASA tech. Is it just that there's really bad optimization going on in the background or something? Like, two galleons on a private partnership server should NOT lag out the game. Nor should a company that is this well funded be having this much trouble managing their own servers after 10+ years of upgrades.

There are many things that are considered a "server." For instance, I used to have a PC set up to run a Minecraft server; it hosted games and worlds for my friends. Technically, it was a server... with like 4Gb of RAM, dual-code processor, and 100Gb HDD, a server. Professionally I have software running on servers with 128Gb of RAM, motherboards with two slots that each support 8-core processors, and terabytes of hard drive space.

Traditionally now, with virtual machines and cloud containers, you can purchase (rent) the entire spectrum of hosting solutions. This is what I mean when I say I'm not impressed at what Microsoft is giving Rare: we know they could be hosting SoT of machines with more than enough RAM and processing power to have six ships and dozens of players, but they're probably hosted on decade old hardware in the dank back of some warehouse in Phoenix. Which is a feat indeed, it's difficult to find anywhere dank in Phoenix!

@strangeness I mean... no?

I write accounting software for a living. I understand accounting laws, regulations, federal and regulatory requirements, and best practices. So to say that it would "muck up Microsoft's and Rare's P/L sheet" is a stretch, and that it "makes it more difficult for Microsoft to evaluate Rare" is downright insulting. If the numbers aren't organized in a way to make those calculations easy, then they need better accounting software or better accountants. Yes, fine, anti-trust laws maybe, gotta keep an eye on those, keeping the accounting clean perhaps, but to say that putting a "cost" line item and a "expense" line item from an owned company to a subsidiary is in any way illegal or difficult is just plain wrong. It happens all the time.

The problem is greed. Microsoft wants to wring out as much profit as possible, so is running Rare on the minimal server specs possible, plain and simple. They could upgrade them for free, totally legally. They don't because the sole purpose of a company is to generate profit and minimize risk. Microsoft doesn't care about the game or the players, they exist to treat us like minimum effort ATMs. To believe otherwise is just misinformed.

tl:dr
Just make SoT 2 happen with a better infrastructure built up, cull the old gen consoles for new ones and there you have it :D.

it's going to be 6 years since the games release and it functions worse then ps2/ OG Xbox Online games that had less online ping issues literally 2 decades ago with physics and servers that could hold 20 players in them.

That's just an embarrassment at this point.

@ix-indi-xi it does seem like there is a lot of sloppy coding from the early days of them learning the engine and stuff. perhaps working on a SoT 2 and when the time comes just copy over peoples progression so you could save all your cosmetics and stats

the game needs new content to thrive but as has been the issue since the early days the more content they add to the game the less stable it becomes. seems like trying to fix hitreg just caused even more server instability. on top of that we have crab people and ghosts fighting each other on islands any players get remotely close to. that cant help the server any. i imagine having fotd up all the time now so 2 fort events are running at once is also creating stability issues. i wonder if server stability is really good in safer seas they might transition toward that being the main mode since it might be the only fix to stability. basically make hourglass its own mode so you only have 2 crews fighting each other so what will be higher seas in december will become a hourglass defense mode so you can farm the pve while fighting off invaders or you could have 2 diving crews fighting each other. 2 ships on a server seems manageable thats 8 players right now the game can only handle 3 galleons on a server. now the guilds is out and seems to be the final big systematic update perhaps we will get another long season while they work on a stability update because like a lot of things like quick draw literally sat on the back burner for years. server stability is one thing you would think should have had priority. but they seem stretched thin in terms of trying to get out actual content. and now they are focused on balancing with quickdraw and sail nerfs so maybe stability is next in line? fingers crossed

So, hitreg will never be solved because we are on cheap servers? Yikes.

@strangeness
Well if they openly admit that older consoles has nothing to do with server performance/lag, then it's on their side & Microsoft.

Which was always the case really.
I never said old consoles where causing server issues, in fact I hinted the opposite how 2 decades ago, games like Halo, OG StarWars BattleFront 2 had better connections such as hit-reg on the OG Xbox then what SoT currently has which is embarrassing. Mind you these where games on relatively large maps with vehicles and physics going off...
It's almost 2024 in a live service game...

The Console argument really came down to Caps like FoV which I guess could also be another rumour/theory when some RARE people on these forums stated that the game was made with 90 FoV in mind. Which imo is a poor excuse and doesn't make much sense at all since 120 FoV looks decently good from the footage I've seen, you can even see reload animations on guns fully which you cannot on native 90 which I always found odd.
But to sum up the topic of all these ''issues'' which some genuinely are, it's a combination of all the factors, that's just video game design in general and the pipeline, from bad seam placements on textured models, to server issues, the debate can go on forever in a pick and choose fashion...

@d3adst1ck

LordQulex anwsers seems to be the most plausible with low tick rate having to relay information for every player back & forth, physics on a huge open world even with LoD enabled (Obviously), old Microsoft Servers, as probably the main culprit for bad hit Registration.

• He claims to have 20 years of experience in this domain to which is probably more then all of us combined in knowledge.