Pings going crazy & game freezy through rounds 5-7

[djdb]

Recently joined & have been enjoying this version of MULE, but I have a recurring problem where my ping goes from ~80 to ~600 during rounds 5-7.  The game slows down & becomes almost unplayable, especially moving in & out of the store.

The worst part is the other players tend to be extremely unpatient.  I understand the irritation, but it's not as if I were doing something intentionally or like I could wave my hand to make it better.

I have a new windows 7 rig with minimal processes running.  Doesn't matter if I have apps open or not, but just in case I've been closing everything down with no improvement.

Any ideas?

[Atarianer]

Hi!

I got nearly the same problem. I am from germany and i got always high pings (180-250) when playing a bot-game. Finishing a game becomes hard because I dont know when I got a timeout-error. It appears suddenly, even when the game is playing smooth. Can you make this game being more tolerant to higher pings? Hardware-problems on my computer seems not to be, I got no similar problems with other network-stuff.

[Hotblack Desiato]

djdb,

The problem you’ve described sounds a lot like the problem I was experiencing, although I had it in offline play. Be sure to check out the thread, “Mid-game hang-up”.
http://www.planetmule.com/forum?topic=1829.0

The main problem for me was the OpenGL settings for my graphics.  Once I was able to set it for triple buffering it pretty much eliminated the problem, although I haven’t tested it with online play yet.  You may want to adjust your graphics for performance rather than quality.  What are your video specs?

[Chuckie Chuck]

This does for the most part sound like simple networking trouble in this case.  Although, I do have a question...  What is the FPS during those slow downs?  If it is still consistantly about 60 FPS you are just experiencing game networking issues.  If the FPS is dropping, then you have a driver issue as suggested by Hotblack Desiato.  So do try to observe that.  Hotblack has a machine that could run 6 sessions of mule without a notable slowdown, yet he could barely run one because his driver settings for OpenGL were wrong in his video driver.  (Check your cards graphic settings program to fix this under OpenGL or 3d Gaming Settings)  I know it's not a 3d style game, but it utilizes a 3d gaming game engine.  Pretty demanding.

I think administration is looking into writing some new more efficient networking code to make the problems with long pings less noticeable.  The pings from Germany can not be decreased, but the short pings of 60 to 90ms enjoyed by American players can be brought into sync with them more accurately with the right coding.  Right now there is and has been a problem with this since day 1 when Planet MULE was released.  Improvements have been made, but there are still issues.

I get those same long pings if I play a game hosted by someone in Germany.  The quality of your ping is all relative to where you are on the planet relative to the host players computer.  Most the time we utilize Mainstreams BOT host.  They are housed in the San Jose area in California.  I'm only 5 hours from there, I get 70 to 90ms pings consistantly.  German players get an average ping of 200ms consistently to those host bots.

Many of us are hoping to see an update to the game to help deal with the issue, perhaps speed up the effects of the slow down caused by the longer pings (though that seems unlikely) but at least get the game into better sync.