Alpha Test Conclusions

[Jinxp]

It was great and i can see the game growing big in the future

[Sipher]

@Rory

@Whack

 

Netcode can be a little tricky to deal with, and is a pain in the ass, in my opinion. However, the hardware all the connections are going through are just as important. You first need to determine what layer the bottleneck is taking place in.

 

Layer 1(Physical)

What kind of physical medium is the server connecting to the outside world with? Copper pair, fiber, coax....wireless?(Please say no, for the love of Jashin-sama say that the server is not using a wireless connection). Ideally a fiber line would be used because light travels much faster than electricity, which goes through copper/coax.

 

Layer 2(Datalink)

What speeds is the connection that the server uses setup for? Is the server on a 10Mb line? Something better? Does the server have it's own dedicated line, or is it part of a home network connected to a router that's shared by several other computers? Ideally for the server, you would want it to have it's own dedicated line so that resources aren't being used by other devices in the network. I realize however that this is probably not the case since this stuff can get pretty expensive and it's not like this game is huge or for-profit.

 

Would it be possible to make a completely lag free game on a 10Mb line to support several hundred players? You bet your ass it would, if you don't mind learning an assembly language and spending 3+ years to code what would take a few months in a non-assembly language.

 

Those are really the only two layers we have to worry about at this point regarding the OSI model and networking. I mean, at this point, the game doesn't even encrypt anything. When I say that nothing is being encrypted, I mean nothing is being encrypted. I've already checked the packets being sent/received and it's all plain text. At this point I would recommend that anyone who took the time to read this, know that you should not use a password that you use for other things in the server login. Not to say that Rory and the others can't be trusted, it's just extremely unsecure.

 

Now if the game does start to encrypt packets, you can expect the network load to go up a bit. There's the whole matter of checking hashes and all that fun stuff that needs to be done. Before looking into the networking side of everything, I would take a look to see if the server itself is being overloaded for whatever reason. If the server has a high CPU usage when everyone connects, that could very well be the issue and would mean that the code needs to be more efficient.

 

Maybe the code doesn't need to be more efficient, maybe what needs to be addressed are the layers I mentioned at the top of this post, who knows at this point. Also, if the server isn't dedicated, that would be a very major cause for lag. A server that's hosting a game but also being used for other things like streaming or playing other games and all that jazz would absolutely cause lag.

[lolrinse]

http://www.nfoservers.com/

 

I used this vps for my maplestory private server, and I would have to say it is pretty efficient when it comes to hosting. Check out the specs before using it though. Hopefully this helped

[Hayate]

^I honestly feel it's less a VPS issue and more a programming related issue, rinse.

 

Have you thought about using a Java server? You could accomplish multi-threading and several things to help make it a stable run. Hell, back when I was big in the Runescape PS era's, we were able to get 2000 people comfortably onto servers- albeit on an 8-gig ram vps. (The way the netcode was written helped use minimal cpu and decent ram, and hell it really did wonders.) You might be able to find a lot of documentation on Rune-server and even port it to vb6 where applicable.

[Photon]

If we could place wagers, I would place it on an unchecked infinite loop. But we shall see or not, when they fix the issue.