In the recent 'wars' and mass lmining the game has appeared to slow down a fair amount. Individual's pings don't appear to go up by much if at all, but homing missles appear to jump around, people complain about 'lag' but still have low pings (and I assume low packet lose).

I dunno about u, but each lmine adds between 5 and 10 to my ping. I was in the 500's at the last war, and I've been up to the 700's. This is over my normally 50ms cable connection. :(

yeah but it's not only the mines...

Our server's load is going above 1 under certain corcumstances, so your ping times would be affected by this. We're working on optimizing the server a little.

i suggest keeping number of lmines to a fixed number per player, with maximum of 4, next mine you put removes first one.

hey, thats a good one! that way station-mining is also eliminated...(kinda)

/me likes randomize's idea, it is good

Bad idea, as much as I hate Whistler's flag mining (heh), he does a good job of making our capping job tougher.

whether you like this idea or not is irrelevant.
in order to reduce stress on the server and allow for more fluent gameplay you must reduce number of objects sent to the clients. if you don't limit the number of mines at all, people on dial up won't be able to receive mine locations faster than new mines are placed, do you understand what that means? Limit on mines _must_ be imposed.

if you limit number of mines per sector, but not per player, you will have an unfair gameplay where one person can either take somebody elses mines by placing theirs or not be able to place any mines at all, thanks to person who were here first. either case is unacceptable.

"The Kid" have you thought about the problem or just thrown your comment without much consideration? Let me come up with a real life example. I was in sector 11 today and there were so many mines there popping up with just 2 or 3 miners, that I wasn't receiving updates in time and even though I could see no mines around me (not on radar either) I was getting killed by them. That's with 2-3 miners constantly unloading their hornets around station and further and further.

Let's scale up this example to situation when 5 people are at it. Let's assume it takes 30 seconds to get out of station and drop 4 mines off and another 20 seconds to purchase more and start again. 50 seconds = 4 mines, one person. 5 people * 4 * 5 minutes. 100 mines. 10 minutes? 200 mines.

How long did it take for Blaster to set up the fireworks? How many mines were there?

If you have better ideas on how to solve this conundrum please tell me, but I find Vendetta harder and harder to play from overseas.

Hey it's the only time I ever mine, and only when the offense has me seriously worried. I'd actually rather duke it out over the flag than drop mines. Consider it a compliment!

I agree that some limit ought to exist to enable dialup users to play, but it should be a per-player rather than per-sector limit. If it were per-sector I could fly into an enemy home sector and dump my own mines, thus preventing defensive mines from being laid. 4 per player seems too few though, given the impressive cap teams that people have been able to get together.
Maybe when the defense bots get smarter (unable to be led so far astray) a limit wouldn't be so damaging.

good point, I didn't think about flag mining...
Anyway, I'm sure that limiting mines is not the only way to reduce server stress, and I'd rather not see anyone sad because of a loss of mines than lag.

I'm Blaster... and I know about the lag. If 6 ppl on 1 team wants to mine then that's teamwork. Go cap their flag when they're busy mining.
"Let's assume it takes 30 seconds to get out of station and drop 4 mines off and another 20 seconds to purchase more and start again. 50 seconds = 4 mines, one person. 5 people * 4 * 5 minutes. 100 mines. 10 minutes? 200 mines. "
It doesn't go that quick.
and ray said server optimization. w00t. IMO, lmines cause a ton of lag because the devs don't like them and haven't worked on them >:O

Wouldn't it be possible to download such "static" objects (mines don't move much, right?) while the player jumps into a sector?

Then the server would only have to send updates (mines which blew up someone) and people could put 1000 mines in a sector.

But here is an idea to make mines more ... undesirable: Disable the FOF (friend-or-foe) detection. You place a mine and everyone (even yourself) has to stay away from it or it will blow you up.

This will make placing mines much more ... interesting :-)

Mmm, new meaning to mineing stations, so then i can hop on as gold and mine there station with L-Mines and watch them die!!!!

Bwahahahahahhahahah

>good point, I didn't think about flag mining...

>Anyway, I'm sure that limiting mines is not the only way to reduce server
>stress, and I'd rather not see anyone sad because of a loss of mines than lag.

When said lag makes it impossible to play it should become a serious issue to developers. As I mentioned above, mines not sent to me as fast as they ;placed, making me explode without actually being able to see mines that killed me. It's not about me being sad (poor poor), but rather about player not being able to play (OMG WTF?) ;)

Philmannn Dark: That's what it does. In theory.

Blaster hit it on the head: We've never looked into the lightning mine thing as we should have [because we think they suck].

Mines send one event per mine (which is imbedded in a packet among several other events), and no updates (well, maybe a couple if they're "skidding to a halt", but we can eliminate those updates). Or that's what they're supposed to do. The mine itself is only around 30 bytes of data. There shouldn't ever be a situation where it takes more time to send you 30 bytes of data than it does for it to explode. I'll take a look... Something obviously is awry.

well I've seen you saying a lotta thing about the lmines before a1.

what about packets that are sent when they hurt other characters? I mean server must transmit events for me to see lightnings hitting other ships?
large number of lmines + large number of players being damaged by mines all that takes 30 bytes per mine? you must be genius to make that work :)

a1k0n and I had a little "test" with this... let's see what he says.

shrug. If a large number of players are being damaged very frequently, then it's obviously going to be a problem. But the damage packets are just "start" and "stop" events for the lightning effect. It's simpler and less data than all the ships moving, for instance. Blaster and I did a test, but nothing really showed up. He reported "m_waiting" in the station, but no ping increase. But we didn't have anyone else dogfighting in the background. We'll have to conduct some more tests when people are actually seeing the problem.

The packet size for lmines can easily be reduced a lot, too. Full orientations/angular velocities/etc are being sent because nobody cared enough to specialize it.

What about lighting balls then? :P