A Path Beyond A Different Perspective

[Pyryle]

So I have been playing A Path Beyond more frequently these past few weeks, and I have been receiving multiple remarks from other players telling me that I am some "laghacker" and/or cheater whenever I'm ingame. The most notable of this can be seen  in one of Totd's APB madness videos where he kills me, and I managed to posthumously kill him a couple seconds after the fact.

So here's how my end of things go since I started playing more frequently again: For the past couple of weeks, my modem would spontaneously reset itself multiple times during a given 24-hour period, regardless of the time of day. These spontaneous resets cause me to go offline anywhere between 1 minute and half an hour at worst. In between these resets, my connection while playing APB would still be stable enough to stay online, but not unstable enough to get completely disconnected from the game. The end result, is that whatever gameplay I see gets sent in "bursts" of data, where every moving object appears to be moonwalking, then disappears/reappears in a totally different area, as if my connection is (literally) using chrono technology on everything.

I am actively trying to figure out what's causing my modem to reset at random, and the closest possibility I can come up with right now is that the power signal to my modem is sub-optimal. I'm also getting my ISP's technician to check on my line signal outside my house soon, provided I have ample days off from work to properly schedule an appointment.

Below is a video of one of my "bad lag" days. It's business as usual between Voe, FRAYDO, and myself playing APB, and Totd also makes an appearance (even on teamspeak):

Call me what you will, but this is the stuff I have to deal with while playing APB. I do apologize in advance to anybody and everybody who thinks that I'm some dirty player of the game as a result of this problem I'm having. Except Voe. He sux 

[Raap]

You're a true Lag Wizard.

[Voe]

7 hours ago, Pyryle said:

Except Voe. He sux 

In the ass.

[FRAYDO]

Ban him for lag hax and raciial slurs.

[NodGuy]

8 hours ago, Pyryle said:

So I have been playing A Path Beyond more frequently these past few weeks, and I have been receiving multiple remarks from other players telling me that I am some "laghacker" and/or cheater whenever I'm ingame. The most notable of this can be seen  in one of Totd's APB madness videos where he kills me, and I managed to posthumously kill him a couple seconds after the fact.

So here's how my end of things go since I started playing more frequently again: For the past couple of weeks, my modem would spontaneously reset itself multiple times during a given 24-hour period, regardless of the time of day. These spontaneous resets cause me to go offline anywhere between 1 minute and half an hour at worst. In between these resets, my connection while playing APB would still be stable enough to stay online, but not unstable enough to get completely disconnected from the game. The end result, is that whatever gameplay I see gets sent in "bursts" of data, where every moving object appears to be moonwalking, then disappears/reappears in a totally different area, as if my connection is (literally) using chrono technology on everything.

I am actively trying to figure out what's causing my modem to reset at random, and the closest possibility I can come up with right now is that the power signal to my modem is sub-optimal. I'm also getting my ISP's technician to check on my line signal outside my house soon, provided I have ample days off from work to properly schedule an appointment.

Below is a video of one of my "bad lag" days. It's business as usual between Voe, FRAYDO, and myself playing APB, and Totd also makes an appearance (even on teamspeak):

Call me what you will, but this is the stuff I have to deal with while playing APB. I do apologize in advance to anybody and everybody who thinks that I'm some dirty player of the game as a result of this problem I'm having. Except Voe. He sux 

Well, to me you are a dirty player because of this. You knowingly play the game even though this unfortunate issue you're experiencing is screwing over your enemies. It's rather annoying when you shoot us after we get behind cover or when you're not even looking at us, e.g., that moment in the Power Plant when I was following you and shooting you in the back yet, if I remember correctly, you took no damage and I took shotgun to the face.

With that said I hope you get this resolved soon. There's nothing worse in an online game than playing with lag, especially on this engine.

[Mojoman]

Obviously shooped. Maybe he haxors our mind to make us think he no haxs? Bu  haxs he is!

[forg0ten1]

been playing this game for a long time, and not normally one to complain about players, but this "lag" is kinda rediculous

[TeamWolf]

It's one of the reasons why anyone below 44kbps would be kicked from the old Renegade servers.

[Voe]

8 hours ago, forg0ten1 said:

been playing this game for a long time, and not normally one to complain about players, but this "lag" is kinda rediculous

There is a reason I asked Pyryle to make this thread. It doesn't matter if it's out of your control Pyryle, but you're getting an unfair advantage over the other players. 

I, on my part, am willing to let this slide. I know I'm biased as we're old time friends, but I also know Pyryle is an amazing player and if he kills me with lag, he probably would have killed me without as well.

However, it is the community opinion that matters. I wonder what you guys think.

[moonsense715]

I wonder if it's possible to "sabotage" my own internet to get this effect? If it is then we'll have to come up with some countermeasures.

It's easier to kill moonwalking enemies than if their position updates normally. Damage calculation is client side, so if my client sees them where they actually aren't and I hit them on my screen, the server accepts it as valid.

[Einstein]

53 minutes ago, moonsense715 said:

I wonder if it's possible to "sabotage" my own internet to get this effect? If it is then we'll have to come up with some countermeasures.

It's easier to kill moonwalking enemies than if their position updates normally. Damage calculation is client side, so if my client sees them where they actually aren't and I hit them on my screen, the server accepts it as valid.

Right. Ever heard of a "lag switch" ?

[Raap]

4 hours ago, Einstein said:

Right. Ever heard of a "lag switch" ?

As Einstein suggested, you can intentionally throttle your upload rate in order to on-demand "lag switch". It's an unfortunately quite common problem in online games.

You got two solutions: Move hit detection to server-side (good luck with that).

Add auto-kick safety measures that boots people with high ping spikes.

The latter is a common solution, unfortunately it also affects people who legitimately cannot help their Internet situation. 

It's a tough call to be sure. I personally haven't noticed much lag switching in W3D - plenty of rubber banding at times though but that is something else.

It also doesn't help NA players much, since the servers are hosted in Europe, and NA network infrastructure is known to be a wreck, it could potentially false flag a lot of NA players due to their relatively higher pings. in a perfect world however we'd have two servers; One in Europe and one in NA, with the playerbase to consistently fill both servers. Unfortunately splitting the playerbase right now would not be a wise decision.

Edited May 18, 2017 by Raap

[OrangeP47]

1 hour ago, Raap said:

It also doesn't help NA players much, since the servers are hosted in Europe, and NA network infrastructure is known to be a wreck, it could potentially false flag a lot of NA players due to their relatively higher pings.

Yeah, even when my internet is working perfectly I can't get less than 200 ping typically because of the server location.

[NodGuy]

Also, what I find strange is that when you're having this "issue" your ping remains the same and it doesn't affect you. I'm no expert when it comes to connections and whatnot, but if you are having router issues then wouldn't you be lagging like crazy while this is happening? I know when I network issues with W3D not only are other players moon walking but I'm being warped around like a motherfucker. The only time I know of when you don't lag but everyone else moon walks is when you get the green "connection issue" error message, but everything you do still registers with the server.

[OrangeP47]

It could be separate download/upload trouble. A lot of modern games will do things to try and compensate if just one fails but it's hard to do, and W3D is likely too old to be very advanced in that department.

I know sometimes when I'm having a problem with my connection my download speed is fine (as fine as 3M can be  ) but my upload 0s out, so if a download *starts* everything is fine but it takes 30s seconds for the signal that I would like to start the download to ping out.

[Einstein]

33 minutes ago, NodGuy said:

Also, what I find strange is that when you're having this "issue" your ping remains the same and it doesn't affect you.

Ping is done in packets and as such requires a connection to update, just like other types of traffic. In other words, if a connection drops intermittently, the game's ping function will be affected just like the game or anything else utilizing the constant connection. If his connection drops and stays out for a couple seconds, then reconnects, it won't necessarily change his ping rate on screen because the ping packets got dropped just like all the other traffic. Judging by how renegade handles player and vehicle movement in this scenario, it likely displays the last successful ping until it receives the next ping reply from another one and updates the value. Just a guess (but I do have a networking degree ).

[OrangeP47]

22 minutes ago, Einstein said:

Just a guess (but I do have a networking degree ).

And here we thought that just meant you were good at meeting new people

[NodGuy]

2 hours ago, Einstein said:

Ping is done in packets and as such requires a connection to update, just like other types of traffic. In other words, if a connection drops intermittently, the game's ping function will be affected just like the game or anything else utilizing the constant connection. If his connection drops and stays out for a couple seconds, then reconnects, it won't necessarily change his ping rate on screen because the ping packets got dropped just like all the other traffic. Judging by how renegade handles player and vehicle movement in this scenario, it likely displays the last successful ping until it receives the next ping reply from another one and updates the value. Just a guess (but I do have a networking degree ).

Whenever I have lag issues with W3D games my ping jumps from around 180 (normal for me) to over 500, 1000, 2000, etc., even if it is just for a moment. That's how I notice I have an issue, when I ping is climbing like crazy.

[Einstein]

Its possible then that these are two different types of issues. If your ping is high, it can mean that your network (or ISP) is crowded or "bottlenecked" at the moment. Traffic will get processed, just at a slower than ideal pace (but not dropped). Ping would then jump up because it is in fact working, albeit slowly. However the "gauge" so to speak that ping is, tends to break when packet loss is the problem, which is what I described earlier. Basically in that case, it shows the same as a normal ping because it did not receive a value during the connection drop and doesn't have a display value for not receiving an ICMP ACK packet (or whatever it uses for its pinging system), so it just continues to display the last value it received. I hope I'm making sense.....and again, this is guesswork. I have a networking degree, not a W3D engine degree, so I could be totally off here. It does line up though.

EDIT: I like how the forum recognizes "ACK" as aircraftkiller In context, thats an "acknowledgement" packet, sent in response to a SYN (synchronize) packet.

[Voe]

There are different kinds of lag. I sometimes have a weird throttle on upload which makes me unable to move or communicate by VoIP, but I see everyone moving as the normally do and I can hear them over teamspeak. I imagine pyryle has the opposite.

[Chaos_Knight]

17 hours ago, NodGuy said:

Also, what I find strange is that when you're having this "issue" your ping remains the same and it doesn't affect you.

The thing is we are talking about "ping" display on a game HUD, not actual ping command ran for diagnostics. Which in practice might mean that the "ping" you see here may actually be only "one way trip" time reported by the server, not the full circle. This would also explain serious delays and rubberbanding I experience sometimes with a stable ping of ~80.
We can also agree that outgoing connection for Pyryle is stable enough which is confirmed by the fact that his characters seem to behave normally for other players. Never saw him teleport around really (or had this much issues killing him ).

So I think his "ping" value stays the same because server receives his data just fine at all times. But it sure fails to send his data to him every now and then >_>

[GaryOak]

Good idea to make this thread, as, as you've pointed out, this is a thing. 

There have been games where I as a Tanya would run away from you as an engineer

I know you 100% dont hack, but I can definitely see why some players unknown to APB would think that

Im definitely not as skilled as you are, but facing an engineer as a Tanya and getting killed in literally 0,1 seconds is just madness

Let's hope a solution can be found!