Topic
Is it just me or has there been alot of lag lately?
Is it just me or has there been alot of lag lately?
Replies
- i too have lag.
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I didn't have much (performance) lag until recently (past 2-3 weeks), but it's gotten substantially worse this past week after I upgraded to Firefox 13, to the point where my entire browser tries to hang if I don't reload frequently.
ETA: After doing a little googling, this may be partially to do with the new version of Flash, so I'll withhold fussing about it until I've been able to test Glitch with Flash's new protected mode disabled. - I find it to be extremely sluggish for the last few days, even takes a while to load my inventory, meh
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Yeah, I'm hitting some epic lag all of a sudden too. Since Flash auto-updates silently now I can't directly confirm that is the cause for me, but it certainly seems reasonable.
Main symptoms: Jumping almost never happens when I expect it to (making triple jumping almost impossible). Also, while harvesting things (like trees or barnacles) I seem to skitter around without actually ending up anywhere near the thing I'm harvesting. (I often have to reposition myself to harvest again.)
Extra Info: The streets I'm on are public streets, but in places where I see almost no one, like random streets in Kajuu. So overcrowding is definitely not the cause. - I haven't yet gotten the latest Flash version, and yet the lag still comes. I haven't upgraded Firefox either... That said, I lag on all kinds of streets.
- The lags have been killing me. OS X (Hackintosh) with newest Chrome.
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Except for a couple of times during the past few weeks when I *think TS was having some network/server issues, for me it seems to happen after extended play and during "peak" hours. For the first, I reload, for the second, I just cope. But I see the same things.
The only lag that bugs me is when I first enter the house. Everything looks fine, but after I walk a few steps, the avatar stops dead for a few seconds consistently. - Woochi, I've been avoiding my house for the same reason, extreme lag. I thought it was b/c I have too much crapola in my SDB's, and even set my butterflies free/removed fireflies to try and combat the problem, to no avail. Glad to know I'm not the only one--
- Sandy, for what it's worth (and although I often forget to do so), changing to a zoom of 1/2 (in case you're not aware -> type /zoom .5 into your local chat window) PRIOR to entering the home seems to help considerably, although the load takes ~1-2 seconds longer before rendering your interior.) Once you're in-house, it'll still work, but it's not as effective at reducing the rendering lags.
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Update: after tweaking flash, I can say that performance is better (no more browser hangs), but I still get a fair bit of lag as I play longer. The most obvious symptom is the game being slow to register a directional key up (makes Summer's Day fairly hellish, since my Glitch not stopping when I tell her to means a lot of attempting to overcorrect on jumps, which leads to me falling off a lot...), or to not register it at all until I mash the directional keys and jump a few times. The "won't stop walking" thing used to be an occasional, random occurrence, but now it happens to me every play session, and once it starts, that's my cue to reload. Also, loading streets takes longer and longer as I play.
Like Nerd of Epic and Kouki, I'm finding this is consistent behavior across every kind of street.
I've always had house lag, so I don't notice *too* much difference in that, but I will say that the past couple weeks, the walls/floors don't load in right away (apparently unloaded walls/floors are pale blue), which is new. Oh! Also, my furniture tab takes a bazillion years to load, and freezes me briefly as it switches. - MX, how did you tweak flash?
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You have to add a line to mms.cfg to manually disable Flash's new protected mode, which is now active in Flash 11.3, Vista and higher. The issue is only with this protected mode used in conjunction with Firefox 13, apparently; you should google it for more info.
Like I say, it only seemed to clear up Firefox grinding to a complete halt; I still get some performance lag the longer I play without reloading. -
Agreed, things have been slowly getting slower for a while now.
I think TS should set aside part of each week to profile and tune client performance. - I have definitely been experiencing a lot more lag in movement commands lately. Summer's Day was definitely a battle against over jumps. I've also ground my nose into the edges of several streets as the lag prevented me from changing direction.
- Past 2 days I have had a great deal of trouble entering the world :(
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Justinia, it looks like there were some network problems for you; the bandwidth test failed outright.
Janitch, the client guys do work on performance, all the time.
But, we do suggest folks do what Justinia did- try the self help test and submit to us with your specific details too; a lot of the time, they will be network related. You can also pay attention to the framerate yourself by pressing Q and P when in the game; it will bring up a little performance information box in the lower right side. There are also some things we are looking at where there are specific places that crash people out as described in this topic. If you get behavior that matches that, send in a bug report at the time of it happening, and mention these topics, and we can look for patterns that may fit in with the debugging we are doing. -
I wonder if much of the lag in homes could be resolved by allowing storage of sdbs in cabinets.
I've noticed that if I'm in (literally) my home when I log in, it's often sluggish, due to my admittedly modestly large number of items having to be parsed and rendered, most of which are themselves sdbs that contain all my craftables, BUT if I log in while in my back yard, I notice far less lag..until I enter the home. In fact, it can be as long as ~10 minutes into the game and when I enter the home from the backyard, things are often still rendering, which implies to me that there's a "need basis for rendering objects at play. If that IS the case, then moving sdbs to a "safer" location (ie storage cabinets), *might improve the situation while in our own respective areas, fwtw, -
wht everyone above said. i am so laggy - i got annoyed enough to just x out of the window all together and stop playing for the rest of the night.
I spent ALOT of my game time tonight just waiting on screens to load . as i was trying to run some maps to rebuild my currants and IMG.
It's gotten way worse the last few weeks.
i dont auto update my flash player. ( i think it's still bugging me to update it from last reboot i did ) .
anyway - much worse lag changing locations. it now takes forever to go from street to street whether walking or tp'ing. and i cant move properly , missing jumps etc. My house has always lagged some - so i'm not too fussed over that. but this not able to change locations without extensive loading times is making me craaazzzzy .
grrr. frustrated. - idk. The lag in my home has gotten quite intolerable. Inevitably, no matter how long I've been ingame, the first time I walk through my house I get stuck for several seconds ~1/2 way thru while the game does something or another. And again each time I re-enter the house from the front yard. Often times, I'm at home doing the backyard garden/animals thing for up to ten or fifteen realworld minutes and there are still items loading into my house when I enter through the back doorway. Hence, the pondering about whether being able to store sdbs in cabinets might improve the rendering issues.
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I've posted a long thread about the "lag" (aka framerate drops) in Glitch over the past month or so, basically it comes down to the fact that TS needs to optimize their usage of the Flash platform.
Flash Player has built in limits that prevent system crashes or using up all the RAM, caused by bad programming/optimizing by developers. Glitch's problem is that while it can easily reach a 1 GB in memory usage, most computers today come with 2-8 GB of installed memory, so running into the built in limit isn't the issue. What is the issue and what Flash doesn't limit is the amount of CPU usage of the content loaded "in memory". For example, when someone rolls a 12-sided die it degrades the overall performance of Glitch until the user ends the current Glitch session... (the dice roll animation, continues to "animate" or run "in the background")
While Flash's history hasn't been a bucket of roses (aka the recent Firefox Protection Mode issue*), it's a great platform that is stable and capable of amazing things
*If you've updated to 11.3.300.262 you can delete the ProtectionMode=0 from the mms.cfg file
TL;DR TS needs to optimize their use of the flash platform or move Glitch to a more open platform (HTML5, CSS3 etc.) which is totally possible with the newest web technologies. - Lag was so bad last night I could hardly even chat. I would type a line of text, hit enter and watch as it slowly appeared in the chat box. Jumping, changing streets and moving around was next to impossible. Hit arrow or space bar and nothing happened until seconds later. Cleared cache etc to no avail :-(
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Glitches, please says something like "the game was choppy" instead of laggy (and say it was laggy if it is playing smoothly, but taking a long time to do things like open a menu) -- that tells us your computer cannot render frames fast enough and you most likely just need to restart it (if it is worse than usual).
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Kamer, with all due respect, you know just enough to complain dramatically but not enough to complain helpfully. Let's do some math.
The game engine is around 150-200 megabytes in memory when it's unpacked and JIT compiled. Not a lot of room for big savings there because we can't delete a hundred megabytes of code -- there would be no game.
A location is composed of layers. Usually 5-7. A typical location may be 8000x2000 pixels, that is 16 million pixels. Each pixel contains an alpha channel, bringing us to 4 bytes per pixel, and 64 million bytes per layer. Multiply that by 7, and you get close to a half gigabyte for the static visuals alone for a typical location without any code whatsoever. No code. None.
Also, no avatars, no street spirits, no apples. No new day, no chat. No sneezing or scowling animations. No client-server communication or caching of asset bundles so locations load quickly and don't saturate your network.
The avatars can be around 1 megabyte each. You're in a party with fifty friends? That's another fifty megs, without any code. Apples take up space, as do crab headphones, and gameshow wheel animations (which are enormous).
These are just in-memory values, not on screen. Blitting is the process of copying pre-rendered bits from memory, such as an image, into another location (a buffer) for display. That display location sometimes takes as much memory as the source. And if you have more than buffer so the framerate is smoother (a back buffer), then it takes twice as much.
So we're conservatively at around 750 megabytes for the first time you enter a party space with all your friends. Head to Ix later and add another 20 megabytes for asset caching. And this is regardless of whether you're using HTML5 or Flash or Unity.
Finally, in case you decide to draw the comparison: 3D games often use less memory than a 2D game because their textures are of lower quality. A 2D game can't stretch a texture without it looking really bad; or it would have to use vectors to redraw the texture at the desired size which costs extra CPU time and slows rendering down, and still contains many of the other aforementioned hidden costs.
We're doing what we can to improve the existing game, at the rate we can, while finishing the core game experience. Our resources are limited, much like your computer, and sometimes we have to sacrifice things (like framerate) in order to do things that are magical. Or even just to do things like fix a stupid, albeit crippling, bug. If you know something we don't, please send us your resume.
Now get back to playing!
=D -
I'll tell you my game has been intermittently laggy, then -- I've been getting lag spikes where all the animations repeat and menus won't open for 1-5 seconds, then I get the accelerated animations while my client catches up. It's roughly 50/50 odds as to whether the menu will then open or if I have to click again to get one that will. I just haven't had it happen at a time where *I* had time to write a worthwhile bug on it or even sort out additional factors (other than to note whether or not I've had other network lag with it -- I haven't).
Also, Jono, I'm going to quibble slightly -- with 3d, it's not usually that the textures are lower quality (though obviously that varies), it's that they're easier to reuse without being obvious. Also, if the 3d engine supports procedural texturing there's a pretty big savings that can be had there if it's used well. (The following is an oversimplified example, because I don't want to lose too many people here.) Working in 3d, you can take a wood texture, load it in to memory once, and apply it to a floor, some furniture, and a door, while rotating and scaling in different ways so that it isn't obvious that's what's been done. (Even easier if you can put a decal on top in some places to give occasional cracks, scratches, etc. that disguise tiling.) I haven't worked much in 2d engines, but I'm guessing that it can't really be done that way for most things and certainly wouldn't be as easy to hide as it is in 3d. Oh, and since I don't know which things would both carry over and actually improve performance, no resume for you.
Now get back to doing things that are magical! ;) -
Magic Monkey -- totally valid argument on 3D. We do reuse everything; the problem is just that everything is always right in front of you and never at distance and rarely obscured -- it needs to always look its best and can never be scaled (try zooming out to see how quality is lost during scaling, and it is truly *awful* when zoom in further).
We're working on improving what you call lag. But it can 95% of the time be ascribed to a temporary or permanently bad network connection, a computer that needs to be rebooted, or a computer that isn't powerful enough for the game as the game is coded today. Tomorrow the game will hopefully run a little better on older machines, but that's an iterative process that is secondary to finishing the game (a fast game that is unfinished is no fun). - Weird I've been getting a lot of lag lately too and my computer is not old by and standards and I never have a problem with my internet.
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Yeah, mipmaps can make a big difference in 3d performance too, and that's something that really can't be applied here. I look forward to the day that it's feasible to have everything vector-based and infinitely resizable all the time without it being such terrible overhead. =)
I am, though, going to claim that this is a 5% case. Everything else on the network has been fine, ping times via the self-help test are higher than I like but normal relative to what they are when I run it without problems, and my system is decent (AMD FX-4100 quad core, 16 GB ram, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti should all be more than adequate in this case). It's also atypical of the symptoms I get when the browser and/or computer need a restart. The typical restart-needed symptoms qualify as choppy and sluggish, but I don't get the stuck animations or delayed menus with that. Regardless, I'm set to bug it if/when it happens again, which should clarify for everyone what's causing it. - Magic Monkey, we're aware of the problems; just allow us time to improve them.
- Always, Jono. But you know, my patience increases every time you stop by Live Help and serenade us... ;)
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There once was another online game that had a fantastic community. The Beta test went quite well and then the gates were opened. More context was added and more items appeared. That was when the LAG showed up also. Instead of addressing the technical issues, more things were added. Why fix the problem when you can just add glitz and bling to distract the masses seemed to be the attitude. Members left and to replace the loss the game added Facebook only features and new players came. The LAG dug in and became horrid. The newer players, who seemed to be quite young & rude, plus the LAG drove many people away until the game folded.
Many of the former players found a new home here. To their surprise the devs were quite responsive to their concerns. Help tickets were resolved instantly. It was how a game should be. Until the LAG showed up. The LAG here has become horrid as well. Glitches are frozen or very slow to respond. Jujus grab items before a Glitch can move. Th sloths are faster than a Glitch. Glitches are seen frozen mid jump Frame rates have dropped to single digits. Reload after reload makes it hard to accomplish much these days, but we have new items and plans for even more. Sure hope this is not Deja Vu. -
I just ran the self-test again, which said everything was OK. FWIW, I believe the main problem is CPU, not network.
The performance has been getting worse, not better, so I repeat my request for effort to be put into client optimization. - I'm no dev, but it's been noted before that extensions can cause problems too- could that be part of what makes some people experience "lag"?
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Feels like PurpleLogic may have a point here.
Of course it's important to keep developing new stuff for the game, but if "a fast game that is unfinished is no fun", an unfinished game that is barely playable is even less fun, so none of those should be "secondary".
Like others, the game has been quite choppy (aka framerate perfs) since the last few weeks, while it used to run much smoother.
Is it related to the new game UI? new content?
Or is it the new versions of Flash that are really bad, do we still have to tweak the config file someway? -
The degrade in performance IS the result of new stuff being added and (what seems to be) no effort to address the performance issues (that have gotten worse over the past 1-2 months) of older content...
The more it gets pushed off the more difficult it will be to fix them (more content = more points of failure/issues)
Its a snowball effect, which PurpleLogic's comment leads to my exact concern around if the performance issues not getting addressed; where no new feature(s) will outweigh the problems with performance. Its hard to get hooked or immersed into game that runs terrible.
I recently (last week) bought a new laptop, mainly to the fact that I needed a better CPU (for my upcoming semester of college), but also to see if my 2 year old laptop was in fact not capable enough to run Glitch. (Which from time shopping around for a new laptop performance-wise it can still match-up to laptops sold today around $400-500 price range).
The more I play on my new laptop (Intel Core-i7 quad core with nVidia GT540M 1GB VRAM) the more I am convinced its not that my laptop was not capable of running glitch at smooth pace, Glitch can't run with consistent smooth performance on any system!
Here is my performance index ratings (on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9)
I almost always run Glitch and ONLY glitch (open web browser, goto glitch.com, enter world)
and on two occasions within the last 24 hours, I've had the frame rate just within 10 minutes of starting glitch have frame rate jitter of 10+ (fps drops from the locked 30 fps into the upper 10's and lower 20's then back up to the locked 30 FPS). From my observations so far, typical performance within twenty minutes of traveling to home streets and public streets, transfer times between streets go from 2-3 seconds to 7-10 seconds.
I've tried emptying cache, setting flash local storage to unlimited, heck I even tried setting my power settings down from high performance to balanced.
It's difficult to rationalize putting money into a product that you have to "kick" or "jiggle the wire" when you use it. -
@Jono How about having a perf/benchmark test page to go with the current network one?
Like, a client that just moves your character around, loads different things, do some defined actions, and returns an average fps rating. I know you got the tech already, so how about sharing the results with us?
At least it will help us track our performance over time, or try different settings, while being sure the benchmark is always the same, and not some random feeling of choppyness in variable conditions. - yes there is alot of lag and it keeps getting worse, no matter how many times I reload it doesn't help any more, I am getting really frustrated.
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Just to follow up here, note that there are known performance problems using Chrome on a Mac as the browser (see this post). I have found that playing from Safari works much better for me.
If that doesn't describe your problem, perhaps a more detailed post stating specifically what bad behavior you are seeing and what client (OS, browser and Flash version) you're using would help them track it down.
I suggest avoiding the word "lag" and being very specific about what is slow. - Firefox & Windows xp here...
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I play on both Chrome and Firefox. Sadly I am on a Windows 7 netbook and understand that my performance is not optimal for Glitch. Nonetheless, the game in recent weeks has been degrading. Both browsers have issues. In Firefox I experience a KNOWN Flash issue with a runaway Glitch. Adobe and Firefox suggest downgrading to Flash 10.2 until there is a new Flash released.
In Chrome, which used to be a smoother experience, the game now freezes often and my 'lil glitch is choppy, slow to respond, has lost her zip, is jerky and not a very happy camper.
I tried the new basement puzzle in both browsers and found it was tedious to even attempt. After much spinach I gave up.
So again I ask why add new context if it will not perform? -
Janitch said it perfectly: "I suggest avoiding the word "lag" and being very specific about what is slow." Thank you!
Performance isn't ideal and we know that. But also know that I track it obsessively, it's actually better than ever (you're just too used to it to notice), and I spend 90% of my time working to improve it.
No more conspiracy theories about performance, okay? Good. Please be patient and try to restrict your worrying to how much fun the game is and not the framerate.
I love you all. - I have been experiencing slow response time (notice I didn't say lag) in response to my keyboard movements - specifically, Jumping. This is only occurring in Firefox as my sis plays on this computer in Chrome and doesn't have the same problem. I find that I see it more dramatically in JuJu land in that I can take anywhere from 3-4 steps sometimes more before I actually jump. Naturally the Jujus get me and my hard sought items.
- I have been visiting lots of towers lately and found that causes lag. If I just play normally, in my home and in various parts of Ur, performance is normal. After I do a round of tower visits the animations - walking, jumping, selecting - anything - become very slow. I usually close the browser (chrome) and restart. I do notice that when the browser shuts down there is a LOT of disk activity, as if it were clearing a lot of cache.
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For me, the problem has been dramatic and it doesn't seem to have any correlation with towers. If I spawn on my street or in my house, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have sluggish performance for the rest of the session.
I'm going to try spawning on an Ur street next and see if it's better if I don't go home for a while.
I have an unreasonable number of SDBs, but the point is that everything was fine even with all of them until a couple of weeks ago. I'll also try that Flash thing and see if it does any good.
What I'm experiencing is clicking on things and having to wait for the spinny wheel to draw the menu of verbs. Then when I do select something, it takes a very long time to happen, and I can't do anything useful while I'm waiting.
Sometimes it goes in spurts. When I stay in one place and everything can seem normal for a little while, but inevitably things slow down again when I move. If I don't move and things (like piggies) come to me, it can also bring everything to a halt for a while. I don't even want to travel because changing screens takes so long.
Once I thought all my piggies were gone, and just when I'd given up and started grumbling that someone must have taken all the meatsplosions, they all showed up at once, quite a long time after I got to my street.
The self-help test gave apparently reasonable results, but last time I even got disconnected, which rarely happened to me in the past. It felt like the computer just didn't want to deal with the game any more, and that's kind of how I feel now. I wouldn't mind if it took forever to load, and once a room was loaded it'd be fine, but every time I walk into range of something new, I have to wait for it to be drawn, and then wait even longer to be able to interact with it.
Restarting and even rebooting don't make the situation any better. If anything, it just means I have to wait for all the elements to load again.
I don't know what's causing it, but I know the game was never like this before. If it had been, I would have never put so much time into it. - Are you all playing with Global chat open? Because Global chat causes me to lag like a mofo. (Especially now that it's EVEN MORE ACTIVE, what with the new players 'n' all.)
- The description that Biff Beefbat gave also describes my experience over the last few weeks, including most recently frequet flash crashes. I have tried all flash solutions, tests, debugger installations, firewall settings, refresh, reboot, alt browsers, etc. I simply cannot do much in the world, at home, on home street or in tower. Unfortunately, I am pre\etty much unable to play Glitch right now :) Really hope there is an answer/solution to this soon.
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Yeah I'm hardly running over 10fps these days...actually it's more like 5fps after 2-3 streets
All this used to happen, but it was more like after 20-30 streets I think
Obviously it's probably worse now with the towers & home streets
Isn't there any way to UNLOAD the previous data, while the player switches streets,
to free the memory or something?
It's not that I really want to reload the page (and reload the whole game) manually every time I change street ^^ - Hey get that comment back there Rush ;)
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My problem occurs when leaving my Home or Home Street for the first time after entering the game. I originally thought this was solely connected to teleporting but it also occurs when moving to another Home Street using my sign or moving to the last location in Ur using Return to World. First off after the move, my arrow keys do not work and I must use the mouse which will only move me a short distance at a time. Movement is very slow until I finally can't move at all. Refreshing the browser (FF) corrects this and then I can continue.
Jono, with your last update this improved and I could move to another location and move using my arrows. I was able to play for a while before the eventual need to refresh. However, I am now back to where I was and need to refresh as soon as I leave my Home Street no matter which method I use. -
Doing the "qp" test (press q and p at the same time), I can see that ping is definitely not the issue. It usually bounces around between 60 and 150.
Memory use is much lower than it was ages ago when it used to cause me trouble. Now it stays in the 600-800 range.
It's the Render FPS that wanders around from 3 to 11 or so. The Physics FPS is usually fine.
I don't know if that's a cause or a symptom, but that's the best new data I have.
At this point, Glitch is basically a slow chat client that makes my CPU fan whir like crazy.
Keeping Global closed doesn't improve the situation.
Once I visit my home street, it is assured that the game will not run acceptably for the rest of the session. Even starting on an Ur street, however, performance is still significantly degraded.
Jono: Please be patient and try to restrict your worrying to how much fun the game is and not the framerate.
The game is not at all fun right now, because of the framerate. I wonder how many new players will abandon the game for this reason. If I joined today, I'd think, "Well, it looks like a fun concept. Pity they couldn't get it to function normally in a browser." and then delete the bookmark.
All my in-game friends (spread around the world) are complaining about it too, so I know it's not just me. -
After some extra testing, going home (either to the street or inside the house) seems to be the kiss of death. Once I visit either place, the game will never run normally again.
If I stay away from home, things will be not be as good as they used to be, but the game is playable.
I tried mucking around with some other browsers. By default, I use Firefox with Windows XP. IE was about the same, Safari was worse.
Chrome was...different. Moving items would stall and speed up in a jerky fashion, but clicking on things yielded the same sluggish and freezing menus, so while cosmetically things were different, it was still equally unplayable.
