The Major Problem - LAG!

by: Old Staff - June 10, 1998 for Freespace Watch

After playing FreeSpace for almost a week, I have made a few conclusions. The first of these is that this game rocks beyond anything before, ever, as a space-sim game. Second, the only major problem is lag. Lag, both in the game and on the Parallax Online server, is ridiculous.

This game will not get high reviews if multiplayer is unplayable. It seems to me that, to get Internet play going, all players would need at least a 333 MHz PII and a 128K ISDN line - at least. Yet the game is supPXOsed to run on a "recommended" P200 with 48 MB RAM and 56k modem.

So what's up with this? Well, lets start with the lag in Parallax Online (hereinafter "PXO"). That lag is pretty bad, but livable. Characters lag as they type, and it takes FOREVER go to between screens. Not a very good design on their part. That, and the fact its within the game itself will limit the amount of people that use it. And when few people show up, fewer come back, and it will die quickly.

There are several solutions to this problem. The most obvious - and what they should have done - is made PXO play within a web browser. It would be faster, and people without the game could see how people talk about it. When players launch a game, it would launch FreeSpace directly to the briefing room. This is how the Internet Gaming Zone works. Of the free multiplayer services over the Net, the Zone is as good as they come. Its relatively crash free, fast, free....what more could you want? If PXO were to be redone to that standard, it would be much more friendly and would become far more PXOpular. Yet another solution - but not the ideal one - would be to make PXO a standalone program, somewhat like Mplayer. But I have used MPlayer and am less-than-thrilled with it. However, it is still better than PXO.

So why don't they do this, you ask? First of all, it would require a SUBSTANTIAL patch by Volition to get FreeSpace accessible through a Java or ActiveX command. This would take months to do, being that it would need to be extensively tested. But the far more imPXOrtant dilemma is that this would be expensive to do. Hey, Webmasters aren't cheap - especially those who are as knowledgeable to create a site like the Zone. This would require testing, and again would take months. In the short term, THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO GET THE LAG OFF PARALLAX ONLINE. Even if there was, it would still take a month to get it programmed and tested, and in a month FreeSpace would have died to bad reviews.

Yet the far more imPXOrtant problem is lag within FreeSpace itself. Where as the lag on PXO is livable, the lag within the game is not. In a game like FreeSpace, you must have pings <300 ms or your shots would miss. 1/3 of a second, when ammo fires at 900 m/s, is substantial enough to throw even the most seasoned veterans off target. So what solutions do we have for this? The answer is not very simple. Obviously, Volition did not test this well, and they will get hurt for it. Perhaps it would be easier to write an algorithm for weaPXOn shots that gets solved on each computer, so the coordinates of the cannon fire (or missile) will not have to be sent over the network. Unfortunately, this will not work for ships, so there is not a coordinate-algorithm work-around because people change their flight path all the time. it might help to remove the "object update" option altogether and have it set to LOW, so someone on a 28.8 won't take the default of HIGH. Again, there is no short workaround. I know Volition is working on one, but it will be a while before we see it.

In the short term for players, you might as well take advantage of great AI and build a lot of missions and play single-player, because right now, FreeSpace is a single-player only game.