List of things that Zenimax could do improve Performance. Please share any you can think of.

RinaldoGandolphi

I_am_Groot wrote: »

One thing which bears mentioning is ensuring that UDP-based game stack implementations can’t be leveraged for UDP reflection/amplification DDoS attacks – using nonces, and the like (the NTP monlist fix does this).

If measures aren’t taken to eliminate this problem, not only will your service be abused and perhaps blackholed by a lot of ISPs, but your game servers will end up being DDoSed by miscreants bouncing DDoS attacks through them.

True. That why you use TCP as a control and authenication channel via TLS and only accept packets from IP's that are properly authenticated.

RinaldoGandolphi

Please note there are some things on the backend I don't know how they have set up. I am not purporting to have every answer. I do know as network engineer that UDP is faster than TCP and has less overhead, that's its real redeeming factor. You write in the code what parts of TCP you want to implement and discard the rest. You have to do more of the heavy lifting yourself vs TCP but this also gives you more control over how things work.

TCP isn't really more secure than UDP, just more reliable. However, in terms of a game I would think you would code for performance over reliability. You can't have it all. if you miss a packet TCP requires a re-transit, with UDP if you think a packet isn't received you just send the next one out which has everything the client needs.

the internet is still an unreliable thing. Its more reliable than the dialup days, but its still "unreliable" TCP is resilent and for most internet stuff its fine. the billions of lost packets per day are quietly in the background being re-transmitted and most of this is transparent to the user.

If I was personally going to make an online game, I wouldn't base my netcode on reliability i'd base it on performance and tune it as I go along. With TCP your pretty much stuck with how it works, with UDP you can added stuff you need or remove things you don't. It would allow you to tune and trim your communication protcol/netcode down to the bare minimum you need and nothing more. This would allow you to write your netcode to have the least amount of impact possible on your servers.

You would probably still need to use TCP for things like banking inventory, purchases, that sorta stuff.

This would be a huge re-write for them though and it just may not be feasible from a financial standpoint at this stage. I don't know. Even if they went for a hybrid with authenication and bank/inventory/loot/database as TCP and combat as UDP it would probably I assume make a big difference in game combat performance once they had the bugs ironed out in 6 months or so after implementing it.

Gilvoth

remove the NPC guards and the blue flames inside keeps in cryodiil.
they both are not in the lore, and have zero input to anything to do with that zone.
it would free up resources to remove them completely.

ZOS_FalcoYamaoka

Greetings,

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Alinhbo_Tyaka

Hire someone that is a performance coding expert who has experience with high transaction systems. Little things like changing integer multiplication and division to shift operations or writing a bit of inline assembler will improve performance more than most folks realize. Make sure any code that is in the performance path is written in a language that supports passing data structures as pointers so they can be accessed directly and avoid excess memory copy/move operations. Again use languages that can access system functions such as networking, disk access, etc directly via low level interfaces. Seriously look at using procedural programming for anything considered performance path in the event the code is an OO implementation. You can still use OO design but writing the code procedurally provides greater ability to tune the code path that you don't have with OO languages. None of this is the sexy work of flashy new graphics but is something any product or game needs if they wish to see acceptable performance.

xWarbrain

precambria wrote: »

REMOVE WEATHER EFFECTS FROM ALL PVP ZONES MY GOD

This, and the mist around the Dolmens. The black mist that you can pass through if you go up a big hill close to a dolmen.

The ambiance of weather is nice, but it 100% causes a high amount of lag. I have a video I'll try to find of riding from Carm to Nickle or Roe with zero lag in clear weather, heavy lag when I pass into a rainy area, and the lag immediately stopping when I leave the rain.

darthgummibear_ESO

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Mayrael wrote: »

Hire full time coders not just some "mercenaries", spend just a bit of what they earn on servers upgrades, you know the stuff that does work, not some shady fixes to some niche stuff - like we all know that both stuck in combat and increasing lags are connected to ball groups or in other words, large amount of players grouped in a tight space. Start with this. AoE skills cause exponential growth of calculations, they need to focus on this not on some ridiculous stuff. Issues we experience most are related to server side, our clients are responsible mostly for distribution of recieved data from servers where all calculations are done (to prevent cheating).

They are reworking how the Aoe works with the servers that will be going live with Greymoor from their performance improvement plan. Its something they have confirmed they are working on so they do know about that one and are working to fix it.

If it's anything like this recent "performance improvement update" I'm not overly optimistic.

precambria

Lintashi wrote: »

Several games have this button, that makes graphic settings go to minimum instantly. Press it again, graphics go back as you like. Really useful in events, raids, etc. Also I bet, all these glittery, sparkling mounts, also add to sever strain, together with calculating tons of different sets, with many of them having similar effects. But we will get more and more sets and shining mounts with complex animations in every next expansion.

I would use the hell out of one of those, I already and constantly shifting my settings depending on what I'm doing. Medium for BG, high for 4 mans and ultra for housing/outfit