Combat Locking, game's Event handling may be the major Lag culprit

NotSo · June 2015

I believe the cause of combat locking today is caused by your target, who is now attacking wolves, not leaving combat. But this stretches deeper. EPJimmy could be in combat with AD charlie who's throwing fireballs at everything he sees. Now AD Charlie is in combat with DC Wanda, Bill, Flamingo, six wolves, and a duck. Well EP Jimmy can't stealth or mount until AD Charlie gets out of combat, AD Charlie can't stealth or mount until DC Wanda, Bill, and Flamingo get out of combat. DC Wanda, Bill, and Flamingo can't stealth or mount until their targets break combat, and so on (you can see how it webs out of control).
The checks the server does to make sure someone can stealth may be a huge part of of the lag all by itself. I believe if you change this system, you will fix the lag. Or you can change some event handling. I assume (because there are so many bugs and so much lag) the ZOS team isn't exactly the most prestigous group of programmers (no offense, sorry) that the stealth Event handling is running frame by frame, i.e. the game asks the server every 5 frames (or so) if you are in combat, if the server responds "no", you can stealth. If the server responds "yes", you cannot stealth. This needs to be changed to ask the server only when you try to mount or stealth. Much less traffic to the server. Though this might already be the case with the Event handling and I am just talking out of my ***. But in the case where the call to the server is looking at 100 different targets for every player, either frame by frame or some other Event handling, this can become a huge problem.

Thank you for reading.

Edit 1: Really, the system doesnt know to look at 100 different targets on it's own, it's looking at your targets targets, and their targets targets, that packet probably becomes rediculously huge.

Egonieser · July 2015

IMO in-combat state and therefore stealth should work like any other game - you hit or get hit it triggers, if you don't get hit or do an attack in the next 10 seconds, you drop out of combat regardless of what your enemy is doing. It's a simple and effective way. No rocket-science grade coding needed.
The only reason i believe you remain in combat in Cyro for such huge and random lengths of time is because to prevent gear swapping and mounting mid-combat.
I personally see no reason for mounting not to be enabled and gear swapping should be locked to keeps/resource or quest buildings only. It would even add a degree of immersion and prevent macro spammers.

NotSo · July 2015

The way it is now would be fine if and only if you are fighting a 1v1 with nobody else involved. They didn't do any extensive coding for the way it functions now and there was a miscalculation that the system would stay "local" and not leak itself onto hundreds of player/npc entities. Thus, resulting in the combat lock.

kaithuzar · July 2015

They stated they were attempting to fix something similar to this in the next update. The issue I see is that you stated:
"This needs to be changed to ask the server only when you try to mount or stealth."
This would be a similar situation to what we are in now because nightblades spam cloak. Agreed it would be better than the system currently is, however depending on how many nb's are in a single area fighting it could get a little nasty that way.
But there may not be a lot of options to fix these things. Lets hope that everything turns out well next patch!

chevalierknight · July 2015

kaithuzar wrote: »

They stated they were attempting to fix something similar to this in the next update. The issue I see is that you stated:
"This needs to be changed to ask the server only when you try to mount or stealth."
This would be a similar situation to what we are in now because nightblades spam cloak. Agreed it would be better than the system currently is, however depending on how many nb's are in a single area fighting it could get a little nasty that way.
But there may not be a lot of options to fix these things. Lets hope that everything turns out well next patch!

Wouldnt having the sever ask every time you try to stealth make you or the sever crash? I mean what if you in a keep and every one and there pet duck trys to stealth would look like the nuke in t2

NotSo · July 2015

You sending the packet to the server whenever you hit crouch or mount key is almost no traffic than compared to the game sending its own packet to the server every five rendered frames of the client running, creating tons of traffic.

I don't have proof that's what is going on, but a lot of games are built to do redundant checks on the fly. In cases of an offline game, the client isn't sending thousands of packets over the web, it's handled locally.

Though I don't think the out-of-combat checks (in this case) is the major contributer to lag, It can still be that last bit of weight that causes the server to overflow (when ping goes jumps 300 to 999+).

I think the way the out-of-combat check is tracking an impossible web of targets (other players or npc's you have joined combat with), creating a huge packet to send back and forth from the server. If this is indeed the case, then a check being sent to the server every 5 frames is stupid huge compared to every time you press crouch or mount.

chevalierknight · July 2015

NotSo wrote: »

You sending the packet to the server whenever you hit crouch or mount key is almost no traffic than compared to the game sending its own packet to the server every five rendered frames of the client running, creating tons of traffic.

I don't have proof that's what is going on, but a lot of games are built to do redundant checks on the fly. In cases of an offline game, the client isn't sending thousands of packets over the web, it's handled locally.

Though I don't think the event handling with out-of-combat checks is the major contributer to lag, It can still be that last bit of weight that causes the server to overflow.

Dont know sending the packtet your self with 200 all doing it at the same time sounds like it could ddos the server. Wouldent the way they do it now be layered to stop overload

NotSo · July 2015

Sorry, I edited the my last post.

The packets being sent, to check if you can mount or not, should only be a few bytes in size. Thousands can go through without any major problems.

I am suspicious of the way that the combat lock behaves and am basing all of this entirely around that behavior.