How many frames does this game run at on a normal (non-laggy) day?
About frame rate.
Mon, 05/18/2015 - 04:06
Mon, 05/18/2015 - 05:44
#2
To my experience, connection lag has very little to do with frame drops. Average FPS depends on where you are and what you are doing, but also on the specs of your computer. My laptop totes 4 GB of RAM and a pathetic 1.90 GHz processor. It's just barely enough to keep the game running at 40 FPS when running about the Clockwork Tunnels. I've even seen the glory of 60 FPS in The Core. In crowded places like Haven or in the middle of a bunch of bullets and various other particles flying around the screen, I average around 15 FPS. Opening menus and hovering over items (for the first time; subsequent times are much faster, probably due to the data being cached?) can drop the FPS to 6 for a few seconds, and loading screens chug along at 1 FPS. In barren areas with little to nothing going on, I've seen the FPS counter rise to, and when the screen goes completely black, I've seen numbers up to 500 FPS.
If you are running the client through Steam and you have the Steam Overlay enabled, there's a handy dandy FPS counter you can activate to keep track of these frame drops.
Mon, 05/18/2015 - 05:59
#3
To my experience, connection lag has very little to do with frame drops.
Not in most games and circumstances, no. But some things will actively wait for a connection before running another line of code. Examples include but are not limited to:
>The entire client freezing up as it waits for all the "spawn box" messages to come through after the Roarmulus Twin spawn animation.
>The entire client freezing up as it waits for all the "equipment information" messages to come through after someone joins your party
>The entire client freezing up when trying to log in in sub-optimal network conditions
>Steam all running on one thread, often causing the UI to completely freeze up whenever connection was lost (has since been fixed since about a year or two ago)
I've seen it occur in one or two other games: it's just bad programming to expect every single message to reach the client in a single frame. I mean, this may look bad, but at least there wasn't an enormous frame rate drop.
Mon, 05/18/2015 - 08:17
#4
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"Can someone confirm that hovering over items in your inventory causes enormous frame drops?"
Interestingly, that only happens when I play in Windows but not Linux (on the same dual-boot computer).
I will also note that the updater takes approximately 40x longer in windows on the same computer. It may have something to do with how Java handles moving resources into memory (since I will also note - its a one-time "lag" per client session).
Mon, 05/18/2015 - 08:42
#5
@Skepticraven
So do you live far from the server? Or do you get 3-4 bars?
Tue, 05/19/2015 - 14:31
#6
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"So do you live far from the server? Or do you get 3-4 bars?"
I don't understand how that is relevant.
Both Win7+LinuxMint are running on the same network on a literally identical computer. The delay happens in windows, but is not noticeable on linux.
Tue, 05/19/2015 - 17:26
#7
Its possibly relevant if the two operating systems handle the networking parts of Spiral Knights differently. It's unlikely, but seeing as the two operating systems already handle the code and graphical content differently, it seems plausible.
Unless you claim that you are at a better understanding of javacode networking and multithreading than I? Which is likely, but otherwise I don't really see the reason why you would withhold data.
Tue, 05/19/2015 - 19:22
#8
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If it were a networking related issue, it would occur every time. Both Whimsicality and I have stated this was not the case for that operation.
I don't have exact numbers, but I know my game looks like it's running about 40 at least. In the Ready Room I think I recall there's few processes being handled by the client, so your computer cooks up a storm running it up into the several hundreds. Particular things, such as the terribly optimized item message function that like, loads in all a player's loadout (upon joining a party) or all of a player's inventory (when opening your arsenal) in a single message, which causes massive frame drops. Can someone confirm that hovering over items in your inventory causes enormous frame drops? I want to know if this is related to the client freezing as it loads in a rotating gun model, or if it's freezing because it's waiting for a response from the server regarding all the details of the item. (and I'm just feeling it because I live far from the server)