Spiral Knights - Show us PING please! :D (+rant :P)

Show us PING please! :D (+rant :P)

3 replies [Last post]

Sat, 10/01/2011 - 04:46

Ufana

Please show us our pings. We need this Information to dynamically adjust our behaviour to it and partially compensate the handicap of having a high ping - especially in pvp. When another player "shows" me how far in front of his visible position he actually already is with his sword, it's too late to adjust and my ping seems to change quite often so I either stop too late or too early.

I'm aware that this game might not have "An actual" ping like most games. If that is the case, show us the average... or a "walk ping" and a "damage ping"... or latency difference to the lower ping players we're up against... or something. Anything. More information than a BROKEN 4-bars-system. I had good ping with 1 bar, I had bad ping with 2 bars, I saw a third bar about 5 times for a few seconds and didn't notice a difference. And when I see 4 bars, that means I have really bad package loss or possibly pulled out my cable. What do those bars stand for? The number of outgoing packages per second no matter if they arrive or not? It's a computer game, not a cell phone, I know you don't generally like showing us numbers for anything (I'm somewhat surprised that I can actually see how many gel drops I have instead of just "A very big amount of"), but we really could use that little edge against lag ;)

Sat, 10/01/2011 - 04:50

Quotefanboy

I'd like this.

Perhaps also a frame rate icon too, because I'd like to know when I'm getting massive lag in vanaduke or in Rhom Twins what my frame rate's at.

Sat, 10/01/2011 - 05:21

Starlinvf

It looks like a round trip

It looks like a round trip average like you'd expect from other "bar" meters, but the method they're using may not be good at handling errors in the data stream. The only reason I could see packet loss boost the stats is if the averaging method treats dropped packets as 0 or 1ms (a minimum valid number to avoid nulls), which would instantly skew the sampling.

From rough estimates, I think 2 bars is somewhere around 300-400ms (what I'd expect from where I live to the east coast). 3 bars being around 150-200ms, and 4 bars <150ms. The numbers will seem a bit off, but you need to account for a little bit extra latency due to the cloud and some processing time, which aren't reflected in echo pings. Since most in-game meters use the data stream to pull latency stats, it does manage to reflect the extra processing time, and will give a better reflection of its practical response time.

Sun, 10/02/2011 - 01:18

Ufana

To me, 2bars can feel like

To me, 2bars can feel like "anything between 100 and 2000". It seems to change quite often, too, which for me means I get hit (or miss) 2-3 times before I'm able to readjust my "antiping-behaviour". My ping getting better in the middle of a fight can be awful - I run into several attacks & spikes & stuff in a row that I thought weren't really there any more, use my shield at the wrong time, stop charging a bomb too early and at times die very quickly. My ping getting worse in the middle of a fight is awful, too: I suddenly can't shield-bump any more, stuff that I didn't see as a threat suddenly hits me... often enough I make it trough half of fsc or an arena or something without getting hit and only after the 3 "unlucky seconds" that killed me I realize: "Wow, my ping is a lot better now!".

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Show us PING please! :D (+rant :P)