ASCII

by Magicsofa
ASCII
At Symbol Causes Inexcusable Injuries
ID:1199414
 
Hey when I played this on my own computer I got fantastic speed and the game was a lot of fun. When I played a server it ran at about 1 tenth of the speed.

What's up with that? It's a small game, small maps, text only. Really shouldn't have any lag at all let alone going this slow.
Well, I was running a server on my home computer - there are several things that could cause a lot of lag, like automatic updates or the other computer on my network. A real dedicated server would probably perform a lot better.

Also, the bot code is a bit resource intensive, but with only three bots on the server I don't think that was the issue.

Thanks for letting me know!
Oh right yeah. I noticed the bots weigh heavy on the server. I'll put it on my ByondPanel sometime and see how it goes.
In response to Magicsofa
Alright, I'm hosting it as I type this. Gonna leave the server up 24/7.

I played it myself and I'm from New Zealand so maybe that's affecting it but the game is unplayable from my computer. It takes a few seconds to recognize that I've attempted to move or shoot.

It's an American hosted server, please try it for yourself MagicSofa and you should see what I mean.

I currently also host a 24/7 server for Biocrisis which has graphics, overlays, explosions, physics and hundreds of mobs and I can still play it from New Zealand.

This is a small Ascii game with 5 mobs on the screen and I can't play it online at all. Kind of sad cause I really like this game. The feeling that I'm getting without looking at your code or setup is that there's a lot of stuff going on in the background that's either not helping or has efficiency problems.

Not to dis the game, I love the game but I just can't play it as it currently is.

Also, without trying to seem like a negative nancy there's some cool stuff you could do I think which would make the game a lot more friendly. One thing is to let server hosts set their own title, that way people can see the servers they like instead of a generic default name which is ambiguous with the rest.

Also, a message of the day would be nice (letting the host set it). I like to stay engaged with people playing my server and let them know about changes I make.

Okay, so there's my thoughts today after my hosting attempt.
In response to Magicsofa
Played again on a different computer, this time I got good speed for 5 seconds and then massive lag and then good speed again. It continued like that for about 30 seconds then just consistently lagged to a unplayable level again.

Also, when 'use graphics hardware' was turned off my screen would switch between blurred and not-blurred, particularly when I was around lava or water. Anything flashing seemed to compound lag.

Oh and one more thing, I never respawned unless I exited the game and played again. Don't know what that's about.

Would be interesting if you could shed some light on any of this because like I said it's very strange to experience these lag issues with such a simple game.
In response to Magicsofa
Also, I just tested on my home computer and looked at the CPU usage. It's ridiculous...

Just plain man, this thing eats CPU. I don't know what code you're using but it's mega intensive. Each bot by the way adds about 1.5% CPU usage. This whole game shouldn't use more than 3%.

That code needs serious revision man if you ever want it to play smooth or even just play smoother.
I may try to make the bot code more efficient, in the next update. However I just went onto the server and added 15 bots. Dream daemon cpu usage was maximum about 11, averaging 6. Dream seeker stayed under 20% regardless of bots. And anyway, this is with 15 bots which is a lot. With 3 it did stay around 3% cpu.

I think this is more of a latency issue, since I can join the server locally and it plays just fine. I'll try to improve the code though, I wonder how old is your computer?
Also, the respawning bug is fixed now so that will be in the next update as well
In response to Magicsofa
Thanks for the update on the respawn bug, that helps a lot.

Yeah interesting results. The computer I was using is:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
System Model: Dell System XPS L502X
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M
Updated to v 0.95

o Fixed not being automatically saved to the admin list when hosting
o Fixed the sound bug
o Fixed a bug where you became invisible after spectating and re-joining
o Fixed the survival game-over loop bug
o Minor tweak to bots efficiency
o Cleaned up the admin menu

+ Added server name setting
+ You can now start on any survival wave