Teach me!

[vondrack]

I am 100% sure I am putting way too much time into this game...

However, it's not that I'd feel obliged to put that much time into the game to compete - I guess I just have a weak spot for "fighting for (almost) lost causes" or something...

EDIT: my turns take very long also because of the horrible lag. If I take a citizen off a city tile, I've got to wait like 5-10 seconds (no kidding!) for the game to become responsive again, same if I move a unit of mine to clear fog of war, same if I pillage a (rail)road... it's quite a torture...

[alexman]

This is the third time in 4 days that I find the PTBS server rebooted. I'm not sure what's going on - I'll try to find another machine to use as a server.

In the meantime, try saving the game if you just invested a long time playing your turn. The save I used to restore the game this morning is from 8:13 pm EST.

[vondrack]

Seems like there won't be a turn for me and Nols to play today... so let me use this opportunity to ask you a lag-related question, Alex.

Do you have any idea why the game becomes almost frozen for me if I shuffle workforce in the city screen? As mentioned in my post above, if I take a citizen off a tile, it takes several seconds before the screen updates and the game becomes responsive again. Moving a citizen from one tile to another needs about 15-20 seconds for me (it's way better - actually, completely fine, I think - if I am just switching specialists around).

Interestingly enough, the several second long freezes also happen when Gloria is adjusting workforce in her cities - my game becomes as good as halted at those moments (I can easily tell when she's doing that even if she doesn't tell me).

Same thing if my ship moves close enough to a Celtic city to force citizen reassignments (well, the part about forced citizen reassignments is my idea of what's going on, as it sorta resembles my city screen troubles).

And as if this was not mystery enough - while it works this bad for me like 95% of all time, I did have moments where the game let me adjust workforce with no lag at all (the response was pretty much instantaneous).

My rig is quite old (P4/2.0GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI9600XT) and my current internet connection is a bit lousy as well (two 1Mbit wireless connections), but I haven't had this problem throughout the playsession - and I definitely do not have this problem with SP or PBEM.

While the internet connection is far from stellar, we are always able to keep talking over YIM with Gloria (voice chat, not type) with no problems, dropouts, or any kind of voice quality problems - just the game freezes.

Any idea where the problem might be? A very wild guess from me - could it be that all trade routes get recalculated every time the commerce output of a city changes?

I have also went OOS twice over the last week or so. Once it was quite weird, as it was after I spent about an hour playing my turn - then all of a sudden, I went OOS (relogging fixed it). The other OOS happened when your civ temporarily went to an AI (happened few days ago, not sure what it was), I got the error message right after joining the game...

[condor223]

Our turns take so long because of the lag. I get to wait with every single unit move. At this stage of the game there are sure a lot of units to shuffle around!

Guess sitting there waiting for the hang up to move on takes a loooooooooong time and its very tiring. I'm used to faster play in ladder games, where we have no lag.
Nolz

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by alexman
This is the third time in 4 days that I find the PTBS server rebooted. I'm not sure what's going on - I'll try to find another machine to use as a server.

In the meantime, try saving the game if you just invested a long time playing your turn. The save I used to restore the game this morning is from 8:13 pm EST.

By "save" what does that mean? Can you cause the PTBS server to make a save server-side by doing something locally? I'd assumed it 'saved' locally only...

[snoopy369]

Vondrack/Gloria - do the freezes happen when either of you are logged in seperately, or only together?

[vondrack]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Vondrack/Gloria - do the freezes happen when either of you are logged in seperately, or only together?

For me, I believe it does not matter. Although I think that when - on a rare occasion - the game worked fast, I was the only one logged in. But usually, I can be the only player logged in and the game will still be waaay tooo slooow when I start managing city tiles.

[condor223]

The slow down is when Vondrack is online with me.

I would be interested to see if Alex gets the same thing when he's on with Radek.
g

[proviisori]

Every game is having server troubles it seems. :?

[snoopy369]

That sort of delay I'd expect is one particular computer having trouble contacting one other computer, causing everyone online to slow down at the same time. Radek, if it's your computer and the PTBS server, that would make sense, and Gloria's computer would just slow you down more, making it worse. We've known that Alex's server is slow for a while, so it's probably the ultimate source of the problem (the data line, probably?).

You all need to get comcast

[Blake]

Oh so it's back to the sheep harassment .

We can deal with it when they come to clog our harbor with their corpses, but why must they molest our poor innocent woolies?

OOC:
The slowdown is caused because the game is synced. So whenever Vondrack is in a game, everyone will lag whenever anyone performs a move.

[condor223]

The game and stats page is down again.

[proviisori]

I couldn't even connect to the game earlier when Vondrack was logged in.

[vondrack]

Originally posted by Blake
Oh so it's back to the sheep harassment .

We can deal with it when they come to clog our harbor with their corpses, but why must they molest our poor innocent woolies?

You are misunderstanding - by destroying the facility, we are letting the poor woolies free!

But seriously - it's not the sheep we are after. If you rebuild just the pasture, but no railroad, we promise to let your woolies be.

OOC:
The slowdown is caused because the game is synced. So whenever Vondrack is in a game, everyone will lag whenever anyone performs a move.

I can definitely not rule out it's me causing the horrible lag, however I am lost when it comes to what causes it. It's not the connection - because the lag only occurs when I am carrying out specific tasks in this game (as described in my earlier post).

If it's my aged computer, then why it's not happening always (as mentioned above, I had times when the game was running smoothly, no lag). And even if it's my old rig, then I do not think it's that old to need like 10 seconds to take a citizen off a city tile...

As for people failing to join while I'm logged in - this is an arbitrary thing and happens even to me (when other players are in). Andy has that kind of a problem with me sometimes, too (however, he can join just fine at other times, with me still in). Must be a GameSpy thing, as I'm running the same firewall/router config all the time, with the CIV port open.

[alexman]

We are on a new server. The old one finally died last night. This one is a slightly faster machine, so it may improve lag a bit.

The lag is a combination of factors. Radek's slow machine, his slow connection, as well as the server being on a slow machine.

Only actions that need to be communicated to all other computers so that things remain in sync cause "lag". Reassigning citizens is one of them.