I have an issue where I play with a friend on the forum and every time we're both in the same area, the game starts to lag really badly with stuff like opening doors and chests. But this is typically in an area where I've done a crapload of terraforming, so that's partly my fault, hahaha. He eaven built a base juuuust out of load range of my base to increase his performance.

I found a Draugr village in a prime location for raiding both Plains and a nearby swamp with not only lots on crypts I saw (at least 7, and I only explored one side), but also TWO locations where TWO Surtling Geysers are very close to each other. Going to build a palace there at the Draugr village without doing any terraforming, and going to build a HUGE network of catwalks in the nearby Swamp for Chain farming and Crypt raiding and Bloodbag hunting. There are SO MANY indestructible trees in the area of the swamp that I explored, and I finally meleed my first two Abominations solo while I explored it.

Sorry, I forgot to mention, I switched us over to a VPS server about a week ago, and the performance is better, but there's still noticeable lag when in said area.

I can play with my aussie friends on the other side of the globe quite fine. Riding a boat is exciting, not never had any accidents. Heck, I can even ride a cart, be pulled around and accurately shoot at things while doing that, so it's not really like peer-to-peer is bad implementation here.

Originally posted by Mharr:

It's uncomfortable though, because it means one day whatever server it talks to won't be there ever again. I guess if it's all based on a central Steam process though, at that stage we'll only have to hack it one time.

I think anything using the SteamPlay API (or whatever the multiplayer backend that Steam provides for devs is called) is going to have that same problem. Just like when GameSpy went under.

I'm not super concerned about Steam going under that way any anytime in the near future. If it does, we probably have much larger issues. It would be nice to have a P2P connection mode, though.

I hope for some optimization because if they can't do anything with that p2p, I'm gonna be stuck to play alone until 2025(final date for fiber cable), old ADSL copper fart connection can't handle data upload and 64kb/s is the maximum
My utterly slow connection literally kills other players, everything goes to freeze when upload exceeds ~60 kb/s.
Had no issues on fiber but that was before I moved to other place

It's uncomfortable though, because it means one day whatever server it talks to won't be there ever again. I guess if it's all based on a central Steam process though, at that stage we'll only have to hack it one time.

I think it needs to be able to talk to a central server at Steam for the multiplayer API. Would be nice to not have that limitation, but it's pretty low priority. We found an extreme edge case. Most games don't have "multiplayer still works during a total internet outage" in their design requirements.

There is one quirk to this - you cannot connect to a server, even a dedicated server hosted in your local network, if you don't have a WAN connection to the internet (probably to Steam).

I found this out the hard way when my wife and I wanted to play during a winter storm that knocked out our internet for a week. We had power, our home network was up, I even had a dedicated server running on an old rack server I keep around... we couldn't join it or directly join games hosted by each other. It just timed out.

Hm, that's not how routers are supposed to react in those circumstances, with the internet connection down it should be like all connecting to a simple network switch box. Overzealous DRM?

It is a coop game without official servers. I doubt it will ever be anything but p2p.

There are things you can do with private servers to improve this though, using Serverside Simulations should prevent one player's poor connection from directly affecting others' performance, and hiring a pro server is an option if the home internet connections don't have good upload speed.

Even if you rent a dedicated server the clients still host their areas.

So if one person with bad internet is in an area first people who join all go through them for local sync.

I don't think this is likely to change unless they host swap to best connection every time someone else gets close to another... that could really make a mess of things with the constant shuffling.

Originally posted by GunsForBucks:

Even if you rent a dedicated server the clients still host their areas.

That's precisely what Serverside Simulations prevents.

Originally posted by Yew Nough:

To my knowledge: Yes. Nothing has changed.

Dam... ok thank you

To my knowledge: Yes. Nothing has changed.