I have heard comments from time to time in vent about some of us whose pc's don't handle the sieges at all. It seems like some of us aren't going to be able to be active in the sieges with the current pc's.
I would like to know who fits into this description - we have some support functions that come up occasionally that we could use your help with.
It might be scouting a less populated area or handling some logistics or getting some items we need together.

One example was the last Hamlet siege we had - when we switched from def to off we suddenly needed some siege hammers and did not have a enough ready.

This could have been handled by someone in our town much easier than the general of our offensive force.

So if you can't be as active as you want to be in sieges consider backing us up and list your name here or pm me in game.

Thanks.

We would also like to work with you to make sure it is not a settings issue.

I can handle sieges about as well as anyone, my problem is that sometimes my server lag just spikes.. I realized that some of the time it seems to be related to me forgetting to turn off VPN for my work. But other times there is no reason. I'm out in the middle of nowhere by myself and *ding* Lost connection to server.

I have lost so many mounts to this issue.. I don't even want to think about it. Not to mention outright deaths, usually to mobs.

I hope this goes away if and when NA server is released.

I was lagging pretty good last night... but I think it's something that can hopefully be fixed if I tweak my settings properly.

(going through all the new player stuff I can find, pretty step learning curve right off the bat)


I'll be in game tonight around 6 PM central time hopefully till around midnight, then should be on for a good deal of time tomorrow night as well. Hopefully can hammer everything out at that time... spent the half hour or so that I was on yesterday just remapping my keyboard because the default settings are horrible.

I don't get a lot of lag but my cpu evidently can not handle the seiges at all. I have tweaked the setting as much as I can and if there are more than 50-100 people in the area I pretty much get 1-2 FPS.

I am not sure when I will be back in but I know that I will not be able to upgrade my computer anytime soon. Tasorin helped me with my settings etc and we basically decided my Processor is not very good and my video card could be better for this game.

I'm definitely one of those folks. I'm pretty sure it's not a settings issue, I had shadows off, shader_1 on, but was still getting like 2 seconds per frame during the hamlet siege.

Comp is a 3.8ghz single core with 2gb of ram (forgot what kind, I'd have to be on it to check) and a 512mb video card... a gtx7800 or 8800 or something if I recall.

I'm preety sure some of you just don't have your settings tuned correctly, rather than havn't bad rigs. I'm on the west coast, never have anything lower than 300 ping; and I can play in the bit battles fine. (Of course I get the occational lag spike or when i cross server line)

I have spent many hours trying to trouble shoot this issue across multiple individuals systems. My conclusion is that its not a simple one fix do this solution that works for everyone.

What works for one person doesn't work for another. The delta variable being video card brands, video card series, video drivers, Motherborad Northbridge, pixel shaders, and the grand daddy of them all HD access times, virtual memory and paging issues.


JetStar, Syloc, and myself did a three way comparison since were all west coast, have about the same ping times, and have similar systems, similar HD speeds, and similar ISP bandwidth. We all used the same settings, Jet and I went through and even did the Performance settings for the CPU, Memory, Virtual Memory, and the Page File. After doing all of this, we still had three separate outcomes and FPS results. There is no rhyme or reason to why one of us (me), has shitastic fps in sieges, and those two are playable. Its not my system, its not my settings, its not a fragmented HD, its not a crappy system or video card. Yet for some reason I get the shaft if there are over 100ish people in rendering distance in active combat.


Here are some things we did find out though, that may help some of you.

First thing I always do after I load into Darkfall is go to the Task Manager and go to the Processes tab and hit User Name button and bring all the "ADMIN" or "USER" run programs to the top. I kill any resource hogs that I don't need running, like the firewall, virus scan, ad-watch, and so forth. Secondly I highlight the DFO.exe and right click it to bring up the exe menu. I then select Set Priority, and you have really two choices here. Either select "High Priority" or "Real Time Priority" the choice is yours. I haven't noticed to much of a difference between them.

DFO doesn't really take up that much of a typical dual core systems CPU resources. Even running under siege scenario, the CPU was only using about 55% of its resources under DFO's heaviest load. All three of us have L2 cache in excess of 1mb, and a Northbridge that supports similar through put.

DFO doesn't really take up that much of your typical RAM setup as long as you have more then 2 gigs. If your running 2 gigs, you probably are going to have to get another stick or upgrade to dual 2 gig sticks. This resource issue directly effects system index/paging and your system will start using the HD for memory and hose your FPS. DFO is sucking up about 980,000 kb on launch, and under peek usage after running for several hours never eclipsed 1,365,000Kb of RAM usage. The problem for those with 2 gigs of ram is going to be using the HD to page/index Memory, which will cripple you and turn it into a slide show no matter what in most cases.

Middle to Low end ATI cards seem to be having the most problem under the heaviest loads. The N-Vid cards seem to be preforming a little better in the middle dollar range for DFO. It seems that a 8800 GT non SLI in a PCI express slot with 256mb and a minimum of 24 pipelines is enough to not tax out the video card as long as your putting your settings down to the minimums. Anything less then that and your asking for a serious rendering choke point in your Video card processing capability. All three of us have cards in excess of this minimum, and none of us were seeing the Video card as the choke point. Under the heaviest of loads during the KGB siege from Hyperzerg in our city my Video Card never eclipsed 70% resource usage. I have an EVGA 8800 GTX SLI 512MB w/ 48 pipelines and factory overclocked and know the issue isn't the card.

The biggest issue seems to be HD access time and the page/index file and access issues. This seems to be causing the vast majority of "Virtual Memory Errors" that occur during crash's under the heaviest loads during a siege. Some of that we can fix on our side with settings, and with a decent HD setup, but the majority of the issue is on DFO's side and the way in which it access's game information off your HD.

My suggestion, and I know this sucks and isn't feasible for everyone is to get a second small capacity HD around 20gigs with High RPM's and access time and go RAID setup and get the game off the System HD and into its own HD environment with higher RPM's and lower access times in milliseconds.

The second side of this problem doesn't have anything to do with us, its how the client works and how its accessing information off the HD and what its putting into the page file buffer for later use. This has been an issue for a long time with high system demand games, they push it to the user side and people who don't have high middle to high end rig's get left with a crappy game experience in a twitch style game.

Finally, I did some homework and did some traceroute and ping tests back to the servers in Germany. Holy crap are there some serious problems here. If your West of the major interchange in Philly, Chicago, and St. Louis, packets seem to do a lot more bouncing around. Hell one time I had packets that decided to go EAST of Germany and come in via the Pacific UnderSea Fibre trunk.

When I get home tonight I will post all the settings Jet/Syloc and I used in detail to help. I think if we use this as a baseline we can trouble shoot individuals system issues easier knowing we have all done the basics.

I'm Pentium IV 3.2 GHz, 2GB RAM (pretty slow frequency, but don't remember), SATA HD (no raid) should try to fix this, Saphire Radeon 4850 HD x2 1GB card...

I am wrecked during sieges... now I can and will defend KGB cities because I have a good ranged spot that I can fire down onto the clan stone without too much worry of dieing to lag.

Settings have been adjusted and everything done possible... I'm just running a pc that hasn't been upgraded for 3 years (before faster buss speeds, ddr3 ram, and dual cores etc).

I just don't have the money right now to finish upgrading everything which I've priced out at around $650. In a month or two I'll be set and have the upgrades completed. Until then I'm farmer brown, Joe smith, maybe even a GSS operative in training... *sigh* Skilling up is hard to do

Couple of things, one that P4 class cpus are simply not enough, I have noticed this. Apparently DFO takes good advantage of advanced instruction sets and modern cpu architecture because no matter how good of a p4 or older AMD someone has, they all seem to lag during sieges.

my best suggestion to you guys is enable animation reductions, and try and fine a -nosound switch for dfo, or use a trick that prevent dfo from loading sound at all. I forget the specifics and have not tried with dfo yet, maybe someone else can help with the specifics.

Hate to say it, but the best way to see if it's workable via your "settings", is litterally sitting down in a safe, but laggy spot at the next siege, and just test out different settings. As much as I hate to have people sit and do nothing, a smooth, playable game is much more important for the long run.

That's what I did. =P

Sounds to 8, and animation reductions up to 1.0 helped a lot for me. (or whatever that setting is)

Yall know that i cant go. If you need Bartender for fighting tho, someone else that can play sieges could load him up.

Ok.....most people have covered almost everything.

Keep in mind that the TYPICAL bottlenecks for any game are:

CPU (not as much s other components, but since DFO takes advantage of multiple cores and Core 2 Duo or higher CPU is advisable)

Video Card - This is a gimme...get the best you can, always. More RAM the better.

RAM - get 3 gigs if you can. If you have a 64 bit system..get more.....more more more

Hard Drives - Hard drives are mechanical and as such are ALWAYS a bottleneck. Setting up a stripe array is a relatively cheap way to get a massive performance boost.

Page file - if you have multiple hard drivers, set you page file to a different HD than you operating system is running on. This will give you a decent performance boost as well.

Dunlop,
I have a 64 bit system running vista - Home Premium. When I had this system built we configured a raptor drive for the primary game drive and 2 500g in raid array. We only put 4 gig in but I don't run anything on this pc but the game and fraps, even antivirus is turned off almost all of the time.
I have a good motherboard and 2 9800 nvidia video cards (9800gx2).
Should I have a page file set up from my raptor drive to the 500g drives?
This pc works for sieges fine except for the out of memory (leak) disconnects. I am constantly at 30-40 fps in seiges and usually 100+ outside of sieges.
I am the least computer savvy member of KGB I am sure so if I should be setting something up to help with the memory leaks let me know.

Thanks

What kind of array are the two drives in? If they are striped..your page file should be on it in the least, if they are mirrored I'd still put it on the raid.

Page file on a different HD than your OS will always give you better performance. If those two drive are striped then I'd put my operating system on them and install the game to the stripe as well. Be sure to make alot of backups because you have more points of failure, but raw read/writes will be increased by about 30%

If you are getting 30ish FPS in a siege with that system I'd say your bottle neck is likely your connection and not your machine....although upgrading your connection may not do anything because your always only going to get info so fast from the other side of the world.

As far as the memory leaks go and out of virtual memory space, that is a client memory leak issue and it will only be fixed when they fix the client. Nothing you can do to fix that one.

If you want to spend the money, I'd double your RAM, but 4 gigs is a little above par for Vista.

The video cards are SLI right? What CPU are you running also and what is the northbridge chipset on your mobo?

Upgrade the chipset and video card drivers too BTW. That can help performance as well.

Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz is the processor. 2 drives are mirrored. Motherboard is P5N-T Deluxe I dunno where to look up settings.

I am fairly sure my video drivers are up to date and will check on the chipset driver update.

I didn't think DFO supported SLI. I generally have settings on "let application determine" setup.

If you think the ram would help I can drop another 4 gig in.

More than anything, I'm wondering what setting people use for sieges? What filters, shaders, what do they put on off, low, etc.

damn if your getting 30 fps in a siege with 300+ peeps then that is damn good! Considering most of the people there are getting 4 fps or less. Why try to fix something that isn't broken

Strangely enough, memories of ShadowBane sieges and the power
point level framerates just came to mind . . . .

The minimal settings of just floating heads just cracked me up



Overall frame rates can be attributed to a whole lot of variables
so it's going to be tough to pin it down. Your location may have
a lot to do with packet transit time and loss. If you're sitting
close to a major backbone then you may not have as many server
lag issues as someone who has to traverse half a dozen different
networks to get there.

Next time you run into a server lag spike, fire up a traceroute
and see where your packets are slowing down. You can usually
narrow it down to a network along the way, though getting
anything DONE about it requires nothing short of deity level
intervention. . . :|

Come to think of it. . . has ANY game ever managed to pull off
a large scale siege without the clients getting absolutely
hammered in the process ?