New server! Feel free to help.

[Piglet]

Here's a picture of the server in its rack in the datacentre. I visited today and met the owner. He's a really nice chap. He might drop in to the game some time. Watch out for a low ping if they do it from work!

[Romulus]

 :ok: :pft: :grphug:

[MajorTom]

Hello fellows and friends,
I just send 10 Pounds monthly to help, nice idea and thanks Piglet for managing the stuff.
Killer*squirrel

[Piglet]

Thanks to everyone who's helping.

The new server seems to be running really well now. The outstanding question now is how best to configure the game engine to work best at high player count.

The CPU is no longer the bottleneck. The issue I think we now have is the limit the game itself has on how much information is able to flow from the game engine on the server to the clients. When there are 30+ players in a box room spamming spiders and flak primary and rockets at berserk speed there's no possibility of being able to fit all that data into the bandwidth allocated to each client.

The issue isn't the server bandwidth...we currently have a totally uncontended 200Mbps segment all to ourselves.

The client game tells the server game engine the maximum bandwidth available, up to a limited amount the server itself can be configured to. Anything that doesn't fit into the limit negotiated isn't sent. You see that as missing rockets, players not showing up where they really are, and that sort of thing.

If anyone knows enough to help optimisation then please let me know.

[hagis]

I don't know enough (perhaps enough to break stuff) but is it worth poking the tick rate up some,. if the CPU isn't hitting the limits adding more ticks might (or might not) allow more stuff to happen in a given timeslot?

[tirofijo!!]

ommm, ok i like to take photos, that i can do

[Piglet]

I tried upping the tickrate from 35 to 45. The server got to 40% usage with 30 players and 2 spectators on facing ass, but the gameplay experience was... interesting. Players didn't show which team they were. Rockets couldn't be seen on the client (the server would tell you that you were dead from rockets you didn't know about.... It was mayhem.

It would be great if we could find someone, perhaps someone in epic who could help.

[hagis]

right - someone who understands how this all fits together would be really handy!

I was just reading https://wiki.unrealadmin.org/Netspeed_Tutorial_(UT) - is is possible to set/change the netspeed on the server,. people aren't using dialup modems these days (generally) and it might allow the server to send more info?

[THOR`]

Flak, who was the community manager for Epic is still around in the UT discord, not sure how much help Epic would really want to be with Fortnite ruling the roost however.

[Piglet]

OOh - she might help. I helped her out with her server once

[THOR`]

Here's the link to the discord server.

https://discord.gg/unrealtournament

[Piglet]

Friend request sent. Thanks.

Does anyone know any utility that allows an extermal call to get CPU utilisation % per logical core on a machine so that I can add it to the server monitors?

[THOR`]

I'm not sure but HWInfo might allow for something like that? CoreTemp also has a remote server monitoring plug-in but again, not sure that would help.

[Piglet]

ommm, ok i like to take photos, that i can do

Thanks.

For information, these are the maps that need some screenshot love on the Warfare and main Freon server:

https://miasma.rocks/pages/maps.php?t=o&o=1

This shows what we have - better ones are always welcome.

https://miasma.rocks/pages/maps.php

[holyspam]

right - someone who understands how this all fits together would be really handy!

I was just reading https://wiki.unrealadmin.org/Netspeed_Tutorial_(UT) - is is possible to set/change the netspeed on the server,. people aren't using dialup modems these days (generally) and it might allow the server to send more info?

-WARNING-
INCOMING WALL OF TEXT

about the network issue, increase maxclientrate to 12000 or 15000
even on freon i get 9900 bytes when 8v8 chaos happens

it's just that the server decides what data to discard or not, and if you are already over the limit at 16 players it will discard more important data for a doubling of information

Then there's the issue of too many players together causing the client to drop fps probably below 50
Since the client sends updates to the server depending on framerate...you get less updates from each player, but the server is still updating the last received player data, which is not getting updates from the player client

it results in players looking "frozen" and suddenly reacting

i think it's more of an issue with players CPUs which cant handle many players on screen.
because no matter the amount of cores available, ut2004 only runs on one and runs slow on that one, because at the time of release the fastest instruction set on CPUs was SSE2

there's no way you can stay at high fps in fights like these if your config has set everything to highest quality
it all runs on a single core, the 64bit game might help but i have only seen 20% better fps and that version comes with other problems

So let's say you get fps below 50 in these fights and your CPU runs at 4GHz, the only thing guaranteed to work is higher clocks

You say f*** it and decide to cool it with liquid nitrogen(LN2), you pay 500$ for a LN2 setup and you get your CPU to 7GHz running for the duration your LN2 lasts which is 70% higher than stock.
ABSOLUTELY BEST-CASE SCENARIO, you increased your 50fps to 85....so...yeah

Next best thing to do, is turning down cpu-heavy effects.

things that could help during intense fights:
turning off gore completely
character quality to lowest
physics detail low
world detail low
everything that has a checkbox turned off

things that will fix the problem
re-writing the game engine and re-compiling ut2004 for modern architecture support and multi-core use could give you constant 200fps or higher but that's only a sweet dream

So...

tl;dr
If a netspeed increase ON THE SERVER can't help then it's caused by huge framerate drops ingame, so nothing else can be done