Miasma Community

What's happening?

If you play here regularly you may have noticed that for the last month or two the gameplay has been much more smooth, as we've been running on a significantly more powerful rented machine.  We were using a virtual server on a much less powerful server previously.

As a result of this test I have arranged to buy our own physical machine and to have it hosted in a UK data-centre.

If you've got here from the game server, then you're about to play on the new machine :) It's still a work in progress. The machine needs a bit of performance tuning, and there will be an IP change early in the new year as it gets moved into its final position in the data-centre.

Are you willing to help?

This message is to ask that if you enjoy playing here that you consider donating a small amount (even £1) each month to help pay for the running costs. You can set up a one-off or a regular Paypal donation from the left donation button on this page (https://miasma.rocks/pages/donate.php). Please leave a message on the paypal donation page with your player name so we know who is helping.

I am quite happy to pay for all of the new machine, but if any of you would like to donate towards the cost of it feel free to make a one-off donation and let me know it's for that purpose in the message on the paypal donation page

Oops! I forgot to unlock the thread.

"Thank you" to the first person to do a regular £1. I don't know your player name to say thank you directly.

Hi, I just send some small money from myself, I hope we will keep the server online. :)

Thanks!

The server's probably going to get some maintenance tomorrow (later today as it's after midnight here) to see if we can get it running a bit faster. There will be a down-time.

I've set up a monthly donation of £15.

Wow! Thanks. If more people prove willing to chip in small amounts monthly and we can cover the bills & have a little contingency for repair then I'll give you a shout to lower the amount.

Much appreciated!

Im donating 10 euro automatic monthly. :-)

Quote from: Piglet on December 16, 2019, 09:15
Wow! Thanks. If more people prove willing to chip in small amounts monthly and we can cover the bills & have a little contingency for repair then I'll give you a shout to lower the amount.

Much appreciated!

I'm happy with that, would be nice if we can get a bit of a buffer financially just in case something comes up. :)

Hopefully I'll find some time to actually get on the servers myself, working shifts makes it a bit difficult to play as when I'm awake with some spare time isn't always when the servers are populated :D

Are there other ways to donate? Something from my faraway Russia can't throw a coin through PayPal, or I'm probably very dumb

A fiver a month from me - as a bribe for making Contrast the default map  ;D

Ha! OK. You're not getting any argument from me on that. It'll take effect from the next full server restart.

Quote from: Jozz on December 16, 2019, 17:56
A fiver a month from me - as a bribe for making Contrast the only map  ;D

Done.

£5 a month for £∞ of fun. Sweet deal.

im so sorry i cant help for now, boyfriend credit card blocked for a year, but i will try to find a way.... a legal way jeje :D

Absolutely no problem.  Any donations are gratefully received from those who have spare money and would like to put it towards helping.

There are other ways in which people can help if they would like to do so and have time:

For example, you could spot when there is a map playing which doesn't have server monitor images, take interesting screenshots of the game as it plays sharpen the image (for example in GIMP which is free), crop to 160x120 pixels and name them mapname_n.jpg  (where n is an incrementing number). Let me have them and I'll upload them to the monitor

Another example, you could try out new maps for ONS/VCTF/Freon and recommend them.

If you don't have spare money that you want to use in this way, don't have spare time to help, and just want to play...that's also fine.

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!

 :ok: :pft: :grphug:

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Here's the link to the discord server.

https://discord.gg/unrealtournament

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?

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.

Quote from: tirofijo!! on December 18, 2019, 13:32
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

Quote from: hagis on December 18, 2019, 15:55
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?

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

Quote from: Piglet on December 18, 2019, 16:48
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?

CPUMon
"CPUMon is a simple little gadget for monitoring CPU performance from your desktop. It displays a real-time graph of CPU performance as well as current usage indicator. Features include user defined colors, transparency, alpha-blending, adjustable update rates, layout presets, window locking, constantly updated CPU speed for mobile and speed step processors, tray icon mode, statistics, memory usage, and more.

It comes integrated with a sophisticated processor detection toolkit which provides detailed CPU information, list of supported CPU features and other specifics."

https://www.den4b.com/products/cpumon (https://www.den4b.com/products/cpumon)

screenshots
https://www.den4b.com/screenshots/cpumon (https://www.den4b.com/screenshots/cpumon)

download
https://www.den4b.com/downloads/cpumon (https://www.den4b.com/downloads/cpumon)

I use the portable version to show my intel q6600, 4 cores

I'm using HWInfo on the machine to monitor it, but can't see an API to remotely monitor on either. It would be useful to show players complaining about "lag" what the CPU is doing

I'm wondering if the increased fire rate and weapons drop on death could be contributing to the performance problems some people are seeing client side, UT2K4 never played nicely with high player counts to begin with so adding those into the mix may well just be too much certain CPU's.

I spectated briefly and managed between 140 - 200 fps, my system does have pretty decent per core performance and none of my cores are anywhere near 100% load (Intel Core i9 7940X @4.6GHz) so it's not so bad here, for people on older machines however I can image it being much worse.

Doesn't seem like much can be done server side to help with that.

You're probably right about the dropped items. The client needs to be told where each thing lands and what it is. That compounds the problem of limited bandwidth between game engine and client.

There's lots that can be done in maps to isolate areas so that the engine knows that it doesn't need to include anything from outside. There's things like removing spiders - every spider is yet another channel needed...but when you have 30 players in a box (facing ass, for example) with berserk mod, dropped weapons, spiders, rockets, and flak primary etc I'm not entirely sure there's going to be any way to get all that information in the available space.

It would be interesting to try the map with 30+ players and only shock.

Might be something to try doing over the weekend, I should be around most of Saturday so I don't mind being an extra body on the server to help with the load.

I guess the maps also play a large roll in performance, I doubt many of them were created with 30+ players in mind or even vehicles come to think of it.

One of the other roadblocks I can see would be, if we did find a way to increase the amount of information pushed to the client from the server, would people then have to make adjustments client side to make use of it?

Hopefully Flak gets back to you with something useful.