Spectators slowing the game - is this OK?

[zerver]

More than one bug :)

I have had the "You won the game" window appear two times because my ping reached the limit, but I could still move the window to the side and continue playing

[SirMaverick]

I think the funny thing is that everyone is agreeing with me and voting 'no' which is the opposite.

Any you can't change your vote.

[Rafal99]

AFAIK that is exactly what would happen if Spring didn't slow down for them.

Right now, it seems that connection is lost if ping is more than ~1 minute.

We need some changes so that specs only lose the connection if they completely stop to send sync responses. Also, the annoying repeated "no sync response for spectator" must be removed ofc.

Thanks for your votes, I will look into this...

Ok, I played a long porcy BA game yesterday which dropped me near the end because of lag timeout so I observed how that works.
(If I knew the game will turn into that I wouldn't join it, but who could predict...)

1. For some reason even when the game slowed down I was still kept at 100% cpu and had growing ping, game was of course unplayable in that conditions. Minimum game speed was set to 0.3, which I bet was never reached. I read that it tries to keep max cpu at 75%, which didn't really work. It is sort of pointless to slow game down, if the slowest player still can't play and his ping grows.

2. It spammed "No sync response etc...".

3. It disconnected me when my ping reached 60000ms (which was actually good, I couldn't even exit with all that cpu / gpu lag )

4. In that conditions it isn't really like 'watching a replay' which I suggested. Lets say game runs at speed 1.0 and won't slow down for players / specs. Everyone can handle that, except one spec who in this situation can handle 0.7 max, if he wants it run fluently and be controllable. His simulation won't run in real time so it can be as well same as watching a replay. But the game will try to run at max possible speed for him, which is bad since you can't do anything with such load.
Would be since if the "replay watching" spectator could adjust the speed of his game to his need, if he wants to watch the game 0.5 speed then why not, it won't affect others, and will make a game run fluently for him.

(I know that none of these change the fact that I should buy a new cpu.
But still massive enough spam of fleas/weasels/nanos/fighters/whatever can make most cpus reach their max.

[==Troy==]

From post above :


Can we have a spec mode which ONLY records the received information? And does no calculations otherwise. (i.e. background process)

I.e. just silent recording of demo. (and possibly as was suggested above, there is no reason why not immediately play this demo, but at a slower rate)

[zerver]

The throttling will only reduce speed to half. If you want to continue playing at even lower speeds you have to set the speed manually.

But this is a game, and games are supposed to be fun. Is a game at 0.3 speed really fun? Is it that important to win? Not imo.

[Rafal99]

Ok it is possible it was running at 0.5 the moment when it dropped me.
And of course game should be fun, and speed <0.5 is not going to be very fun, so it is good it dropped me actually. Just wasn't sure if the system works as expected, thanks for clearing, it is all ok. :)

Another thing is that you may sometimes want to spec at such a lower speed, when you specced the whole game and it is near the end, you want to see the finish, even if it is going to be not real-time replay at very low speed.
And it doesn't have to be such a low speed - in a situation where the host runs at 1.0 with no slowdowns, you may want to watch it at 0.8 which is perfectly ok, and would be nice if Spring allowed it somewhat.

[koshi]

Can we have a spec mode which ONLY records the received information? And does no calculations otherwise. (i.e. background process)

I.e. just silent recording of demo.

There's a client in the works that does just that, so yes.

[Argh]

How about we make specs who can't run the game fast enough run at their own speed? The host will send all the commands etc to the spectator, but won't care about him and will just run the game further with the proper speed, while the spectator will just basically watch a replay.

I like that idea. Same with people who have died. And if the "just save me a demo" was included, then voila, you can quit but you can also see what happened later, if you're bored.