Yesterday I played Factorio multiplayer with 2 other friends

[Zequez]

First I want to say congratulations to the devs because it was lots of fun, and it worked perfectly during our 4 hours game, which we'll continue next weekend.

Anyway, here are some comments regarding multiplayer:

- What exactly is the latency selector on the multiplayer creation screen? Since we live in the same city, I choose 66 latency which seems good enough for most games. But I'm not entirely sure how this affects the game.

- A general feeling of slowness. I'm not sure if it's because multiplayer or because of the new version. But generally it was all kind of laggy. For example, while trying to deconstruct a conveyor belt I used to be able to run towards the belt while keeping the right mouse button pressed, but on MP it's not quick enough and I run over the belt, being pretty frustrating when I have to remove a many belts.

- The shotgun caused lag. Not sure if it's a bug, or a inherent behavior of how MP was made, but when shooting everyone got lag. One of my friends have a shitty Internet connection, so that might cause it.

- What are some ways to reduce lag while playing multiplayer? I mean it wasn't really lag, it was more like an slowdown of the entire game.

- One thing that I want to point out, because I heard people asking about it is that it doesn't work like usual multiplayer games, because there is no "host" in the game, or "server". I started the game and my friends joined, but then in the middle I lost my Internet connection and they kept playing. And then I joined again! It's pretty weird! And the last person to leave the game will have the last version of the map.

- Also at one point one of my friends left and clicked the pause button, probably without thinking. But the thing is that he was the only with the ability to unpause it, so we were locked until he came back.

Anyway, the major issue was a bit of lag, but it was really playable, although not as smooth as single player.

Edit: Also, to play over the Internet we just used Hamachi, not the method mentioned on the Wiki. It worked out of the box with the Hamachi IPs.

[GewaltSam]

- What exactly is the latency selector on the multiplayer creation screen? Since we live in the same city, I choose 66 latency which seems good enough for most games. But I'm not entirely sure how this affects the game.

If I got that correctly, it "determines" the latency for everyone in the game; I guess it shouldn't be lower than the slowest connection in the game. We tried around a bit; 99ms is a bit too high, and I have a good connection (and all other players are living within 500km), so i usually set it to 50-66ms. That seems to work fine.

- A general feeling of slowness. I'm not sure if it's because multiplayer or because of the new version. But generally it was all kind of laggy. For example, while trying to deconstruct a conveyor belt I used to be able to run towards the belt while keeping the right mouse button pressed, but on MP it's not quick enough and I run over the belt, being pretty frustrating when I have to remove a many belts.

You can try setting the latency lower like mentioned above, but it could cause problems if it's too low. It's not possible to simply walk along a belt and deconstruct it with a ping higher than 30ms i guess.

[Rsouls]

The game is constantly uploading and downloading data to and from everyone. So if one of your friends is lagging or not uploading/downloading data fast enough, it would cause the game to slow down so that person could catch up. (This is what I came up with, since my friend's internet is spontaneously unstable).

Latency is kind of like setting up the tolerance of the lag. The higher the latency, the more delayed the game will feel but it will give some time for the people who do not have fast internet to catch up and the game will feel more consistent . If everyone have fast internet, then you can lower the latency and enjoy the super fast reaction time and smooth gameplay like in single player mode.

[slpwnd]

- Also at one point one of my friends left and clicked the pause button, probably without thinking. But the thing is that he was the only with the ability to unpause it, so we were locked until he came back.

This is annoying. We will do something about it soon.

Anyway, the major issue was a bit of lag, but it was really playable, although not as smooth as single player.

The lag is caused by "waiting" for your input to travel to all the other players before executing it. So you press go up button and only after the specified lag (+-) it will be actually executed (unline in singleplayer when it is executed immediately). We plan to address this in 0.12 by "latency hiding for player actions".

[Schorty]

Anyway, the major issue was a bit of lag, but it was really playable, although not as smooth as single player.

The lag is caused by "waiting" for your input to travel to all the other players before executing it. So you press go up button and only after the specified lag (+-) it will be actually executed (unline in singleplayer when it is executed immediately). We plan to address this in 0.12 by "latency hiding for player actions".

THIS! In my opinion, this is the biggest issue. The other things are running pretty smooth, if you play with people from the same area like you. I'm happy to see, that you are going to fix this somehow =)
Anyways, your efforts on multiplayer are really nice so far!

[Zequez]

- Also at one point one of my friends left and clicked the pause button, probably without thinking. But the thing is that he was the only with the ability to unpause it, so we were locked until he came back.

This is annoying. We will do something about it soon.

Anyway, the major issue was a bit of lag, but it was really playable, although not as smooth as single player.

The lag is caused by "waiting" for your input to travel to all the other players before executing it. So you press go up button and only after the specified lag (+-) it will be actually executed (unline in singleplayer when it is executed immediately). We plan to address this in 0.12 by "latency hiding for player actions".

Great news! Thanks!