Factorio Forums

I've got an issue that my google-fu hasn't been able to rectify:

When hosting my MP save that's about 162 hours in, the clients always lag. This doesn't matter who is hosting, but the other person experiences a "choppy" gameplay experience regardless of the displayed latency (between 7 and 9 ticks, usually the former), FPS (60.0), and UPS (60.0).

This lag isn't present on the host machine (We swapped hosts to attempt to see if it was an isolated issue) which at first led me to believe it was something to do with latency, however when creating a brand new save in multiplayer the issues aren't present.

Additionally I procured a server from one of the partner links (MCProHosting) and ported the save in, to find I had the same issue, but now for both clients.

From what I've read from other posts there's some sort of "slowest speed" locking to sync up clients, but it is very perplexing to me why the client (regardless of it's me, my friend, or both of us when using the dedicated server) is the only one who sees this issue.

What I've tried:
Changing game.speed: Both up and down (UPS changes, but FPS stays the same, and even when the displayed value is golden (Say 60) the gameplay still has that lagginess to it.
Only connecting one person to the dedicated server (Same issue)
Made it so no requester chests were active so all robots on map were ported (Just in case that was the issue)

What else can I do/try? This issue makes multiplayer miserable for whoever isn't hosting for us, and even getting a hosting service didn't fix it.

I have a top of the line PC (i9 9900k, 2080 TI, 64GB RAM, SSD) my friend has a laptop that's above the recommended specs, and I can provide more info if needed.

I am not sure what you mean by "choppy" but i understand it's difficult to describe is it more like the inputs are delayed, or it's not smooth visually, with small freezes and catch up ?

I have no idea on whose screen it would show up the numbers saying what is the slow-down in case of a slow-down related to a mod, maybe you can upload the savegame (maybe your account is too new hopefully not).

One thing i thought was that factorissimo2 has a hotkey to reduce the updates from stuff going in and out a factory. It's something with Shift E or CTRL E by defaults, you use that on the arrows near connexion when you are inside a building, like you can do on the accumulator of the building to manage power.

It shouldn't be a problem on a high end computer, but it helped me on my laptop.

Thanks for the reply!

It's extremely hard to describe the choppiness, it almost feels like the game is forcing a slow-down of sorts as opposed to traditional lag. Your actions execute as expected, but there's a very noticeable chugging to everything. The FPS/UPS says 60, but it definitely feels like it's 30 or less for instance.

I'll try to tinker with the settings you suggested for factorissimo2, it's just odd how this started seemingly randomly when we'd been using the factories from a very early point in our save.

The only thing I can think of personally is that the games internal 'lag smoothing' that I'd seen mentioned in other posts that are somewhat similar is the culprit, as this seems to be 100% relegated to multiplayer connections (Which is why we don't lag when running/hosting the save but all connected clients do).

I'm sure the most common failure point here is the clients network connection, but my net is absolutely up to the task, and I'd assume the hosting partners (Of which I rented a server) to be running even better than my personal connection does.

I'll report back if I find anything else though, but any other suggestions are welcome!

The internal slow down of the game, means the host cannot run at 60UPS, this means any clients will be slowed, even if it (might) doesn't show less than 60 UPS.

162 hours is quite long and if you play on multiplayer you can definitly make maps that are ressource-consuming.

You have a very good computer, so if you are the host, and read 60 UPS, it seem to exclude the possibility that yours is the "weakest link", If you rent a (probably) high end server, and experience it as a client, that is something else. (same with host swapping).

The "weakest computer" slows everyone only when it is the host, if it is not the host, then it says in game who is being dropped from the game, which end up in a disconnect for the slow client you can't be on a game that your computer is to slow to process.

maybe a save game would help if you can attach one, even though i would probably need to set speed to 0.1 to open it x)

I have already tried to troubleshot a factory for perfomance when i was using Angel+bob mods, and made my factory fully nested in 1 factorissimo building.

Of the things i read were that Factorissimo2 as the 1 function using lua to teleport ressources. But in the 2 you have settings that allow you to teleport less often , but more material. Where it is the most useful is if you don't use belts to connect the inside and outside but chest directly. You can set it so that the content of chest is updated every 20 seconds from memory ( 1200 ticks ) instead of every tick for a belt for example. I then decided to bottle most of my fluids to take advantage of that, because the pipes contrary to the chest don't keep throughput if you update every 20 second .

At first i didn't need it, it's only after my game started to slow that i realised each connexion was active every 1/2/5 ticks, and i was planning to add many mores. That could explain why it becomes visible after some time.

I don't know how deep you went into AAI, but i know this one also can have an effect on virtually everytick, maybe a very light one but if you make enough in parralel, it may start to show.

maybe not as a critical slowdown as i experienced with my laptop, it was easy for me to know the root, instead of 0.8 i had like 14 for factorissimo ( while you have 0.8 out of the 2.8 required for update ), but maybe it is just enough so that it's visually noticeable because of the latency DELTA and not just the latency or something like that, that wouldn't show directly in 1 screenshot.

I hope you find some explanations, the car on a wagon looks real nice which mod is that ?

EDIT: Deleted what I had put here. Sorry, my tendency to over-engineer and test things got the better of me. What I was posting doesn’t actually matter much cause it wouldn’t help you actually solve the problem.

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mmmPI wrote: Mon Jul 22, 2019 2:00 am the car on a wagon looks real nice which mod is that ?

It looks like it might be this one: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/VehicleWagon2