Topic: Bridgewater-Brunel no. 1 - Great Britain sized map (no. 2)

[freddyhayward]

I have got it to work today without any major issues.

[CK]

The game eventually unpaused as usual, it just took a while.

[jamespetts]

Splendid, thank you for confirming.

[freddyhayward]

For me the server only seems to be online for the last 10 minutes of every hour, so I suspect long and repeated autosaves are the problem. IMO, autosaves should only occur at game-time (say, per month) rather than real-time intervals. On a related note, is there no way to sync clients without reloading each time a new client joins or a desync occurs?

[jamespetts]

The in-game autosave feature is disabled, but it is set to run a save/load cycle every hour if no player has joined (thus triggering a save/load cycle) within the last hour.

If a save/load cycle takes 50 minutes, then the saved game is too large to be dealt with reasonably by the server, unless there is some error causing an additional delay; but I cannot test this properly at present until I am able to replace my computer.

[DrSuperGood]

If it is taking 50 minutes to save/load cycle that really is not practical for anyone but the most devote player to use. A new server game might be recommended in such situation, possibly one with 25% less area so that memory usage is less of a problem for the server.

[jamespetts]

If it is taking 50 minutes to save/load cycle that really is not practical for anyone but the most devote player to use. A new server game might be recommended in such situation, possibly one with 25% less area so that memory usage is less of a problem for the server.

Indeed - although we would need to verify that this is the case before making such changes.

However, as I have mentioned before, land area per se has very little on either memory or CPU usage; it is the number of town buildings and quantity of transport infrastructure that has this impact. It is better to have a more spread out map (with local clusters of towns) where long distance transport can occur alongside local transport than have a more concentrated map of homogeneous density. Reducing the rate of town growth might well be worthwhile to prevent excessive load, but this is likely to be very challenging to calibrate.

[freddyhayward]

Issues with the savegame itself aside, wouldn't it still be far better to use in-game intervals for load/save cycles? This would guarantee some level of progression between each cycle. There is little use in autosaving when nothing has happened.

[DrSuperGood]

Issues with the savegame itself aside, wouldn't it still be far better to use in-game intervals for load/save cycles? This would guarantee some level of progression between each cycle. There is little use in autosaving when nothing has happened.

The problem is that it must complete a save/load cycle every time someone joins. If someone tries to join, anyone already in the game would have to wait 50 minutes before they can start playing again. Most people will give up by that time.

[Freahk]

I guess I had the same issue far less extreme on my server.
Due to the smaller map, loading times were -sometimes- around 10 minutes. However, on the same machine, most times it was much faster, around 30s.

[jamespetts]

I should note that the 50 minutes time given is unconfirmed based on the report of the server being available only 10 minutes in any given hour. 10 minutes is still too slow - but 30 seconds is acceptable. It is unclear at the present what might be causing such large fluctuations.

[freddyhayward]

I should note that the 50 minutes time given is unconfirmed based on the report of the server being available only 10 minutes in any given hour. 10 minutes is still too slow - but 30 seconds is acceptable. It is unclear at the present what might be causing such large fluctuations.

I would doubt it is actually 50 minutes - when already connected, the server usually unpauses at ~30 minutes past the hour. The 50 minutes I observed could be due to additional crashes or other clients attempting to join.