Multiplayer in Arma 2 - Is Warping (Lag) and Cheats still an issue?

[maddogx 13]

Perhaps some stats from the devs, bevore i buy this game and bring it back cause of warping players/ai in MP ...

No statement is a statement too :)

Arma2 will be released in Germany next Friday anyway. You can be pretty sure to see loads of activity and info on these forums once that happens, including people talking about MP. I for one intend to play the campaign in coop mode with a couple of friends and will be posting experiences and possibly videos along the way. :)

[Auss 208]

was not a server problem. me and all clan members had this warping seen on ervery server since arma 1.00

Mate i think your server specs or settings are rooted. Warping is rarely seen on a server that is configured correctly

[Landstalker 10]

MadDogx '' ride on '' next friday wow didnt realise was that soon for german release damn things are looking up for the desperate few wanting to play it i best learn german and quick .......

[garack666 10]

MadDogx '' ride on '' next friday wow didnt realise was that soon for german release damn things are looking up for the desperate few wanting to play it i best learn german and quick .......

subtitles are german and the game. the speech is in english.

[pogoman979 10]

Hi pogoman979

I will not go over what others have already posted to correct you misunderstanding of the problem.

From your post you are talking about a client based server rather than a dedicated server on computer based at a server host.

You make it clear you are hosting the server on the same computer as the client you are playing with. Follow what others have posted to correct your setup but all that will mean nothing if your computer is not up to the task.

You need to have fairly good computer to do this. Dual core would be the minimum with affinity for the client and server set to different cores and lots of memory.

If you are doing this for a home LAN a better solution is a separate computer as server.

If you are hosting others on the server over the Internet you need something more than a standard ISP broadband, most only allow 256 K or perhaps 512 K outbound. ISP's often throttle people running servers from home computers and it may even be against your ISP contract.

i dont actually host servers for other people to join, it was just a test. i have a dual core e6750 clocked at 3.4Ghz and a whole bunch of ram, i just thought that since i'd essentially be joining a lan game there should be no lag, but from what rowdied said i see that i need a much better computer to have no lag.

wrt the rest of your post i know arma is a demanding game, however even playing the default version of warfare on decent servers (where the VD is fixed at like 600m), there is still ai warping, so it is a real problem.

[whisper 0]

Again, no other engine can dream of showing that many AI units, acting independantly (meaning in Warfare, they go on their own missions, capturing towns and such, even if it's not so well done), that you can see over a what? 1200, 1500m if not more view distance. This uniqueness induce the lag you see. I'm not sure you can expect perfection there. Better get used to it.

Ofc, that doesn't mean we should shut up and not ask for improvement :)

[garack666 10]

Again, no other engine can dream of showing that many AI units, acting independantly (meaning in Warfare, they go on their own missions, capturing towns and such, even if it's not so well done), that you can see over a what? 1200, 1500m if not more view distance. This uniqueness induce the lag you see. I'm not sure you can expect perfection there. Better get used to it.

Ofc, that doesn't mean we should shut up and not ask for improvement :)

Thats right but Arma 1 is useless. Such a great View Distance and lots of KI.

But all are warping and the nice real bullet Physik is useless when you cant hit them cause there warping.

[whisper 0]

That's exagerating quite a lot

[tomcat_ 0]

Again, no other engine can dream of showing that many AI units, acting independantly (meaning in Warfare, they go on their own missions, capturing towns and such, even if it's not so well done), that you can see over a what? 1200, 1500m if not more view distance. This uniqueness induce the lag you see. I'm not sure you can expect perfection there. Better get used to it.

Ofc, that doesn't mean we should shut up and not ask for improvement :)

point i was trying to make is that if we make a simple mission/test:

1. restrict the viewing distance to 300-500 or whatever you recommend

2. make on a mission with no ai, and get a plane to fly at high speed at low altitude

If you watch that plance flying above your head....you will see it warping...

i haven't done the above experiment..but planning to do it in Arma2...but i guess with only one plane on a whole map there is still gonna be warping...

[whisper 0]

If you haven't done it, how can you say it will warp? oO

[garack666 10]

After playing first time on a dedi server: Warping like hell, worst then arma 1. warping problem still exist , netcode is not better. forget MP. Patches cant correct this, cause they never cant in arma 1 i think. but lets hope...dont buy the game so fast when you dislike warping KI/ players.

[sidhellfire 0]

Strange, that I've never experienced warping on my community server in A1, and bet there will be none for me in A2. Yet, I expect to see this a lot on public hosts with unknown connection.

[Leopardi 0]

Warping is near non-existent on a proper server. I don't think there are proper servers in ArmA II yet.

[tomcat_ 0]

well i guess we can move this thread to new multiplayer forum...?

[Placebo 28]

Indeed. Moving to MP.

[ChrisAA 10]

Not sure if it was some guy cheating, but every time I killed him he kept spawning on his body, nobody else would. He just kept spawning ontop of himself.

Can't remember what game mode it was, but not even I could do that! (capturing points, but we had the controlled point he was spawning in)

He seemed very afk as well, like he had to come out of the game to do whatever he was doing.

[{SAS}Silentkiller 0]

For me I think playing Evolution there is occaisional warping/lag this seems to be when some goes on one of the side missions; puts their bots in a little bird or wake up 2 towns at once.

These things really stress even the best server.

Btw, does anyone know if you actually need a copy of the game to run a server or are there server files?

[-=seany=- 5]

So evo is included with Arma2? interesting. Is it there own version like warfare was to CTI, or is it pretty faithful to the Evo of Arma?

One other question on multiplayer, does it still take up to 15-20 minutes to connect to some servers?

[garack666 10]

So evo is included with Arma2? interesting. Is it there own version like warfare was to CTI, or is it pretty faithful to the Evo of Arma?

One other question on multiplayer, does it still take up to 15-20 minutes to connect to some servers?

nope takes just forever cause of a blackscreen bug :j:

[toloquta 10]

I think the position prediction net code is a bit lacking. If the algorithm can make a good guess at the position of moving objects the corrections (warping) required when the actual position disagrees with the real position will be smaller and less noticeable.

The Quake3, Source and Unreal engines all have good prediction code.

If the server is hitting 100 percent CPU load things are probably going to start getting screwy even with good prediction so you'd want to verify that wasn't happening at the first sign of excessive warping.

Due to the nature of some of the game modes with lots of AI there could be a lot of load on the servers. I'm not sure if the server code will take advantage of 8 - 16 cores but I think that is what you would want to shoot for a high capacity server with lots of AI if it did.

[walker 0]

Hi toloquta

ArmA has more resistance to warping than any other game you will play. If you were to play ArmA at the view distances of other games, 200-300m your warping would disappear in ArmA on a properly set up server, but ArmA is played at a much larger scale.

You may have been fooled into thinking that other games do not suffer warping, They do.

To get around it they use a range of limits and tricks:

First off they limit number of players, next they limit view distance and they remove ballistics.

They then begin the tricks:

If you are running a client/server you are not seeing the world that others are so you will think things are better when they are not, it allows you to think it is a bad clients LAG problem rather than your server, you are being fooled; they use interpolation to guess where the player will be rather than give the true position, they use line of sight for bullet path rather from end of the gun, they use laser gun rather than true ballistic path, they do not model sound placement or environment etc.

This is why all those other games suffer from accusations of cheating, according to their machine they hit the guy, according to his he was not even in that street, the usual COD/CS chatter.

Warping is not realy an issue in ArmA as it is in other games.

Kind Regards walker

[toloquta 10]

When you're talking about view distance here I'm assuming you're really talking about the rate of position updates the client is receiving which would depend on the number of moving objects within the view distance radius. Its possible that if the client and/or server were smart they could further reduce the number of updates by eliminating object updates that could be determined to be irrelevant (object is too small to see at current distance, object is obstructed by terrain, etc).

All client/server multiplayer games presenting a real-time environment are going to have to use position prediction on the client side for moving objects unless they simply don't change the position of the object as viewed in the client until a real position update is received (this would appear as jerky movement unless the updates could be sent at a rate which would match the clients rendering frame rate). The effectiveness of the prediction algorithm used is very important to providing an accurate jerk free multiplayer experience, although of course it is not the only factor. I haven't spent much time analyzing the behavior of the prediction in ARMA or ARMA2 if what you say is true then it must have a pretty effective algorithm.

I realize a lot of games take a lot of shortcuts in their net code. From what I've seen ARMA (not sure about 2) takes quite a few shortcuts in that they don't make much of an attempt to validate data sent by the clients. Putting in more validation to test if the client is "lying" would make cheating much more difficult.

As far as how the weapons work I agree that they appear to do it right in ARMA. If I were writing it, I'd have the client send out a packet as soon as the weapon was fired with the weapon vector. The server could then compute the bullet trajectory and determine if the bullet would hit anything along its path. When firing from a distance this could work very well in that server would still be computing the bullet path before the object you were going to hit was even there. I'm not sure if ARMA/ARMA2 is smart enough to check the weapon vector received by the server to see if it plausible. For instance if the server knows the player wasn't reasonably close to the position of the weapon vector last update it should throw out the packet and possible kick the player from the game.

Hi toloquta

ArmA has more resistance to warping than any other game you will play. If you were to play ArmA at the view distances of other games, 200-300m your warping would disappear in ArmA on a properly set up server, but ArmA is played at a much larger scale.

You may have been fooled into thinking that other games do not suffer warping, They do.

To get around it they use a range of limits and tricks:

First off they limit number of players, next they limit view distance and they remove ballistics.

They then begin the tricks:

If you are running a client/server you are not seeing the world that others are so you will think things are better when they are not, it allows you to think it is a bad clients LAG problem rather than your server, you are being fooled; they use interpolation to guess where the player will be rather than give the true position, they use line of sight for bullet path rather from end of the gun, they use laser gun rather than true ballistic path, they do not model sound placement or environment etc.

This is why all those other games suffer from accusations of cheating, according to their machine they hit the guy, according to his he was not even in that street, the usual COD/CS chatter.

Warping is not realy an issue in ArmA as it is in other games.

Kind Regards walker

Edited June 5, 2009 by toloquta

[Mojo 0]

+1 to Walker, well said.

Cheating is minimized with required signatures and only specific addons allowed.

I can't speak clearly on Arma2, I've only just gotten my hands on it and testing is still underway, but from my initial looks, I'd say that we can do at least 80 to 90, I hope to push to 150, but I bet we can run 80 all day and never look back. <-- as I say, that is just a guess, a week or so will give us a better view.

That said, there are a wide number of "optimal" server settings. It all depends on WHAT YOU PLAY. As an example, if you play Evolution, with all the scripts running the way that they do, you need a great deal more computer power that a properly optimized mission with as much work as possible of-loaded to the clients via mod.

With careful optimization of the configuration files, a well built mission, a properly configured island and a decent mod, you can run 80 to 100 players in arma1, 50 pretty easily with a minimum of warping/lag/desync.

The net-code and how the server uses it, is the most interesting and devious thing about arma1 in my opinion. I absolutely love to grab network trace files of the missions running, because of the way the server code and net code seem to inter-operate, ping is much less important in the ARMA world that in any other shooter. A player with 12ms and a player with 120ms pings are an a more equal footing than I've ever seen before.

Edited June 8, 2009 by Mojo
bad spelling

[garack666 10]

Hi toloquta

ArmA has more resistance to warping than any other game you will play. If you were to play ArmA at the view distances of other games, 200-300m your warping would disappear in ArmA on a properly set up server, but ArmA is played at a much larger scale.

You may have been fooled into thinking that other games do not suffer warping, They do.

To get around it they use a range of limits and tricks:

First off they limit number of players, next they limit view distance and they remove ballistics.

They then begin the tricks:

If you are running a client/server you are not seeing the world that others are so you will think things are better when they are not, it allows you to think it is a bad clients LAG problem rather than your server, you are being fooled; they use interpolation to guess where the player will be rather than give the true position, they use line of sight for bullet path rather from end of the gun, they use laser gun rather than true ballistic path, they do not model sound placement or environment etc.

This is why all those other games suffer from accusations of cheating, according to their machine they hit the guy, according to his he was not even in that street, the usual COD/CS chatter.

Warping is not realy an issue in ArmA as it is in other games.

Kind Regards walker

yep, good explenation, but all features are senseless when all players warping and laggy so you cant hit them. then i dont need any balistic, cause the balistics are sooo wrong when a player warped 3 meter away..i couldnt catch him with laser beams too:(

[kklownboy 43]

i believe the upload of the server is King... soo if the serve is lame on its upload bandwidth you will have some real jip problems. That being said some servers are not set up right yet to play A2...