Discussion Latency delay Improvements - For those who play outside of EU & NA

[AdmiralPounce]

Hey guys. I am very new to the Naval action and loving it at the moment. Got myself a nice little basic cutter and been doing missions for gold & exp. The first thing I noticed is the latency lag in this game. Especially the response times to moving the ship's controls and gun firing response. I play from australia & already I see a few aus players in these forums chatting about the game and this brings delight to my eyes. I play from NA PVE server & get 225ms latency. Which is not bad in overall responsive gameplay. But what is greatly affected is the rudder, changing of sails, speed changes (the ship delays in response to change in speeds so if I want it to slow down from full, it'll take like 3 seconds to respond and start to slow down), and most importantly gun firing response. At this point it's just an annoyance. But later down the track I can see this as more of a hindrance to more competitive players who don't have the privilege to play near the servers. Especially when you're commanding a speedy brig or frigate that's more agile than the bigger ships (I want that 1st rate so bad! So many guns!).

 

Like all other MMOs latency is a bane to anyone's gameplay whenever they try to play an online game miles away from the server location. I really wish there was a way to fix this but I guess current constraints in technology prevents such an improvement.

 

This thread is more of a discussion within the community & devs alike (if they are inclined to join in the discussion) on what options could possibly help reduce the burden of lagged gameplay in Naval Action. The simplest solution I can think of and is already in the dev's corner of thinking is establishing region based servers around the world. Already you guys have covered NA & EU. I'm sure as time goes RU will also open. Maybe Japan. Maybe Asia (Indonesia perhaps)? And in time maybe Oceania.

 

So that's one way. But how about Cloud-based servers? Would that be feasible for Naval Action? I don't know much about this type of network system but here's a link of the benefits of implementing one.

https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cloud/cloud_servers.htm - could be worth considering for development.

 

And lastly, Client side calculations or prediction. I've only had one experience with this feature. A control physics function that simulates instant response times in controls including gun firing but at the cost of un-synced results. Like shooting at an enemy's broadside where you can just get your back cannons to aim & hit at his stern before he gets away and you see the splash hit but no damage is registered. Since client side has priority in response, it takes quite abit of time for the inputs to reach the server due to your latency. This is also open to "hacking" methods and I suggest not considering this option unless you can provide extra security to your servers. If successfully implemented, this feature could help alot of the players with latencies over 200ms+ but only to a point that improves the "visual" response times since server side inputs are still in effect.

 

So just to recap the options are:

• More region based servers
• Cloud based servers
• Client side prediction

There are probably more solutions that I can't think of. Please share your opinion and ideas about this topic as I feel it is a relative concern for those who play at such high latencies. Considering the early stage of this game I am more than satisfied with the current server performances. But maybe later down a few considerations to improve the servers in Naval Action could take place. Poll included as well.