The Mana World Forums

Hello im creating this post to talk about the new quest.
I have observed that when luvia is spawned the server laggs very bad, and if you leave her there she will continue summonning monsters and the map will get veryy laggy.
Maybe the devs could try to fix that,because even on caliban server its almost impossible to complete that quest.

0x0BAL wrote:when luvia is spawned the server laggs very bad, and if you leave her there she will continue summonning monsters and the map will get veryy laggy.
...even on caliban server its almost impossible to complete that quest.

It's true that Luvia spawns lots of monsters, and monsters can cause clients to lag on that map. However, not everyone has the experience you describe. This causes me to wonder if there's something specific to your situation.

Sometimes lag can happen on the client end. I've had my CPU get totally buried with graphics computing, and of course then the game runs slowly for me.
Please check that your computer isn't getting overloaded during that lag. If it is at your computer, tell us what game client you use, and we'll give some suggestions to improve performance.

0x0BAL wrote:Hello im creating this post to talk about the new quest.
I have observed that when luvia is spawned the server laggs very bad, and if you leave her there she will continue summonning monsters and the map will get veryy laggy.
Maybe the devs could try to fix that,because even on caliban server its almost impossible to complete that quest.

In game players can have atleast 3 type of lags:
1. Network lags.
can be broken or overflowed network on client or server.
2. Server hardware lags.
server by unknown reason can do some lags.
3. Graphics lags.
If players client incorrectly configured or player hardware very weak

From your explanation it look like graphics lags.
For check for 1 and 3 you can use manaplus. At lags time look in debug window for ping and fps values.
Big pings mean network issue
Small fps mean slow hardware (or drivers)

For server lags here is harder and this not for normal players.

i have a windows 7 with 4gb ram and intel hd 3000
i use a 3g modem to play tmw.
i use manaplus.

0x0BAL wrote:i have a windows 7 with 4gb ram and intel hd 3000
i use a 3g modem to play tmw.
i use manaplus.

On my Core 2 Duo laptop with weak Intel HD 3000 graphics and 3GB RAM, ManaPlus can eat the processor when there are lots of monsters or special effects on the screen. I reduced frames-per-second to 24 and disabled some optional effects.

If task manager shows that your computer is very busy running the game, that will cause lag even if the server and everything else are fine. Task Manager will answer that question.

Frost wrote:

0x0BAL wrote:i have a windows 7 with 4gb ram and intel hd 3000
i use a 3g modem to play tmw.
i use manaplus.

On my Core 2 Duo laptop with weak Intel HD 3000 graphics and 3GB RAM, ManaPlus can eat the processor when there are lots of monsters or special effects on the screen. I reduced frames-per-second to 24 and disabled some optional effects.

If task manager shows that your computer is very busy running the game, that will cause lag even if the server and everything else are fine. Task Manager will answer that question.

TMW is playable on Intel Celeron 600 MHz, 96 MB Ram on "shrinked" version of Windows XP (can be done according to many FAQ's regarding this task available on the net).
I found that disabling particle effects and other "visual enhancements" works like a charm if you're running ManaPlus on old machine. It runs at average of 20-24 fps on maps like Tulimshar desert. Problems arose, when you enter areas crowded by players. Client freezes for short amount of time, leaving you vulnerable to aggressive monsters. Maybe there's a way to somehow optimize code which draws player characters?

shargom wrote:Problems arose, when you enter areas crowded by players. Client freezes for short amount of time

That freeze is most likely because the client is loading the sprites for their equipment from the hard drive.

A method to optimize this would be to load sprites in a separate thread and skip drawing each sprite until it has loaded (the result would be that characters would appear "naked" until their equipment has loaded).

On the contrary, i believe it's a network load due to requests of players' infos in sight.

v0id wrote:On the contrary, i believe it's a network load due to requests of players' infos in sight.

Maybe you should actually take a look at the client source before you jump to conclusions.

The view info about each character isn't requested by the client. When the server informs a client about a new character in view, it also sends all the view info, which is just a few bytes per character.

You can trust me that it's the equipment loading. I actually optimized that code a few years ago by introducing caching. Before I added caching, you would have that freeze again and again when the same group of players got in and out of sight. Now you only have it the first time, because their equipment stays in the cache.

the newer manaplus versions(..1.20, and it's less recent daily builds) use a lot less CPU. Kudos to 4144 for that.
If using manaplus, press F until you get a green background and it will strip the graphics to those only necessary. You can also attempt turning off some features. Bot Checker, for example, uses more than you'd think, but probably less than I remember.
I've also found that the manaplus video detection does a great job in configuring the graphic settings.

oh, and to test new versions in windows, without installing(as portable), use something like 7-zip to extract the manaplus installer to a folder. copy over the configs, logs, and if you want, screenshots, from your other data directory.

I experienced spawning lags as well with this quest

Crush wrote: A method to optimize this would be to load sprites in a separate thread and skip drawing each sprite until it has loaded (the result would be that characters would appear "naked" until their equipment has loaded).

I suppose this solution has been integrated on manaplus (since v1.2.11 ?) because it's exactly what happens for me with my setup (OpenGL/HW acceleration).

When lags happens simultaneously and for the same duration for several players it is likelely to suppose that it is not caused by client but by network or server.

I remember that on some occasion (laggy period or crash) that I am unable to find again (and quote) Frost said that he watched server processes and network. He said that map ping and map server process were normal, while account and char server were up to the maximum load, which should not be the case. I think attention has not been paid enough to this point.