The State of Goon

[Doctor Honkington]

Bare with me, this is gonna be a lot of 

So, recently I've come back. Whilst I haven't been playing for a while I've decided to test out the server to even see if it's stopped lagging. I had tried out the server a couple weeks ago, no lag. I was happy to find that the server wasn't lagging one bit, even with 30 players on. Unfortunately, I came back a couple days ago and it's rough even walking a few tiles. Now this is for both servers, I find it incredibly ridiculous on the RP server with there only being 7 people on and major lag.

This has really disappointed me as Goonstation is the only server that I really enjoy out of SS13. It's full of fun, amusement, and gimmicks. But the lag tears all that apart and makes me sometimes just be like "Nope" then click the big fat X button.

I honestly am confused, I look at other servers, even join them and they have way more players than we do and don't even lag as bad as we do. I understand that it's not all simple and that there are probably major things behind it. From what I can tell is that it's map size, that's about all I can think of. But we can't just go ahead and change the map size, now can we? It'd be too much to shorten the map. 

I feel like lag really has destroyed our player base and has driven some of the usuals away. That plus other reasons of course. This and the fact that there really just isn't much to do anymore. Suggestions are becoming less and less interesting, we've run out of ideas I believe as a community. 

What I think is that if we fix the lag fiasco, we can continue as a community to make Goon great again like it used to be. Lag has been around for a while, it should be prioritized on fixing it. This lag really destroys us more than we think, it's time we found out ways to get rid of it.

I'd elaborate more on our problems, but I see lag being one of our major ones. I'd like to hear from the developers on their standpoint on how to fix this. It's really crushing our community and we can do better than this. We've BEEN better than this.

[locusts]

Lag is being fixed right now. In fact, the choppiness you're experiencing is an unintended side effect a lag patch that was implemented a few days ago. It's being worked on.

[Doctor Honkington]

Lag is being fixed right now. In fact, the choppiness you're experiencing is an unintended side effect a lag patch that was implemented a few days ago. It's being worked on.

That's great, good to hear that were "spacing" lag.












badum tish  

[Mageziya]

There was a few days where we thought that we had actually successfully killed lag, but then it turned out to be a fever dream and byond was being byond.

Contrary to popular belief, lag isn't caused by poor optimization, but rather the eldritch lovecraftian horrors that reside deep in spaghetti code that is gooncode.

[Gannets]

It's being worked on daily. Nobody is attempting to keep the game laggy. There's only so many coders with time/knowledge/motivation to attempt to make these changes.

It'll probably get there, you just have to be patient.

[robertGN]

I pretty sure the problem with suggestions has 2 reasons that it is happening, and why it isn't completely a problem.

1. The more dedicated players are picking up DM themselves, and making their own suggestions which are (going to be) put in the Patches forum and are MUCH more likely going to be implemented.

2. People are tired of making huge threads with great ideas, and then nothing get taken from them.

[Vitatroll]

It's pretty bad timing to come back 'now'.

Goonleak slowed stuff down a bit, and even more so since they then had to do an emergency spring cleaning of the code to make it 'releaseworthy'. Then some backend changes to make lag disappear was found to make lag in certain circumstances. Basically, out with the old lag -- in with the new. Newlag is better than oldlag, but it needs a lot of tweaking. Have you watched an explosion with newlag? Really damned smooth. Hardly any hiccups! Certain problems arise, like the loops occasionally freaking the fuck out, but what are freakyloops in the face of grand progress?

Hip Hip!

[Ed Venture]

2. People are tired of making huge threads with great ideas, and then nothing get taken from them.

This is 100% correct.

It's being worked on daily. Nobody is attempting to keep the game laggy. There's only so many coders with time/knowledge/motivation to attempt to make these changes.

It'll probably get there, you just have to be patient.

Now believe me when I say this but I'm not trying to be rude and I appreciate the work and all but putting the 510 beta on the servers was a bad idea and it seems like it backfired hard on everyone. Also people have been waiting for lag to get fixed for years now saying we've been patient is quite the understatement. Again not trying to be rude or ungrateful cause I am most certainly not. Just saying that people have been patient.

I heard how bad it's been on IRC from other people and I'm just staying away till 510 stable comes out as people in IRC and what I seen on the test servers has me pretty hyped for the update.

[Nnystyxx]

[...]
2. People are tired of making huge threads with great ideas, and then nothing get taken from them.

hear ye, I'm a bit grumpy about the density of suggestions, some of which would be potentially trivial to implement, with no response to them, some of which have appeared numerous times

I could pick up DM myself but I have the patience for coding of a fucking trout, these days I try and grab onto and support suggestions that don't require too much spriting

[medsal15]

I know how to solve the problem of no big suggestion thread accepted:
We need a team of coders working on these!
And maybe more than one...

[Erik]

I know how to solve the problem of no big suggestion thread accepted:
We need a team of coders working on these!
And maybe more than one...

Anyone can freely submit patches for inclusion, if you like a suggestion, try programming it yourself, or find someone that is willing to code it, and submit it.

#erikforcoder

[Mageziya]

2. People are tired of making huge threads with great ideas, and then nothing get taken from them.

This is 100% correct.

The big problem with those huge threads is that they're huge. Huge threads also tend to be ground up rewrites of what they're suggestions for, which in the state of a million other things going on (Which is always.) gets ignored under the "If it ain't broke don't fix it," mentality due to the sheer amount of time, often among several people, needed to implement those changes.

[Ed Venture]

I know how to solve the problem of no big suggestion thread accepted:
We need a team of coders working on these!
And maybe more than one...

Agreed


#erikforcoder

[A4Brogan]

I know how to solve the problem of no big suggestion thread accepted:
We need a team of coders working on these!
And maybe more than one...

Agreed


#erikforcoder

[robertGN]

(I didn't want to come back to this thread but I do want to say #erikforcoder)