Multiplayer Lan Game - Will a server improve gameplay?

[krytie75]

I've been playing OTTD over Lan with friends quite a bit lately. Recently I was playing a game which had two human players and 2 AI players. After about 40 - 50 years the game began to slow down to an almost unplayable lag.

A full restart of both machines and all network hardware gave no improvement.

The computers we use to play the games are all restored P4 3.2Ghz machines or better, all with at least 1gb of Ram.

My question is this. If I run a server (either dedicated if I can get my head round it, or a regular graphical user server [which will not be played on] ) on my modern Desktop gaming machine which has Quad Core (64 bit), 4Gb Ram and high speed hard disks, will the mid game slowdown go away? Would the use of a server provide signifacnt advantages to running it on one of the older machines that we play on?

I guess I'm really asking weather it's likely to be the fact that one of the old machines was hosting that caused the slowdown? What (setup/hardware wise) would have an impact on the speed of the game? How can I stop multiplayer games slowing down when the amount of vehicles/stations gets so high (which I assume is the cause of the slow down) ?

N.B. I noticed on an online game with station spread turned up way above 12 and some mammoth stations on the map the older P4 machines slowed down to unplayable whereas the Quad Core had no problems whatsoever.

Thanks in advance for your time!

krytie

[planetmaker]

The computers we use to play the games are all restored P4 3.2Ghz machines or better, all with at least 1gb of Ram.

My question is this. If I run a server (either dedicated if I can get my head round it, or a regular graphical user server [which will not be played on] ) on my modern Desktop gaming machine which has Quad Core (64 bit), 4Gb Ram and high speed hard disks, will the mid game slowdown go away? Would the use of a server provide signifacnt advantages to running it on one of the older machines that we play on?

It won't help. What rather might help is to have the old computer run as server in dedicated mode and use the high-end machines as clients for playing:

In OpenTTD each computer, server and client, has to calculate everything what happens ingame. Clients additionally have to do all the graphical calculations which easily add up to - guestimate - 30% additional CPU usage; and your graphics card won't help you there, nor will actually the number of cores. The only overhead the server has is to communicate with all clients - which is rather minimal overhead. OpenTTD speed is basically defined by the single core speed of your CPU. If the server is faster, you'll experience 'connection lost' messages once your client cannot keep up the pace of the server on full maps (many vehicles, large map sizes).

[krytie75]

Thanks for the reply Planetmaker. It makes a lot of sense.

Just to clarify, are you saying that CPU speed is the limiting factor here?

krytie

[Alberth]

Most likely yes.

The AI players may also use a lot of CPU (depends on which you run, and possibly on their settings).

[Yexo]

If you use several AIs and they do take up a significant amount of cpu then running the server on the fastest computer is best, as AIs are an exception because they're only run on the server.

[krytie75]

Excellent. I'll give it a try and see what happens. I'll put the results in this thread later in-case anyone's interested.

krytie75