Lag and rubber-banding

Issues, Workarounds & Localization General Issues
1

I am having some severe issues that are getting in the way of proper gameplay. I do solo/small-gang PvP, and within the last month or so, I have had a variety of deal-breaking, recurring problems:

  • Modules take several seconds to activate, making accurate fast tackle next to impossible
  • Drones do not respond for 10+ seconds after being launched, crippling half my ships
  • Movement commands are extremely sluggish, making small/fast ships far less useful

Very occasionally, there are also rubber-banding issues; actions I clearly took and got feedback in the UI as having taken get completely reversed:

  • Stop firing my lasers; switch from MF to Scorch crystals; start firing again; my crystals are back to being MF, despite having shown as Scorch when I activated the guns
  • Dscan a fight going on at a place 1 AU away; warp there; arrive there, see the grid setup and who’s shooting whom; suddenly find myself at the spot before I warped, going 0 km/s

I am fighting the client more than I’m fighting my actual opponents, and it’s bordering on unplayable. Has anyone else experienced anything of the sort, or does anyone have any advice for a remedy?

2

After tinkering around and tracing some of the communications between my computer and Tranquility, I found the main TQ IP I was connecting to, plus to route to it. I pinged some of the machines on the way:

## My router
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 200 received, 0% packet loss, time 40046ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.285/0.467/5.745/0.554 ms

## Next hop past my router
--- 10.7.120.1 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 193 received, 3% packet loss, time 40004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 8.152/16.626/133.474/12.015 ms

## Tranquility 
--- 87.237.34.200 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 192 received, 4% packet loss, time 39989ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 84.662/94.003/211.955/14.740 ms, pipe 2

## Unrelated website far away
--- google.co.uk ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 179 received, 10% packet loss, time 40000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 43.210/52.396/184.908/13.020 ms

Looks like uniform up to 10% packet loss anywhere past my router. This is not a CCP problem. At a friend’s suggestion, I re-seated and tightened the coax cable on my modem. Outcome:

## My router
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 200 received, 0% packet loss, time 40034ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.266/0.351/2.064/0.159 ms

## Next hop past my router
--- 10.7.120.1 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 200 received, 0% packet loss, time 40006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 8.113/15.783/82.173/6.548 ms

## Tranquility
--- 87.237.34.200 ping statistics ---
200 packets transmitted, 200 received, 0% packet loss, time 39978ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 83.873/93.895/212.113/15.448 ms, pipe 2

All packet loss is gone. I will re-test Eve and see if my weird issues are gone. If they are indeed gone, then Eve may be impressively unable to handle graceful degradation over a crappy network, but we all already knew that. I’ll post another update on how awfully my experience goes.

2 Likes
3

A couple fights later, I am not noticing any of the super-severe issues anymore. All that remains is Eve being sluggish at letting me align and such, and that’s just because Eve sucks. So… False alarm, I suppose. Also, why is Eve’s netcode so vulnerable to dropped packets? Sheesh.

4

I love it when simple things solve problems.

5

Could you briefly describe what you did to identify the problem?
I assume you used utilities like traceroute and ping but I’ve not used them myself to solve such problems. I’m also experiencing lag and would like to know if it’s EvE or my connection.
TIA

6

Here were my steps. Keep in mind while I have tech background (software engineer), someone who is a professional at this may have gotten to the root of it much quicker.

1) Find the Eve Tranquility IP address using Wireshark. By running Eve only (and no other programs) and looking at what IP addresses my computer communicated with, I identified 87.237.34.200 as TQ’s address. I was unable to extract other info from the communication, since it seems to be encrypted or encoded in a way I didn’t bother figuring out.

2) Ping TQ to see if anything is obviously wrong. The ping looked fine, but 7-10% of packets were being dropped. The command I used was ping -c 200 -i 0.2 87.237.34.200. That is, 200 pings sent at 1/5 second intervals.

Note that command is the Linux ping, which I ran via Windows Subsystem for Linux. The Windows ping to do the same thing needs different arguments.

3) Traceroute to see if a network hop is introducing unusual lag. All the hops looked fine. However, it also gave me the IP addresses of all the hops.

4) Ping each hop, starting with my router. The router looked fine, but as soon as I pinged something outside my apartment, though, the packet drop appeared. This meant it was not a CCP issue, but something wrong with my modem or ISP.

I used the same ping arguments as in step (2).

5) At a friend’s suggestion, I re-seated the modem’s coax cable. I unplugged the cable from both the modem and the wall, plugged it back in, and used some angle pliers to tighten it (since the wall drop is behind a big piece of furniture).

6) Re-test pings as in steps (2) and (4). The problem was gone.

7) Go for a solo roam in a Stabber to see whether everything works well enough to handle a micro-intensive kiting ship. It did! Well, kind of. Turns out I’m still bad at this game.

4 Likes
7

Thanks a lot for this. Clearly and concisely explained but with all the important details and even nicely formatted! It deserves to be stickied.

8

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