soulsbane
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Posts posted by soulsbane
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thought i should start brushing up on a new language.
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20 minutes ago, JCrook1028 said:
There are no "TFP servers".
I'm sure they have servers, just not ones that are being utilized for these searches.
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2 hours ago, Pernicious said:
Full disclosure - I only play on a single server that I host, so this feature isn't even relevant to me.
However, as a network engineer, I'm probably a bit more aware than most that scalability is a huge issue. In most technologies that use a queue of any sort, there comes a point where a tiny bit of extra traffic causes huge latency. Think stuff like cars on the road - Apparently school holidays takes only 5-10% of cars off the road, but can reduce travel times by 30%+. Or your CPU - at 95% utilisation, everything feels normal. At 98% utilisation, it feels like everything is laggy and frozen. Same thing happens in networking where you are so close to capacity, you start wasting time with re-transmits, back offs and retries, etc.
I don't know exactly how the server finder works, but from what I can observe, it seems like the client reaches out to a centralised server for a list of available servers. This part is very scalable. If there are 10 servers online, you get 10 results. If there are 100 servers online, the results returned to you are exactly 10x larger. Even to the tens of thousands, this is scalable.
The next bit is still mostly scalable. It looks like your client then goes through that list and tries to retrieve data about it - latency, number of players, descriptions, etc. You would think if you double the number of servers, refreshing the list simply takes twice as long. Not exactly. Aside from the bandwidth used, any network device can only hold open a certain number of connections. But we still wouldn't be close to that limit.
Where it becomes unscalable, is when you have more users and more servers. Imagine if you had 10 users searching for 10 servers. You'd have a total of 100 queries. Now imagine you have 100 players looking for 100 servers. You have 10,000 queries. If you had 10,000 players looking for 10,000 servers, you have 100 million queries going out, and each player really only cares about 1 server they want to join. It's extremely wasteful and at some point can cause network issues.
So what was "perfectly fine to begin with", might not stay perfectly fine as the game grows in popularity - and perhaps they are expecting a spike in users and servers once the game goes gold and is no longer early release.
I don't even know if Geo IP is how regional selection works. But if it was, it's one of the simpler methods of segmenting a network, and mostly effective, even with inaccurate location. You might have thought "Why try to fix something that was perfectly fine", but in reality, the old server finder might have been heading straight for a cliff you couldn't see.
I know this sounds like a fan-boy defence of TFP, but it's something that can really get the goat of a lot of IT workers who have capacity planning as part of their job descriptions.
So is it our pc resources that are looking up those stats or TFP servers? Hint, i don't think we're using their servers in any way when we look up dedicated servers. I can still use steam to view server's pings bypassing TFP's way of looking up and sorting servers. I don't think it's working as intended.
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I'm someone who's always server hopped a lot. While some of the old server filter was frustrating, like the mod or no mod selection that did absolutely nothing, this version of filtering servers is multiple times worse than the old one. Want to search for us servers, have to search between just east or west coast, and anyone can label their server as east or west coast no matter where the actual server is located.
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The fact that there is a filter to look for servers that have mods or don't have mods that does absolutely nothing. Filter the server list for no mods on a server but you still get servers that have external mods on them that end up crashing the game when you try to join them. (maybe if i waited long enough the game would just stop spamming the null errors and go back to the starting screen, but generally it seems faster to just kill the game and start over)
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3 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:
but the entire meaning to this WILL BE, someone somewhere will complain regardless what avenue is taken.
it is a fact of life now-a-days that someone is always going to try to twist stuff around just for an argument. its a no win situation.
Suppose I was making an argument against cp, but the twitch integration isn't even consistent on what the abbreviation should be. Chat uses #cp, the stream display shows sp, when you type #cp in chat it's referred to as pp. Sure you can find a bunch of different acronym's for a lot of stuff. For example, fbi i'm sure you can find other stuff that would fit. Now try fbi and cp together.
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3 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:
thats as bad as complaining about using PP for Pimp Points, when someone will say "PP" could mean someone needs to go potty to "peepee."
may as well just stop using the alphabet completely and stop the pointless argument over which is greater.... 6 or 1/2 dozen.
Tonight was the first time that I tried out the twitch integration, I made a comment about the #cp command in chat and the streamer said "yea that was my first thought as well" If streamers are questioning the appropriateness of that on their own streams, is that really a good thing for the twitch integration on a platform that is probably going to have a younger viewer base?
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4 minutes ago, meganoth said:
Can you explain what is bad about cp? Obviously at least the dev at TFP doesn't know because otherwise he wouldn't have chosen it
So in the u.s. cp is a common abbreviation for child porn. Hope that is enough of an explanation about why it's bad.
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1 minute ago, meganoth said:
Can you explain what is bad about cp? Obviously at least the dev at TFP doesn't know because otherwise he wouldn't have chosen it
search cp as an abbreviation.
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#cp, why would anyone decide that #cp was a good command to use. sp is what shows up on the streamers channel, when you type #cp in a streamers chat it comes up as pimp points. Even a command where a streamer can #addpp, which a viewer can check by doing #cp in the chat.
I'm probably a bit biased about the whole twitch integration thing since less than 1% of the player base is likely to use it, but then nobody at tfp realizes that cp is bad?
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The chat types #cp, on the twitch screen it says sp, when you type #cp in the twitch chat it's called pimp points. But why would anyone decide that having users type #cp in chat would be a good idea? Nobody thought the abbreviation of cp might be a bad thing?
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Error dump causing a lot of lag
in General Support
Posted
I've been having this same issue. When new players are joining and downloading the map this error appears and basically the server comes to a stand still with lag and even disconnecting people.