Kill the Lag Monster! Tips for helping keep lag to a minimum.

The lag monster rears its head, and either you get annoyed, get killed, or get disconnected. Nobody likes that.

This thread is for sharing tips and ideas on how to help keep lag to a minimum.

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1) AoEs. AoE's are notorious lag monster bait. While not bad unto themselves, they can cause lag when cast on large groups of enemies. Cast on 8 enemies or more with a moderate crowd online, and you may notice some nasty lag. The larger the group, the nastier the lag. In a severe case, you'll cast your fireball on a mob of skeletons, and you'll see the damage numbers pop up on half the group, lag, and then damage on the other half... that's if the server isn't about to disconnect entirely. Keep the AoE's under control and try to limit how many baddies you try to wipe out with a single wail or fireball. Whirlwind attacks count as AoEs as well for this purpose, so it's not just the wizards to blame... the weaponmasters can cause hiccups as well.

2) Merchant Inventories. If you got a TON of junk to sell, try to sell it to a merchant with respawning inventories (Entrom's Emporium for example). Any merchant who's inventory changes periodically will also wipe out the extra stuff that's been sold to them. Merchant inventories can cause lag when they're filled with loads of stuff. If you find a merchant who already has 8 or more pages in a single tab, even if they give you the prices you like, go sell elsewhere. In extreme circumstances, simply opening an overstuffed merchant inventory can lag the entire server. Another trick... with very common items, say gold rings, if you sell them to merchants who already have unlimited gold rings in stock, the gold rings you sell to them will not be "added" to their inventories. They'll be sold, but won't appear as a separate item in the inventory. Sell your common goods to the merchants who won't actually hold the pawned items in stock when possible.

2) Your inventory. Your inventory can actually be a source of lag itself. Some servers even go as far as to limit how much characters are allowed to carry before having to dump excess. We fortunately don't have that rule on Aenea, but that doesn't mean it can't be an issue. While I certainly understand the "collector's knack", wanting to keep all the neat gizmos you come across, try to limit what you actually cary around in your inventory. Try to keep your collectables in your ethereal chest (yes, there have been occurances of the chests malfunctioning, I've experienced this myself, as have others, but they're pretty reliable). I've personally tried to keep my characters' "regular gear" down to what can be contained within 3 or 4 bags, at most. I've actually noticed less lag for myself than when I had 4 or more pages of nothing but bags, each stuffed with stuff.

3) "inventory" laying around in areas... aka body bags. I am as guilty of this as anyone.... I'll do a round or two through a hunting area before actually handling the looting/sacrificing of body bags. All those bags/bones/whatnot laying around can eat up resources. It's rough for shifter characters (who can't use sacrificial flame while polymorphed ) but do try to sacrifice the remains of your kills before moving on to the next spawn. Not only does it help keep lag down, but you can get XP or piety from sacrificing. If you're starting to get a bunch of sacrificine remains persisting after being sacrificed, leave the area and let the cleaner script clean up the place before heading back in (even though yeah, lots of pulsing/glowing remains in a dark area looks damn trippy!).

4) not so much a lag help tip... try to know the difference between graphical lag and actual lag. Graphical lag is simply the player end having trouble processing high-poly scenes. The effect is basicly "lag"... but it's not from the server or the connection. I get this constantly myself... another mage character walks into view, lit up like a christmas tree on crack... my game hangs up for a moment or two before my video can actually process all that info. The more PCs, the more work the video's gonna be doing to render everything. Once you can figure out when something is graphical lag, or actual lag, you can start figuring out what's causing it, and try to take steps to avoid causing it (or figure out you need to upgrade that poor vid card you're putting to a slow and torturous death )



Share your tips for helping keep the lag monster in it's cage

For those charactes on solo adventures, finding a secluded place (aka, a different area) to do all your magical enhancements/buffs before an adventure will help you and others.

Why? It has to do with the way the game handles things.

Say you want your character to use the shield spell. You click on the spell icon and your character begins casting it, casts it, and the visual effect appears on you.

What happens in the background: You sell your NWN game you want to cast shield. Your game sends a message to the server saying you're casting the spell. The server checks for enemies (for attacks of opportunity), checks to make sure you have castings remaining, then decides you can cast it. It sends a message to your computer basically saying "ok, go ahead" while keeping track of your spellcasting. Your NWN game renders the casting animations, sounds, and visuals. When cast, the shield visual effect (vfx) appears on your character as your game renders it. Your game sends the server a message telling it you have this spell effect, the server basically says "ok, he or she has the shield spell effect on, that means the shield vfx, and effect to increase AC, and an effect of immunity to the magic missile spell, all tied together".

With more than once character in the area:

You cast the spell as normal.

In the background, everything that happens when solo in an area, plus the server also updates back and forth with each other character's computer, keeping track of effects on everybody, vfx, positions, animations, actions, etc.

This is why you may some things may work smoothly when adventuring on your own, then slow slightly when in a large group or firing off a bunch of area spells.


Area of effect spells: When you use one of these on a large group of enemies when in the same area as another PC, that other PC is also sent almost all the feedback/combat log messages, his/her computer is told to render the animations and vfx, and is updated on new positions and statuses of every creature in the area.

Still, not bad at all for a game released more than 7 years ago (June 2002, I think), last updated a year ago (1.69 patch), and not originally intended for building/playing PWs .

But dealing with a little slowing is worth it if you're into adventuring in a group.

Oh, wow. ._. No wonder zombie lords lag the server so much.

I've heard direct connecting instead of going through gamespy can help.

Techless One here....

An indirect post from Biowarian Brian Chung:

"This is according to Brian Chung from the 1.69 thread 14 topic in this same forum:

"It's client side loading of 13+mb of horse animations. Since the NWN client by default only caches like 16mb in resources, so whenever a horse appears, it causes a momentary stutter as the client has to clear out the resource cache, then load the animation data off the HD. The standard humanoid animations cause no hiccup because you're almost always guaranteed to have it in memory being a PC so it's always loaded.

You can up the amount by changing the nwnplayer.ini setting under [Game Options] and adding "Max Memory Usage=32". Up to a max of 64mb, beyond that there wasn't much performance benefit according to some tests we did internally. So there might be a small initial pause on the first horse load, but afterwards it might not be as bad even if you transition areas."

The above suggestion seems to help with the new trenchcoats and apparel seen in the game since the last update