Multiplayer Dedicated Server Nightmare

[Vander]

I really need some help to understand what is going on and hopefully fix it.I am pretty much new to SE but I really like it, so much so that I started a Dedicated Server for SE with a company that provides servers for the game. It has been nothing but one issue after another with no resolution in sight. Cannot place blocks, cannot weild blocks, grind, rubberbanding, etc and nothing the tech support does seems to help. Restarting, updating and restarting etc does not help. Restarting my computer does not help.

So in my "YOU HAVE AN AWFUL SERVICE rampage, I set up a Dedicated Server on my home computer, which is virtually band new, less than 6 months old, custom built, with quad core 64bit and high end graphics card with 6GB and 32GB DDR4 Ram and STILL the same freaking issues which makes me feel a little guilty about all my bad thoughts for the company I have a server on. So, I try both this morning, still the same issues. Disapointed and frustrated I went back to my single player world and none of these issues.

Now I was prepared to start blaming all this on my internet provider but I have NBN internet with 50 download and 20 upload (don't always get that, but even at a 10down and 3up I shouldn't have a whole lot of trouble. And others playing on the games ( both bought server and home server) are having the same issues soooooo either ALL our various internet providers are to blame or something else is going on.....

What is wrong here? Is this game just unplayable in Multiplayer which will be a real shame becuase I really like it and what to play with my family and friends, or is there some conflict somewhere or something that I can do to make it better?

Thanks for any help in advance.

[Scapegoat]

As a player (I've never hosted, admined, or run a server in any way) I do know there are a lot of quirky issues when it comes to multiplayer (like the rubberbanding). I've not really heard of not being able to weld, place blocks, or grind blocks (but I'm sure it's been experienced from time to time), but I have found rubberbanding to be part of the multiplayer experience.

In essence, I'm sure your headaches are shared with others who have been on the front lines.

On another note, I, too, would be curious about what those with experience would have to say. What have they done to get their servers running well(ish)?

[Vander]

As much as I love this game I am on the verge of wishing I hadn't wasted my money and actually bought a game that can be played. I really hope someone has some knowledge on how to resolve these issues. If it was just rubberbanding I could sort of muddle through, but this is just all of those things I mentioned in my original post at the same time. I'm dumbfounded.

[physbo]

from my short time with working with space engineers dedicated server is what are the server file settings and the world file settings. I turned a lot of my stuff down to achieve a full 1.0 sim speed with players who had very bad internet. So it is possible to get decent response, but there are still a few bugs and whacky happenings.

[Vander]

I do understand that it's in Alpha and I guess I should add my voice to the dev. team. Thank you for the advice and I will check out the world file settings and see if that helps any. I really look forward to a time when this game is playable in Multiplayer.

[TOS_Orami]

Even a beefier server(an actual 2U server rack mount) has severe lagg issues with this game. It is definately very poor coding. They do a lot of things right and the game moves in the right direction, but they break so much stuff it isn't even funny any more.

[physbo]

what ive done to get great resaults for improved game play, is lower your floating object, lower view distance, and lower physics. Like I said, I have a player that drags the entire server down when he joins, but at lower settings we had 3 players with zero lag except at auto save.

[Vander]

Thanks for that physbo. I will try that.

[KeepGood]

You said...

'I set up a Dedicated Server on my home computer, which is virtually band new, less than 6 months old, custom built, with quad core 64bit and high end graphics card with 6GB and 32GB DDR4 Ram and STILL the same freaking issues which makes me feel a little guilty about all my bad thoughts for the company I have a server on.'

With that spec, you could host an SE game no probs. SE currently relies heavily on raw horsepower when it comes to the CPU, so the higher the speed, the better. You could be running a 44 core super beast and it wouldn't make a difference. Most of the workload is dumped onto one core. High end graphics is wasted on the dedicated server.

You aren't running the dedicated server and the client game on the same system are you? That's not a good idea. SE eats up loads of resources, too much for the server to be running the world and the client (ie. the game itself you'll be playing) to be running. If they are on separate systems, check them using only your local connection, which should be at least a 1gb synchronous connection. That will cut out any problems with your ISP.

If you are running just the one system, there is no point running the dedicated server. Hosting the game yourself is the better option. There are downsides to the dedicated server, eg. radio communication is limited to the view distance set in the world. So no satellite communication, remote control of drones, ships etc, or voice comms for that matter which uses radio broadcasting range in game. Anything beyond your view distance is out of reach :( That doesn't happen when the client hosts the game.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the server side in Space Engineers. I've recently started hosting my world on a dedicated server in my home and was pissed when I found out about the view distance thing. I have bases on Earth and the Moon which are much further away than the view distance can be set to. So I've lost all comms to one base when I'm at another grrr.

For your reference, my dedicated server specs (the bits that matter) are...

3.2GHz Phenom II X4 (quad core)
12GB DDR2 RAM
1gb Ethernet

With that, my world runs at a sim speed of 1.0, there is never any lag of any sort and my world is massive. Multiple bases, huge ships and has more scripts than you can shake a stick at.

For the sake of something to check, don't use any WiFi connections. The latency on WiFi is terrible under the best of circumstances and check your router firewall. Make sure anything like stateful packet inspection (SPI) is switched off. That again causes a higher latency as it checks all the data packets running through the router. There are currently still major desync issues with SE multiplayer so anything you can do to keep the best connection to the server will help. In game, you can use Shift+F11 and Ctrl+H to bring up some diagnostics info that could help track down where your problem could be. You could disable core parking for your CPU too, just for getting a bit extra out of the system (totally unnecessary but hey :D).

Good luck :))

[Ap0calyps3]

DCam is right about not running the DS on the same machine as your client. The only exception to that would be if you are running 6 or 8 cores with a ton of ram maybe. My current dedicated server has the following specs;

CPU 3.3Ghz i3 3225 2c/4t Ivybridge
16GB RAM (2GB of this allocated to a ram drive)
2Gb ram drive with the DS folder on it.
120GB SSD for game logs/saves/mods/storage folder.
Nvidia 1050 GPU (I dont think this is relevant for DS)

We did have performance issues at the start, then I remembered that I had an aggressive power plan on that PC that was down clocking the CPU at every opportunity. I changed it to the balanced plan and things improved a lot.

Some settings we use that I think helped improve things were:

Max floating objects set to 64.

Cargo ships off - This was done as the current DS has confused pistons with warheads, so blueprints that spawn including pistons immediately explode, cutting the sim speed in half. I also got sick of having to clean my save file up so often as we are mainly playing on the planet at the moment.

Physics Iterations set to 10. This one is interesting, and I believe it is one of the primary causes of rubber banding. If I set it to 12, I start getting rubber banding a lot more when flying my character near grids. If it is set lower to 8, the rubber banding doesn't happen, but the physics interactions during collisions start getting very chaotic. I have found 10 is pretty perfect on my server, however we usually only have 2-3 people playing at a time. Larger player numbers, or lower clocked CPUs would require a lower setting here I believe.

Core parking should only be an issue with AMD processors as far as I am aware, I have never had to deal with it on Intel chips.

I will mention that many game server hosts use virtualization to host the servers. Depending on how this is set up, and how much processor time you are actually allocated, they can perform very poorly. In addition, make sure the server host is in the same geographic area to you and your players, otherwise actual network latency will degrade the experience before the server even becomes a factor.

[Vander]

Thanks for the information and advice. I am at a loss. I have both tried hosting on my machine at home, and I tried actually paying for a dedicated server, with the server location not in my state, but in Sydney which is at least in the same country... And still these issues. Other people say they run just fine without all these problems so somehow it must be me, but then why would my issues be experienced by other players on the server that I was paying for in Sydney. Anyway, I'll try again in a couple of updates. And I'll try the things you suggest and see if it's better. It's like it seemed fine until we actually started building things, and there were never more than 3 of us in game, but it happens when only 1 of us were in game, so I'm just totally at a loss. I appreciate all the info through and for sharing your setup specs as that reassures me that mine are more than necessary and that shouldn't be the issue. Oh, yes, I am ethernet connected, not wifi as well.

[KeepGood]

Yeah it's sounds like a bizarre one. I'm curious, do the issues creep in only when you are in the game? By that, I mean do the other players keep experiencing the issues if you aren't in the session?

Definitely keep trying as the game is updated but my spidey senses are telling me it's something else lol. I would get each of the players to host the game and look for those issues, trying it with different people connected. It doesn't matter how good/bad peoples specs/net connections are. It would just be to track down where the problem is coming from. I have read about problems (in Space Engineers) that have been caused by just one person in the game having issues (usually it's been a dodgy internet connection), that affects the other players experience. I'm not sure if anything concerning that, they were quite old posts.

It's amazing what can become troublesome, a simple service that's crashing and constantly trying to start up causing a cpu core to sit in a wait state every few milliseconds, a mobile phone app that wants to enable a bluetooth connection when an adaptor doesn't exist, a file management utility doing whatever it feels like, etc.

Feel free to drop me a message if you would like a hand to try to track down the problem. I'm in the UK, so if I can get a stable connection to your game, players in your country should be all good. :)