Age of Mythology LAN Games

[Ben Randall]

Hi,
A large group of friends and I just started playing AOM (sans The
Titans) LAN games here on the LAN at our University, but we have been having
MAJOR slowdowns in the game when the larger god powers are used (Earthquake,
Tornado). Now, these aren't just regular freezes such as when one person's
connection lags, and the game definatly isn't frozen, but it just stops, for
around 10 minutes at a time. It takes us about half and hour to get through
a 15 second God Power. The weird thing is that the game still responds.
You can select units, view stats, open the encyclopedia, give orders, and
queue up units(except they won't show up until the game moves again). Also,
you can still roatate the 3D view, so it doesn't seem to be a graphics
problem. This can't possibly be a problem with the network as I have been
getting up to 500kbits/s sending files over the network, which is definatly
faster than what you could get in a regular ESO online game. So what's the
big deal. We have all updated to 1.08 and have the latest drivers, I
believe, and have relativly high end systems. I don't think that drivers
are the problem, because that would manifest itself earlier in the game. We
would like to try it with Titan's to see if maybe there was a network
problem that was fixed, but only one of us owns a copy.

Any ideas? Thanks in Advance,

- Ben

 

[Stephen Keen [MS]]

Hi Ben,
This seems extreme for even the slowest connection. The game will only
run as fast as the slowest connection. Does the University use switches of
hubs for networking, are you all on the same segment or are there firewalls
in place? In any scenerio this is still far from good.
You might set up a computer to computer test game and try the same issue
and see if it makes a difference. Or you might even get a hub and have
everyone bring their machines to that room and try the game. This would
eliminate the huge network or internet altogether, just to see how it works.
I am going to try connecting to an internet game now, to see if I can
get this to repro.

Keep in touch on this one, thanks for your post!

 

[Ben Randall]

I just thought I'd give you a bit more information. I'm not sure exactly
what kind of hardware the univeristy is using, but I know that, all the
rooms in our building are connected to the same netowrk domain so we can all
see each other's computers over the lan but not in the other buildings (I
think, not positive on that one). In general, most people are using a hub
to share a connection between roomates and are connected to the lan from
there. Most people have firewalls installed on their own computers, but
these shouldn't affect the game after it's been in progress for 15 minutes.
I'm not sure what kind of software the Univeristy has installed.

These problems usually manifest themselves late into the game, usually when,
one or more sides has quite a sizable army, and then mostly when a major god
power is used. The weird thing, is that, if this were just a huge graphics
slowdown, the game should stop responding, but everybody still seems able to
continue moving around, ordering, and queueing, etc. It really SEEMS like a
graphics problem because it occurs during god powers, but if it was a
connection problem, it doesn't seem to me that a god power would slow down
the game. I can't image that they would let something like this slip by in
online play. It would be much to large a problem. Oh yes, one final thing.
We are still able to send chat messages, some times they will take a bit
longer to get there, or they will queue up, and send as soon as the game
moves a frame or two. As the game beings to unfreeze, we will get
progressivly longer periods of movment and it will stop again for a few
minutes. Then it will just start moving normally, generally not jerking or
lagging. We have only had one(1) incidence of it actually saying "Player X
is not responding. Would you like to wait/kick/etc."

Regarding your suggestion, we have been playing nearly everynight, and it is
much too difficult to move all the computers into one room, even if we had a
room big enough. This really doesn't happen much in two player games,
because they often end much faster. I will see if we can just hold out a
long game and get a large an army as possible and stress the game and see
what happens.

If anybody else has had this problem, please speak up.

Hi Ben,
This seems extreme for even the slowest connection. The game will only
run as fast as the slowest connection. Does the University use switches of
hubs for networking, are you all on the same segment or are there firewalls
in place? In any scenerio this is still far from good.
You might set up a computer to computer test game and try the same issue
and see if it makes a difference. Or you might even get a hub and have
everyone bring their machines to that room and try the game. This would
eliminate the huge network or internet altogether, just to see how it works.
I am going to try connecting to an internet game now, to see if I can
get this to repro.

Keep in touch on this one, thanks for your post!
--
Stephen Keen [MS] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warrenties, and
confirs no rights.

Hi,
A large group of friends and I just started playing AOM (sans The
Titans) LAN games here on the LAN at our University, but we have been having
MAJOR slowdowns in the game when the larger god powers are used (Earthquake,
Tornado). Now, these aren't just regular freezes such as when one person's
connection lags, and the game definatly isn't frozen, but it just stops, for
around 10 minutes at a time. It takes us about half and hour to get through
a 15 second God Power. The weird thing is that the game still responds.
You can select units, view stats, open the encyclopedia, give orders, and
queue up units(except they won't show up until the game moves again). Also,
you can still roatate the 3D view, so it doesn't seem to be a graphics
problem. This can't possibly be a problem with the network as I have been
getting up to 500kbits/s sending files over the network, which is definatly
faster than what you could get in a regular ESO online game. So what's the
big deal. We have all updated to 1.08 and have the latest drivers, I
believe, and have relativly high end systems. I don't think that drivers
are the problem, because that would manifest itself earlier in the game. We
would like to try it with Titan's to see if maybe there was a network
problem that was fixed, but only one of us owns a copy.

Any ideas? Thanks in Advance,

- Ben