Every time a plane spawns online there is a small but very noticeable stutter. This isn't too bad when there are only a few players but when the room fills up it becomes really rough.

Is it possible to smooth out the re-spawn before final 4.08?

Thanks.

Most servers defeat this. When the mission is being built the mission builder takes all the flyable planes in the game that are going to be in the particular mission and hides them as static planes on the map. This way the planes are preloaded and spawn lag is no more.

That does help...but I don't think it cures it completely. Especially when spawning multi-station bombers which seem to eat up more resources when spawning. Probably because they have to init the AI for each station.

I'm not sure how solvable this problem is. I'd love to see a solution as its my number one complaint when playing online...but I think its tricky. It'd be fine if everyone had 2GB and a SATA2 hard drive with 8 or 16MB cache and all of that...then we could load far more into memory.

I have 2gig of ram and I still get spawn freezes.

Also i don't think placing statics has any effect on it anymore.

The placing of static aircraft helps at a minimum. The problem isn't loading aircraft objects but in updating newly joined clients on the game status. I've yet to fly a DF server where someone leaving or joining doesn't cause a significant sttuter if not outright pause. I tend to find DF servers with more than 20 people on it almost impossible to fly because of the constant stutters.

I can always tell when there are "too many" players on a server by the degradation of in game sound.

When I'm sitting on the ramp waiting to take off and I hear guns firing that are kilometers away I know it will soon be time to find another place to fly.

Hmm well I dont really know what to say then if you all disagree with me. All I can say is I only run 1024MB of RAM at the moment and I have no such stutters.

I have 2GB of RAM and during a mission I can tell when a formation of enemy aircraft is spawned, there is always a small stutter, so any element of surprise the AI may have is diminished.

Turn off download skins. No more spawn stutter.

quote:

Originally posted by WOLFMondo:
Turn off download skins. No more spawn stutter.

Again, helps marginally but isn't the issue. I have a network monitor and can tell you for a fact that when someone enters or leaves a server there is a burst of data sent to every other client on the server. It's these updates that are the problem. I've never had skin downloads turned on and I have a gig of ram as well.

Static plane loads and skins represent less than 10% of the problem. If I am on Warclouds and there are more than 20 fliers and someone enters or exits I get a distinct pause lasting anywhere from 1/4 second to as much as 2-3 secs. WC doesn't do skin downloads and they use static aircraft. It helps, but not by much.

This doesn't happen on coops or on severs with a small number of fliers and the problem is the way the game does not filter out data based on distance. You get as much data updated about an aircraft on the server 300 kilometers away as you do on the aircraft flying your wing. Getting all these updates at once on server load causes the problem.

And when it happens, you can tell it isn't just you because on Teamspeak you will hear everyone complain about the big stutter spike at the same time.

+1
Yah it sucks! Especially if your comming in for a landing or on some ones 6 then SPLAT KABOOM! STUTER! CRASH!
Its not fun!

This not only happens online but offline in campaigns too when the PC decides to `spawn` more aircraft. It`s the only stutter I get offline now.

quote:

Originally posted by SeaFireLIV:
This not only happens online but offline in campaigns too when the PC decides to `spawn` more aircraft. It`s the only stutter I get offline now.

I also notice this offline. The game will freeze for a second or two, presumably while the harddrive is accessed loading new planes or voice dialogue. I guess there is no adjustment to fix this?