ground troops LAG LAG LAG

i am playing DCS since Flanker 1.0 (ok that wasn t dcs, just to say i am in fighter collection sims since then)

DCS was growing and got a real push forward with the VR revolution i think,

now, with a lot of new players of the younger generation coming into dcs world, multiplayer is growing to a level that makes DCS close to a real battlefield simulation like ED promises with their THEBATTLESIM homepage.

Especially Drex's DYNAMIC DCS Server is now exactly what all those daily sim pilots are looking for, flying sim A/C's against human players, learning to bother with real people not dumb AI.

Unfortunately, ground troops do cause massive lag, in single and multiplayer for unknown reason, which , i think, stops DCS servers from becoming real battlefields.

just a few units moving do kill the experience

So, my question, is there a way to avoid these lag, thats always showing up when looking into their direction in game, and or is ED already aware of these issue?

+1

thanks for your good post. i wanted to open a thread like this before.

i should say the performance problem with ground units and combat scenes in missions, specially in multiplayer really affected reaching to the real combat simulation.

while another reason you can clearly see these days is inconstancy. when open beta got an update, most of players and servers go to run it and multiplayer in stable version is nearly empty. these one or two week gap between updates is really really bad and has bad effects on multiplayer.

I agree with you.

Ground force is the major cause of lagging and stuttering.. maybe we should wait for the new dynamic engine to come out and make the DCS great again.

I can confirm that moving ground units cause heavy performance drops.

This is indeed a very old issue that keeps DCS from simulating true battlefields:

We have isolated the main issue for lag, it is mainly caused by moving units, either by predetermined waypoints or by CA movements.

 

I suggest creating units as static as possible or limit the number of moveable units.

 

Good luck

This is old report, but still applies.

So yes, units movements cause severe CPU use as all the checking is done constantly for finding targets and path finding and all. It is just amazing how this isn't cheated that nothing else is done than just move the 3D model around when it is already known that there are no enemies in the range or so.

And if there is no player watching, no need to have 3D models at all, you just have information that X unit is in given location and expected to be in Y place in time of HH:MM:SS. If a player comes near by, spawn the unit model there and run the animation and such.

One of source for this problem is that DCS doesn't handle anything randomly, but everything is strictly known objects. Meaning F10 map that shows exact information about unit type, location, status, speed etc. And such a constant information overloads simulation.

It is time that DCS gets proper "fog of war" modes, where you simply do not know anything unless you are there with eyes on the object. No magical F10 map ever, no exact information where units positions are or their status.

It really should be about commands given like in real world. Like if you call to your friend, one of the most common first questions are "where are you?" even when it doesn't matter so often. In the old times when calling to landline you knew where they were, so calling to home number told you that person is standing in given position at their home, talking to you.

Now if you call someone and you ask them to do something like go to store and buy something and bring it to you. You have no idea about their location, their path, their intentions, their transportation or schedule when they are going to bring that stuff.

And that is the military. You give orders for few specific things, departing time - possible route - time of arrival. You train for these basic things that what is to be done before departing, what is to be done on the march and then what is to be done when arriving the location. General doesn't care what individual soldier or vehicle does in the company, it is just expected that they follow the orders, that are based to experience from training that what can be expeccted from the unit.

So when someone looks at the given area on map and commands unit to defend an area from expected enemy position, no general is there knowing where exactly each soldier is located. Large picture is only known that enemy movement is stopped right there.

And this is DCS core problems, general needs to know every single soldier status all the time. And now when more than few units starts to move, the general goes crazy as checking every single soldier every second comes with a high price.

And this is why we should have individual, completely separated AI units to control various troops, be responsible at given elements and tasks and minimize the requirement for computing powers simply going to "Trees do not fall in the forest if there is no one seeing it".

Eventually it as well leads just to a hard dice rolling situations, we can not simulate each bullet fired from a soldier rifle that what is its ballistics and does it hit a another soldier. Nope, we need to roll a dice and just check that does someone get injured, does someone die etc. Just randomly. Unit A shoots at B, roll a dice. Similar way as chaff/flare is rolled a random dice to check does the missile lock on it or not.

When the player is driving a vehicle or is flying in helicopter above the units, then we can run full simulation for checking ballistics of a MBT or a AAA etc. But for a soldier on ground? Helicopter pilot doesn't even care so much about that, especially if we would eliminate the laughable tracers that are revealing "Hey, you are being shot at!".