Re: [M-dev]Pea soup; sounds

[Woody Z. <woo...@ho...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Owen Strain" <ow...@ma...>

> As I understand boaty and pea-soupy, they aren't the same actually. Boaty
is
> like when you play marathon (Infinity, that is) with it set to a speed of
> 'Remote Access'. Basically, there's a bit of lag time from when you hit
keys
> to when your player responds on screen, while maintaining a high frame
rate.
>
> Pea-soupy, as I understand it, is when the entire game slows to a crawl,
> including FPS. AFAIK it doesn't have any further input-lag aside from
> whatever may be caused by the horrible (unplayable, that is) framerate.

Aha yes your assessment of what *I* mean by "boaty" is spot-on.  As I
recall, the old Ambrosia game "Avara" tended to get very boaty over the
Internet.  (Bolo, OTOH, which had some predictive mechanisms, remained much
more playable.  Of course then you got the oddities you get with prediction:
players teleporting, previously invisible phantom shots whacking you, LGM
dying after apparently making it safely, etc.  Much like Quake 2, though
IIRC in Q2 higher ping added some boatiness too - at least to things like
shooting - because your command didn't "count" until the server received it.
Of course, that policy reduced the "guess what, you got waxed by a phantom
rocket" problem.  Whoops, end tangent.)

And it sounds like "pea-soupy" is what I would tend to call "choppy" or
"framey", though maybe neither of those terms really captures the _extent_
by which the frame rate drops in a true pea soup condition.

Setting the speed to Remote Access is effectively telling Marathon you want
it to behave... boatily.  :)  Why would you do that?  Because otherwise with
a slow ring you're going to get "pea soup".  :)

(Note: my NETWORK_ADAPTIVE_LATENCY_2 mechanism does away with the
speed-setting dialog item and tries to automatically dynamically adjust the
"boatiness" so it's just high enough to avoid any framiness or pea soup
caused by ring latency/jitter.  I suspect if you played in a slow ring (i.e.
over telephone modems), the first few seconds of the game would be pretty
pea-soupy, but that it would then adjust quickly to the required boatiness.)

I wonder if some profiling tools could be brought to bear to help identify
the bottlenecks?  Would the (minimally invasive) "Sampler" work?  Of course
at some point it will probably take some instrumentation in the code to help
collect more specific data, but a general-purpose "outside-the-code" tool
might be able to help point to the spots where more detail is needed - e.g.
to explain the turning-off-sound fix or to verify the texture-thrashing
hypothesis.  That pea soup is reproducible (always happens in the same
areas) is quite fortunate... much better chance of isolating (and fixing)
the problem.

I'm curious though - I don't see an obvious connection between "pea soup"
and a low frame rate.  (I would have guessed something more like the
smearing effect when you see The Void, or something.)  Anyone care to
comment on the etymology?  It sounds like there could be an amusing anecdote
lurking there.

BTW thanks for the answers.

Woody

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