More info on the EASHL lag fix in latest patch

[LuGer33]

Originally posted on the EA Forums by EA_NHLDevs:

Quote:

Hi Everyone, Many of you are aware of an issue known as Captain Lag. This has been an important issue for the community that we’ve been working to address since it was first raised. Today, we’re happy to share a positive update with you all - and in the spirit of transparency, we’re going to give it to you in lots of detail. The Captain Lag issue stumped us for quite some time. There was varied feedback across the entire community and no matter how many times we tried, we could not reproduce Captain Lag in our studio. Eventually, we created a special build of the game that allowed us to trace the inner workings while we played. Members of our GameChangers program and their teammates then played games with us and we were able to reproduce the issue with greater consistency. This allowed us to see and understand the actual problem. Since we had several consoles and TV’s in the same location, we were able to see what was on each players screen at the same time. We found that what was being displayed on the screen matched for all the users; which then allowed us to discount the possibility of our server infrastructure delaying sending the proper data to only one player (the Captain). There were no discernible problems within our logs, so we went to work and added information that would allow us to track the internal latency of our game. We tracked the time between us being alerted there were button presses on the controller, to the time we sent it onto the network, to the time we got the data back from the network, and finally - to the time we passed it to the game to actually act on the data (run the game). After more game sessions with the GameChangers, we discovered the problem was with us getting the data back from the network and passing it to the game to actually run the game. The issue was that at the beginning of the game, when we synced all the users inputs (all inputs must be synced so the game simulation processes the exact same thing on everyone’s console), some users inputs would happen to come later than others and that exposed a bug with queued inputs that we have now addressed. The rest of the details of the fix get extremely technical and beyond the scope of a single post, but going forward, all the queues should be identical for games that are played on our dedicated servers, which should positively impact the response for many players; some more or less subtle than others. We have been working on this since it was first brought up by you, our players, but the breakthrough came in the last couple weeks with the help of the GameChangers and some very senior engineers. Our very sincere thanks to all of you that reached out with suggestions and information along the way. Many of you produced information and data that was crucial in our ability to problem solve and for that we are grateful – both for your help and your patience. Thanks, EA_NHLDevs