Question [Question] Arena mechanics, solo vs multiplayer

[OddGirl]

I have a question that seemed better suited here instead of the regular forum… I rebuilt my moon event arena with some ideas pulled together from a few videos here and elsewhere. Its done very well for me solo as a summoner (73216pts pumpkin moon & 5660pts frost moon, I'd never gotten to wave 20 before). I have a not great screenshot if its helpful and another here but its not necessarily my arena specific. The arena is mostly spear traps.

Now the set up is done, here's the question: with this arena I have no problems, I may die once at the most. When I play the same arena with another player its complete bloody mayhem, lots of deaths. This is in expert mode. What differences are there from solo to multi and how does that affect the mobs and arena? Is there a way to make it multiplayer friendly?

Thanks!

 

[inomanoms]

Sorry, can't help you. Farms have never been my thing. But they are @DicemanX's. Perhaps it's time to call him out of his forum slumber on this one?

 

[OddGirl]

I'm a novice at the mechanics end but wanting to learn so be easy on me lol.

I did get in the game right quick for a better screen shot, just in case.

Spoiler: arena

 

[Bahamut2001]

I don't play multiplayer, but I know (from the wiki) that each player spawns their own mobs, up to the spawn limit. (which is slightly increased per person for moon events) And bosses heath scales up (+100% hp?) for each additional person in expert multiplayer.

 

[inomanoms]

I don't play multiplayer, but I know (from the wiki) that each player spawns their own mobs, up to the spawn limit. (which is slightly increased per person for moon events) And bosses heath scales up (+100% hp?) for each additional person in expert multiplayer.

That sounds like a good reason. And probably while mob spawns increase, item drops from statues don't. Sharing max. 10 spawnable hearts among all the players. GG.

 

[OddGirl]

I don't play multiplayer, but I know (from the wiki) that each player spawns their own mobs, up to the spawn limit. (which is slightly increased per person for moon events) And bosses heath scales up (+100% hp?) for each additional person in expert multiplayer.

Good points. I had switched out the star statues for more heart statues and, when soloing, the heart drops from boss kills ends up sustaining me more than the statues.

The biggest reason I'm questioning how it changes from solo to multiplayer is I play with my son, who is 8, and once he dies in the arena and is sent back to spawn, never usually makes it back to the arena (long story, its not hard but ya know). Even though he doesn't make it back I still get slaughtered. I figured there's more mobs but does anything else level up on multiplayer? Defense? Damage? Etc? That's part of what I'm not sure how to figure out. I super appreciate the help and thoughts @Bahamut2001 & @inomanoms.

 

[inomanoms]

@critcodedtuna, Hi Crit. I know you know a lot about game stats and have experience running multiplayer servers. Do you have any suggestions for the madam and her son?

In terms of respawn, you could always set up a bed near the arena.

 

[OddGirl]

Lol, the bed is near the arena, you just teleport to the attack area… he always tries to go the long way around and splut.

 

[critcodedtuna]

@critcodedtuna, Hi Crit. I know you know a lot about game stats and have experience running multiplayer servers. Do you have any suggestions for the madam and her son?

I've noticed some subtle (and sometimes insidious) differences between single player and multiplayer behavior, but I don't have any clear or decisive explanation for it. For instance, I had built this Truffle Worm farm in 1.2.4.1, and found it completely broken in multiplayer. I reconstructed it block by block in single player and it worked properly. I'd also tried some of the event type farms with mixed results. I think the Horseman's Blade/Statues killbox method marginally worked, and a cannonball arena worked more or less. I never got around to trying the AFK boss stuff, but I suspect they would be untenable in multiplayer.

My working, yet unproven hypothesis is that this has something to do with collision detection being slightly unreliable when the latency of multiplayer is introduced. The game is running on a 60 tick per second loop. In single player, you have a tight loop where attacks, projectile movement, enemy movement, and collision detection are happening more or less in immediate succession with no delay. In multiplayer, you add a layer: actions are converted to messages, transmitted to the client, the client interprets the message, and then acts on it. I think this might defer some of that process, so states can get a little out of sync and some collision detections don't always square up once the client is trying to calculate it. It's not necessarily a large amount, but it could add up and alter expected behavior -- however, something like a moon event where there's a whole lot going on would probably greatly exaggerate the difference.

I'm not 100% sure how much of this is handled by the server, how much is handled by the client, and how much is done with confirmation between both. I believe projectiles are largely handled by the client -- the client sends a 0x1b message to the server when the player creates a projectile, and the server passes this along to the other clients. The clients then deal with the trajectory locally. I would guess in the case of traps, the server generates the message and sends it to all clients for them to deal with accordingly. The server gives some direction of NPC behavior (message 0x17 includes some extra AI-specific data), but it doesn't look like the client ever sends any corresponding information back to the server. Does this mean the server manages all NPC movement? Someday I might feel motivated to punt the traffic through Wireshark to see what's happening.

Additionally, depending on how reliant you are on health drops, more players in the mix makes for healing potentially being spread around and not being quite as effective as in single player.

This is the best explanation I've been able to come up with thus far, based on experience and casual poking and prodding. I'm open to any confirmation or correction to this analysis, along with any alternate hypotheses that might explain what's going on.

 

[OddGirl]

Actually @critcodedtuna that makes sense and might explain other weirdness we've been having in that he's using an influx waver and I have a meowmere... in multiplayer I keep getting killed with the message being it was from the meowmere, and he from the influx waver. That is something I don't experience solo and is completely annoying. Tomorrow I might use his laptop/character and have it just sit in spawn and try a pumpkin moon just to confirm. Solo I don't necessarily rely on the heart statues, though admittedly they are necessary on occasion so in my not familiar with the technical details brain aren't pinning it on that. We'll see, its an interesting issue.
[DOUBLEPOST=1444629321,1444178439][/DOUBLEPOST]I did a test of leaving my son's character in an underground spawn point and myself in the arena. It was a very sad state of affairs vs solo. Is anyone more familiar with multiplayer?

I also did some tests with a skeleton statue and damage it took from dart traps then super dart traps in solo and multiplayer and the averages were about the same. I put my (character's) life on the line with the statue by letting it hit me in solo and multiplayer and recording the damage to find the average. I had stripped accessories to take away that variable as well and the damage average was nearly the same. I used the skeleton statue as it was the same every time, literally, both solo and multi had the same HP. Not sure if that was because it was a statue mob or if just bosses get the upgrade with more players.

I'm unsure what to test next or how. Its just odd that it is such a difference between one and the other.

 

[Bahamut2001]

If you want to test if bosses hit harder in multiplayer, try EoC.

 

[OddGirl]

That's a good idea!

 

[Mimp]

I have noticed a lot of irritating things in multiplayer as well. A lot of the machines I've built work fine in single player worlds and work fine on the server... until they glitch, then they're hosed. One example is a simple glowing mushroom farm I made of actuating bricks and a hoik track to pull the mushrooms to you. When I build and test it, everything works great, but if I try to use it with other people on the server, (even if they're all on the same LAN,) it messes up. What I get is an angled slash pattern through the bricks causing a bunch of them to be in the opposite state of the rest which renders the farm useless until I go remove wire and manually actuate all the blocks to be in the same state again. And then it breaks on me again in a matter or 3-4 uses. Very irritating to say the least. (I really want that actuator tool that was requested that will let you just actuate a block without having to wire it...) Typically I spend anywhere from 30-120 minutes per incident to repair it now.

Another example is my dungeon trap, I built a simple dart gun battery like one I found on the forum here. It works great when I first start it up and I've had it run great for a couple hours when no one else was on the server. When I went to show a friend how to use it though... sputtering, bursts, and all kinds of weird fire patterns instead of a nice steady stream. There's definitely something in the circuits that doesn't process the same way as they do in single player.

I've built a few other machines for farming jellyfish necklaces, gel, etc and found that their performance can vary quite a lot. (In some cases they produce results so slowly it's a waste of time, in other cases it's hard to keep up with selling their items. Very weird indeed.)

I don't recall seeing these issues in 1.2.4, so that's a little disappointing.

 

[critcodedtuna]

I have noticed a lot of irritating things in multiplayer as well. A lot of the machines I've built work fine in single player worlds and work fine on the server... until they glitch, then they're hosed. One example is a simple glowing mushroom farm I made of actuating bricks and a hoik track to pull the mushrooms to you. When I build and test it, everything works great, but if I try to use it with other people on the server, (even if they're all on the same LAN,) it messes up. What I get is an angled slash pattern through the bricks causing a bunch of them to be in the opposite state of the rest which renders the farm useless until I go remove wire and manually actuate all the blocks to be in the same state again.

I've run into this as well. It seems that the server-to-client message for changing block activity state isn't terribly efficient and breaks easily. I'm not quite sure currently how it works, but it looks like there's a significant exchange of tile state information -- even when I'm the only one on my server, I can see a brief diagonal tear through tiles in my mushroom farm before it changes state completely. As more players are on, this update gets replayed several times over, creating more traffic and making the update less reliable. Ideally, it would probably be better for the client to say "I just flipped this switch", and the server echoes "player X just flipped this switch", and each client actuates blocks on that circuit accordingly, rather than getting a bunch of tiles to update. (Note: This is based on observation, and I haven't attempted to pick apart the net messaging logic yet to determine what's actually happening.)

Another example is my dungeon trap, I built a simple dart gun battery like one I found on the forum here. It works great when I first start it up and I've had it run great for a couple hours when no one else was on the server. When I went to show a friend how to use it though... sputtering, bursts, and all kinds of weird fire patterns instead of a nice steady stream. There's definitely something in the circuits that doesn't process the same way as they do in single player.

Projectiles are also pretty noisy. There's a good bit of data that's generated and sent when a projectile is created, and when there's a whole bunch of them created at once, it gets really spammy. Since there's no client->server->clients conversation in single player, it's non-issue there.

I've built a few other machines for farming jellyfish necklaces, gel, etc and found that their performance can vary quite a lot. (In some cases they produce results so slowly it's a waste of time, in other cases it's hard to keep up with selling their items. Very weird indeed.)

Without seeing the particular configuration, I don't think I could offer any explanations for this. No idea if this is an issue with wiring, NPC spawning, or the global item cap.

I don't recall seeing these issues in 1.2.4, so that's a little disappointing.

Actuators were definitely an issue in 1.2.4, and probably goes back to when actuators were first added in 1.2. If you didn't run into this before 1.3, you were just lucky. I'm not sure anything has changed with projectiles either. As for the farms, I just don't know enough about the situation(s) there.

I wonder if there's a diagnostic client out there somewhere. I'd love to be able to join a dummy player to my server and see what raw data it gets when various things happen in the world. I suppose I could also just fire up Wireshark and filter the traffic, though that might not tell me everything I want to know without some extra help.

 

[[Genesys] Doomdesirer911]

My best wiring creation is a massive wire from the ocean of a large world to a moat around my obsidian castle. The next day the bottomless water bucket came out.